fighting the horde! how??

[Tigger]

I have recently experienced my first real encounter with the Horde on masse and a very chastening experience it was too

I was occupying the middle east as the Danes and got forced into a couple of battles with the Horde.

They just flee all over the map at high speed making it very difficult to keep your army together and keep track of what's going on Once you get pulled apart they seem to pick you off easily.

first battle I thought they've loads of cavalry so i'll sit in the words and wait for them which was okay except that they wouldn't attack me full on but just kept picking away at the edge of my army gradually killing my troops

After a while I got frustrated and moved out to attack even cuninngly (or so I thought) trying to flank them on both sides with cavalry. Anyway they all just ran off super quickly and after persuing them I marched into another army they had waiting for me and my army was quickly decimated.

Second battle I tried using arbs to keep them at bay but they quickly got behind my lines and ripped them to shreds

Anyone got any tips on the best way to fight the horde

[rasoforos]

Try to make them attack you. then it is relativelly easy to defeat them. The secret to stopping the mongols is to defend effectivelly against their horse archers. The best solution is pavise arbalesters. Put your army high ground , try to cover the sides with light or medium cavalry and put 3 units of pavise arbalesters or crossbowmen in front of your troups. Their archers will try to attack but the superior range and the shields of the arbalesters will make sure they will be decimated. Once their horse archers have retreated then it is easy to defeat their warriors or heavy cavalry. Fighting against the mongols ALWAYS make sure you do not fall for their 'retreat' strategy , dont chace them all the way to the other side of the map , make sure to retreat before that, its better to lose 20-30 soldiers during your retreat than have your exausted army face a whole bunch of mongol reinforcements.

[chegewara]

use the arbs. but don't let them to get torn. also a good idea to have a couple of light cavalries. the point is stick together unless they're fleeing. in my experience the horde is very easy to beat if you have the right combo of defence for your missiles and a couple of cavalry units.

[Sainika]

My real fight with Mongols was when Iplayed as Turkish. Mongols invaded Khazar with around 8,000 men and Armenia with 6,000 men.
Turks don't have arbs and their light cavalry is weak against mongols (let alone with the lack of speed). My ideal place of defending is a hill (or even plain) with deep forests at the flanks. Forests help to flank enemy archers with cavalry and even saracen infantry while my main force stand uphill or make a circle on the plain. Several things that helped me to stand against the horde:
- never chase them;
- always rely on your saracen infantry (or european equivalent - chivalric sergeants). Of course they die under the arrow attack but you get the time to prepare your maneuvres (flank attacks are useless often because mongols always use their tactics, so it is vital to engage them in a fight and round'em with your troops.
- use as many archers as you can gather for a battle. Though if horde has a lot of heavies you need to have a lot of cav-killer troops.
Fighting with mongols was very interesting to play. I wish another factions played by AI were so interesting to fight with.

[Nelson]

I once had to face 22,000 Mongols with 4,000 Byzantines. It took over 4 hours for me to defeat them. Every one of my committed units was reduced by at least 50% but I still had fresh reserves. There were a couple of close calls when my line sagged but it never broke.

I had a 9 star general. The Khan was struck down early by Trebizond archers and thus lost some valor that could never be recovered. And because all of my infantry was either 120 or 200 strong as opposed to the Mongol cavalry of 80, I actually enjoyed numeric superiority until my losses piled up. I never employed more than 4 Roman cavalry units at one time.

[MacGregor]

I had a massive Russian vs. Horde battle in one campaign. I had alot of Boyars and they duked it out with the Mongol archers for most of the battle. They took alot of casualties, but really weaken the Mongols, who were nice enough to draw themselves together in a big group so they were easier to hit. Once my Boyars were pretty much exhausted I retreated and the Mongol heavy cav attacked, but my army was stacked with halbardires and spears once they engaged I moved my remaining Boyars around them and attacked the flanks, driving them off and killing their leader. Two more waves of mongols came but they never really organized themselves into an attack force they would just run up to my line and stand there while I attacked them with arrows and once I charged my whole army foward they just retreated. I had a 8 star general which I'm sure helped.

