Maneouvering

[Adrian II]

Never mind, Ray, your second impression is just fine, this world suffers from too many people taking themselves too darned serious.

It shouldn't be too hard to protect your flanks. If your armies are essentially infantry, concentrate on what they do best, which is marching and fighting in close ranks with ranged support. It would probably be best to put them in three lines, i.e. first line foot, second line missiles and third line consisting of at least one reserve foot on either side of your general. These reserves may take care of enemy flanking cavalry, but make sure you give them ranged support. My rule of thumb is I make up in ranged units what I lack in cavalry units. Pavise Arbalesters are terrific killing machines, their benefit compared to longbows being that their ammunition lasts a lot longer and even during a two-hour battle they maintain their punch because hardly suffer serious losses, apart from direct cavalry charges.

Hope this makes any sense, good luck man.

[Adrian II]

Ray, two more things I forgot to mention. One is you can experiment by carefully copying both armies into a custom battle and saving it so you can experiment with it over and over again. The second is that if you have only one unit of Arbalesters, put them in the third line with your general where they can stay out of harm's way until you commit them either left, right or centre, depending on where your enemy brings his heaviest armour to bear. If it's on your flank in the shape of heavy cavalry charge, send in a reserve spear unit which you put on "Hold". After they have engaged said cavalry you send your Arbalasters to flank them, then watch their corpses pile up. Never mind if your mouse cap tells you your spears are "losing badly", just watch the rate at which their "winning easily" cavalry are dropping stone dead to your armour-piercing arrows. Oh, but this is just one of many schemes and this may become a long thread.

Gotta get back to my real job now ;-)

[rayoftoul]

Thanks for the reply, I'll have to try out all that's suggested

[Ldvs]

I suggest you read Frogbeastegg's guide, she gives many useful tips for new players. It's located on the homepage of totalwar.org in the guides section, you can't miss it