The Seleucid Empire

[RollingWave]

Well I finished it, after conquring Asia minor and then destroying Armenia and pushing Pathia to the other side of the Caspian, I took out Thrace and got the Macedonians to be my protectrate as they were besieged by the Romans. Scythia made a half arse attempt to attack me then also became my protectrate, I pushed the Bruttis out of Solona and Apollonia and then landed another army on Italy to take their home town in quick succesion, then I gave the 2 balkan city to the Macedonians letting them deal with the remaining former brutti rebels wondering around there while I sailed my army to reinforce Italy. and also making landings on Africa and Sicily to take undefended or almost undefended towns. the push north towards Rome was not hard as the Romans wasted their army, the Senate army faced me outside of Rome, but decided to retreat when I already closed on them, need less to say my elephant/catapracts/general/companion/chariots ran most of their infantry down. and Rome fell in a seige that followed, game over. (I had all my borders at home under my protectrate LOL)

Thoughts... pikeman have a lot of problems.... they behave in phalanx even more poorly than normal hoplits / sacred band / egyptian etc...) and their offense capability is very unnoticable when they die so quick..... any time I had serious enemy charging against me my pikeman took rather excess casulties while the kill score is not particularly impressive :/ i think the high men number acturally cause them to function even more oddly in phalanx and thus cuase them to do poorly in general... not to meantion their non existance melee capability means when they go out of phalanx they die even faster (unlike say.. spartan or scared band... they still pretty good even when not fighitng with phalanx working)

[katank]

With pikes, you really have to do stacking cheese and put something like 4 units inside each other in long thin lines.

This makes the pike forest impenetrable. It's truly cheesy but effective. They rarely break. 3 silvershields inside each other cannot be broken even by urban cohorts.

[Conqueror]

Here's my take on the early game as Seleucids, based on my ongoing campaign on H/H difficulty:

Parthia can be neutralized suprisingly easy early on. You must keep an eye on Susa, the Parthian city east of Seleucia. Try to infiltrate it with your spy. They start out with an army in there, but often this army will move out to patrol/attack rebels etc. When you see them move, take your troops from Seleucia and move them near the province border, so that they can reach Susa (or retreat back to Seleucia) in 1 turn. If the Parthian army moves far enough that it can't reach Susa in 1 turn, attack the town! If you're lucky, your spy will open the gates and you can assault immediatly. If not, then you'll have 1 turn to build a ram and still can assault before their army gets to the rescue. Note that while the city will be underdefended, it might still have family members in it so be prepared for a tough fight.

You will then have to deal with the parthian starting army as it will attack you probably the next turn. It should be much easier to take them on the city streets when you're defending though, than it would be out in the desert. This early war with Parthia is a bold move and not without considerable risk, but if you manage to take Susa and beat their starting army, it will pay off. In my game which is now past the early stages, I did this pre-emptive strike against the Parthians and haven't heard a thing about them ever since, although we've been formally at war the whole time. They just never recovered from the loss of Susa enough to bolster a competent attack force.

Building stone walls should be a very high priority to most of your nothern and eastern settlements. Although your phalanx units should be kept on the street level, simply having the walls will greatly weaken a besieging army's ability to use missile fire against you. They'd need to either move inside your walls through gates or holes (easy to counter with phalanx) or get some foot archers on top of the walls (you should be able to stop them with mercenary infantry or even hoplites). When protected from missile fire and flanking, pikemen in phalanx formation will be nigh invincible.

You should hire plenty of mercenaries. The best types to hire are missile troops, since the Seleucids don't have any good long range missile units of their own. Cretan archers (available in your starting province Ionia), Bedouin archers (lots of your provinces, like Syria and Babylonia) and Scythian mercenaries (hire them in Cappadocia, the Pontus province right to the north of Cilicia & Assyria, you'll need to move a family member to the border) are very useful additions to the Seleucid's pikemen & cavalry heavy army. Another benefit to mercenaries is that you can raise a large army quickly, which will be needed to handle the greatest problem of early Seleucid games: Egypt.

You will want to take an aggressive stance on Egyptians, don't shy from attacking Sidon and Jerusalem as soon as you're able. But don't stop to catch your breath for long. When I took those cities, the Egyptians started throwing stack after stack of chariots, bowmen, spearmen and desert cavalry at me. So I did the "Scipio thing" and took the fight to their heartlands; I loaded a full stack army to my ships and set sails toward the river Nile. I found that of the 3 big cities there, only Alexandria was properly garrisoned. Thebes only had a family member and 1 unit of slingers, while Memphis had only a family member! So after I stormed Alexandria, the entire river Nile fell to me in a quick succession. This finally brought an end to the Egyptian's ability to muster massive armies quickly, but they were still a threat, so I sent multiple armies to take all of their remaining settlements.

What followed was lots of manouvering around the strategy map. Their strong armies would attack my invading armies, but I kept retreating and outright refused to give them fight in the desert. I had multiple armies approaching their towns from different directions, and while one of my armies was chased by the egyptian full stack, another one would attack the town and take it. They would then try to retake their cities but I was able to defend them as their chariots lost most of their mobility in the streets. In one of these many siege battles they had many bowmen and skirmishers, but used them to handle the battering rams, so I sent my militia cavalry out through side gates and charged the bowmen when they were packed into nice squares and busy operating the rams. I lost some militia cavalry to their chariots but eliminated so many bowmen and skirmishers that it was worth it. Without their missile troops they were helpless against my pikemen in the streets.

Eventually they lost every last one of their cities and were done as a faction. Now some decades later, there's still an old rebel general wandering the desert who is a very bitter man

So the key to victory for me was to outmanouvre the enemy on the strategy map, always fight in cities and fight defensively when ever possible. I decided to be defensive against Pontus and Armenia, letting them attack Sardis, Tarsus and Hatra, always sallying out the first turn and driving them away. That way I didn't lose income to sieges and more importantly, my mercenary units didn't suffer from the reduction that sieges cause. The way to beat a sally battle against these factions was to put Cretan archer on my walls, sending skirmishing cavalry out through side gates and harass the enemy to chase them to the range of the cretans (or even better, all the way to the range of my wall towers). Eventually they'd got enough of it and begun to retreat at which point all of my cavalry led by my generals would sally out and kill as many of them as possible. The first stacks they sent were tough to beat, but after that they started using increasing numbers of eastern infantry so things became rather easy to me. They kept on sending a new force almost every turn, so they started running out of money and their populations started to suffer.

In my game I own the entire south-eastern corner of the map, from river Nile to Susa to Pergamum and have taken Rhodes, Kydonia, Sparta and Corinth. Pontus and Armenia are still attacking me almost every turn with about as much success as every turn before. I wanted to teach Pontics a lesson so I sent a small army to attack Nicomedia while it was left undefended. The town only had wooden walls and small population so I didn't even try to keep it, instead I gave it as a gift to Thrace. Now the Pontics lost a settlement and can't get it back without starting a war with Thrace I am in no hurry to end this admittedly tiresome war (unless they come begging for peace, and beg properly) for I am now having much more fun with my invasion army in Greece, the situation there has turned into a huge confusing Romans vs Macedon vs Greeks vs Seleucids struggle, with two Roman factions involved.