[Tigger]

Thanks guys for the tips, looks like defence is the best way then whether or not you are actually defending

I agree though that fighting them was definatley interesting and made for a nice change from other factions who so far all seem to fight pretty much in a similar way.

It would be nice if there were more "national" characteristics to battle tactics in the game

[TheViking]

Attack is best defence, it have always been so.

Use heavy cavs to attack them and medium cavs on your flanks.

If im the Byz i.e. I use 12 katas and 4 Pronois on the flank, sometimes only 2 pronois but then i also have 2 steppe cavs.

If you have problem to keep track of the routing enemy that flee in every direction pic one group out (not necessary to be only 1 unit) and follow that group, If you have infantry, walk after your units that are chasing enemy so you still are grouped

[USMCNJ]

army of 80% cavalry, and 20 percent heavy infantry or spear. Use the cavalry to chase their archers away, and the infantry and spear to take on their heavy cav and inf troops

[Cazbol]

Quote[/b] (TheViking @ Mar. 21 2003,00:04)]Attack is best defence, it have always been so.

I totally disagree. Defence is usually the best defence in my opinion. The French believed in the former in the first half of WW1 but had change their minds after taking horrendous casualties with nothing to show for it. Whether to defend or attack depends on the situation.

When fighting the horde, I'll usually fight defensively if I can. I do that because of the high mobility of the Mongols. Sending heavy cavalry like kataphraktoi to chase the fast Mongol archers does not seem like a good idea to me. It's hard enough to catch them with light cavalry an then when you do catch them, you may be far from the rest of your force and surrounded.

In my current campaign I put my main force in Georgia and waited for them to arrive in 1230. They attacked rebel Khazar and my Georgia and got Volga-Bulgaria when the rebels there decided to join them.

My defense of Georgia was based on a stationary defense on a hill at the edge of the map. The infantry formed a semi-circle connected in both ends to the edges of the map, so they could not be flanked. To begin with it was mostly my archers/arbalesters that did the fighting, but since I couldn't choose my reinforcements I frequently had too much cavalry which I'd use to lash out at them, which usually meant driving them away but also resulted in my cavalry being destroyed after chasing the Mongols to the other side of the map where Mongol reinforcements overwhelmed them. After a long battle of attrition where I often had to sit out arrow barrages without being able to do much to counter, the Mongols finally gave up and retreated to Khazar.

The next several years the Mongols would send a few thousand men from Khazar to Georgia to attack me. My defense was much like before but now I included catapults in the defense which were of great help. The catapults quickly reached extreme valour, as their 10 man crews were killing a lot of high quality units. This made the catapults even more accurate killing even more and so forth. The Mongols would usually lose heart after taking about 300-400 casualties and I'd pursue with two units of pronoai allagion to capture the Mongol warriors who couldn't keep up with the retreating cavalry. I decided to kill all prisoner every time, but only found out later on this board what this will do to the generals reputation. He quickly became a boodlover with -3 morale for all who served him, but he always won nonetheless. After several years of this the Mongols stopped coming and just sat there in Khazar with over 6,000 men but without bothering any of their neighbours.

I left the Mongols alone while I finished off all my other enemies, of which there were many. Having done that, I moved in to eradicate the Mongols. Attacking Khazar I was given a bridge battle with two bridges. This was a strange battle where I'd split my forces between the two bridges. The Mongols would place 1-3 units at one of the bridges, while the remainder would gather at the other. My archers would shoot at them across the river and occasionally I'd send infantry onto the bridge to draw the Mongols closer. I'd also mount raids across the less defended bridge, fight it out with the Mongols there and retreat when they rushed in reinforcements from the other bridge. After much of this, I finally felt confident enough to move across the less defended bridge and try to hold the bridgehead. When the Mongols moved their main force from he other bridge, I'd also establish a perimeter on their side of that one. Seeing this the Mongols fled to Volga-Bulgaria.

Pursuing them into Volga-Bulgaria presented me with an interesting map. Totally flat which favoured the Mongols, but with very large patches of woods, but also large open areas. The Mongols initially waited on the other side of the map, so I moved into the woods in the center of the map. It was hard to control my troops in the dense wood and it turned into some unorganised skirmishing, where my Varangian guard killed the majority of the Mongol heavy cavalry. The Mongols then sent light cavlry behind the central woods which prevented me from sending reinforcements there. I let my reinforcements establish a new perimeter along the edges of another patch of woods close to where the reinforcements arrived. Meanwhile the Mongols committed their blocking light cavalry to the fighting in the central woods, after which I slowly started to withdraw units from there to the new perimeter. The new perimeter lay alongside the edges of the woods with the infantry in the woods and the archers just outside it. This turned the battle into the biggest archery duel I've seen, with my trebizond archers and arbalesters against the Mongol light cavalry. I took my archers off skirmishing mode which rendered ineffective the AI trick of riding in front of my archers to drive them into my infantry. Whenever melee contact was made, the infantry behind the archers would rush forward and drive the cavalry off. After reinforcements had left me without any more archers I lined all my troops up in two lines and started fighting those Mongols that didn't keep at a safe distance. Soon after the entire Mongol flock fled and thus the horde was driven out of Europe. In that final battle I killed 71% of the Mongol force of 4,200 and still had 126 units in reserve.

I used the same 8-star general for all my Mongol battles, made him kill all prisoners and kept him out the fighting. The result was a "bloodlover" (-3 morale) who was "not so brave" (-2 morale), hence giving his troops -5 morale.

[Orda Khan]

Try using Mongol tactics when fighting the Horde and draw them into your fight

......Orda

[Jxrc]

I always use the same army made of the best spearmen available plus any arbalester I can find (Twelve units of spear, three of arbalesters and the General). The things is to manage to block each of their attack of their heavy cavalry with spearmen. Since Mongols general are usually not very good you can expect that they will run away after a little fighting. I agree that one should never try to chase their fleeing troops whether on foot or horse. The amount of prisoners you can make is not worth the fatigue. After you stopped the first rush, you just need to be patient and take out their horse archers one by one with your arbalester. Sometimes it gets very dull but by doing so I have never lost a battle against the GH.

The only time as was not prepared, i.e. when I faced them for the first time and had no idea that they were going to show up, I had to fight them with an army made mostly of CAA. Luckily, there were plenty of woods and their general got killed early. That was the most entertaining encounter I had with them but casualties were extremely high for both sides ...

[A.Saturnus]

Sorry if what I say is already mentioned in Cazbol`s post. I don`t have the time to read that huge monster (imagine he had posted that in a new one-word-story-thread ).
Playing the Russians in high, I was quiet worried about the horde. No spear wall, no heavy schock cav besides Boyars. But it turned out to be quiet manageable. I use mainly pav-crossbows (restricted arbs to late) and halberdiers. I fight defensive with a line of halberds and x-bows before them. Their archers lose in ranged and when their heavys attack, I counter it with the halberds.

[Cazbol]

Quote[/b] (A.Saturnus @ Mar. 25 2003,06:14)]Sorry if what I say is already mentioned in Cazbol`s post. I don`t have the time to read that huge monster (imagine he had posted that in a new one-word-story-thread ).

Hehe.

I know. It's awful. I had no idea my post would become that long. It just turned out that way. Sorry.

Verbal diarrhea at its worst. I'll try to keep a lid on it.

[Hobart]

Actually Cazbol, I found that post a really interesting read. Sure it was long, but it was worthwhile.

[Cazbol]

Well, thank you.