Pontus

[pezhetairoi]

Well... I always used them as main line troops :-P Never thought of using them that way, and anyhow, I preferred using cavalry for flanking. Heh, heh.

[Watchman]

I've now played a Pontus campaign for a while, and it's quite interesting - Pontus is a sort of "bit of everything" faction. Pontic Cav are kinda like HA, but not. The infantry are an odd bunch, and in my experience almost unnecessary outside sieges until Phalanx Pikes turn up. The chariots are a mixed bag. Half the units have a basically Greek feel to them (and all the temples *are*), but the culture rates as Eastern in every respect (not that I'm complaining, that "secret police" line of building is useful). Just about all of their immediate neighbors fight in a bit different manner - Greeks and Seleucids have phalanxes and nondescript cavalry, Armenians have HAs and crap for infantry. The Galatean rebels provide further variation - not that FamiCav has any more trouble clearing out stacks of Naked Fanatics than Eastern Inf, it's just a nice break from the usual.

My experience goes roughly as follows. First of all, it is imperative to fortify and tower the passages to Armenia ASAP - odds are the buggers will be coming after you sooner rather than later, and peasants in forts blocking the paths seem to deter them quite long. While they were wondering at what to do about the matter I was profiting from the trade pact I had with them (they were the only guys nearby whe never accepted Alliance, though - go fig) and cheerfully took over Bithynia and Galatia, not in the least because I needed a bigger population base to absorb the army upkeed. Soon after I took Bithynia the "perfidious and effeminate Greeks" decided they didn't want to be my friends anymore, so I ate Phrygia from them to stop having to kill a bunch of MiliHops ever half dozen turns. They were probably busy with the Macedonians and Romans, as they were surprisingly willing to swallow ceasefire and trade pact.

The Seleucids never bothered me - no doubt busy with the Parthians and Egyptians - but I fortified the river crossings around Mazaka just in case - all those army stacks marching by made me a bit nervous.

During this early phase I mostly split my building queues between everything money-related and everything troop-related - particularly temples of Hercules and enough stables and barracks to be able to start producing Phalanx Pikes and Pontic Heavies, as having to rely on Pontic Lights and Hillmen felt like standing on a rather shaky set of clay legs. Sinope actually grows big enough pretty soon, so as long as you keep building in pace you'll be feeling a fair bit more secure in time. Towns not meant to serve as troop production centres (at least as of yet) got farms and temples of Aphrodite instead - especially the teensy-weensy backwoods of Ancyra can really do with the growth boost. I also made a point of having at least one temple of Zeus around, as the priests give useful bonuses and it's easy enough to pass them on to others.

A few word on the Hercules temples, though. Useful as they are, characters meant to actually lead armies on the field shouldn't hang out too long in cities that have them. "Bloody" is an useful trait, and the basic "Anger" doesn't matter much - but the higher levels of those chains, especially of the former which starts giving hefty morale penalties to troops, can be quite troublesome for field generals. A point should be made of giving commanders a Priest of Zeus though; +2 Command on the attack is nothing to scoff at.

On the plus side the temples of Hercules also seem to encourage the developement of the "active" line of traits (which makes buildings cheaper), and gives nothing that hurts Management so at least I ended up bluntly dividing my family members into two groups - governors who can go as stark raving Hercules-mad as they want because it doesn't hurt their main job one bit, and commanders who only visit the settlements with those temples if absolutely necessary and do all the real fighting. Asia Minor is such a small place, even with the dirt roads Pontus is stuck with, that initially only one or two commanders are needed, although this changes one the Armenians go hostile.

The Armenians are a bit annoying to fight against - there's some obvious issues in engaging HAs with phalanxes and javelin cav (not counting all the merc HAs you're supposed to hire ASAP), and all the more so when they throw the Cata version in. Their infantry just plain sucks - Hercules-boosted Pontic Heavy can often crush both Hillmen and Easterns without overmuch casualties even on a frontal charge, and Heavy Spearmen can't hold a candle to Phalanx Pikes; if flanks aren't a concern, the longer spear wins.

Scythed Chariots proved to be if not exactly cheap then at least easily retrainable counter - send them after the HAs and the buggers won't be a bother while you shred the rest of the stack, and even Cataphracts die fast enough if you throw them that way. Scythes are actually about the only troops I consider genuinely expendable - if you've got a Doctor or Surgeon along, enough casualties are usually recovered from completely demolished units to keep them retrainable and using them effectively all but requires death-or-glory suicide charges anyway (although preferably with Pontic Heavies right behind). Cataphracts proved to be of surprisingly little concern; fully buffed Pontic Heavies can take them out easily enough if there's at least two against one, and there always tend to be more Heavies than Catas anyway. Even the upgrade cata-generals die surprisingly fast in the crush.

I never tried to use the Pontic Chariots as HA counters, though. Dunno if I should've, but I always felt they take too much casualties in the firefight given the high building reqs for retraining. A few make useful support troops though, overpriced poor HA clones that they may be (they're not even Fast like the Egyptian ones).

The little batch of woods across the river east of Sinope incidentally turned out to be a neat place to ambush advancing Armenians in, when they try that route. The river crossing works too, as it goes a long way to stripping the HAs from their mobility advantage.

In any case the Armenians proved to be little more than a constant irritation easily containable in the Anatolian mountain passes, save of course it constantly occupied one decent commander and a stack of troops, although I first needed to knock their puny excuse of a navy to the bottom of the Black Sea and put the port of Kotais under blockade out of sheer spite. That aside I was making a good profit from a beautiful net of sea trade routes all over said pond, save the Scythians were proving thoroughly incapable of taking over Chersonesos from the rebels there.

Around this time I started noticing the odd Egyptian remnant stack wandering around the cilician mountain passage, and sending a spy to check things out revealed the Egyptians were already as north as Tarsus - presumably via amphibious assault, as Antioch was still in Seleucid hands. The fighting around the city seemed rather complicated with many small stacks of remnants, and the odd pile of Cilician Pirate bandits pitching in, but in any case I decided the writing was on the wall and the Seleucids on the ropes. So I fortified the pass to Tarsus and took it over when it was back in Seleucid hands. They seemed to have a ceasefire with the Egyptians at the time or somethings, as they were able to spare a fairly substantial relief force during the siege. Scythed Chariots proved to die quite fast on pikes, though. Levy Pikemen put up more of a fight until my cavalry wings were done with theirs and rolled up their flanks - even high-end phalanxes seem to shatter pretty easily before a flank cavalry charge, I've noticed. Naturally I also took Sardis so as to have no pesky loose ends around, and also because Aegean trade is profitable. The rebels in Halicarnassus were still there, so that was next up in the interests of consistency (and because Aegean trade is profitable, and I had a trade pact going with the Egyptians too). KREEESHUN ARSHERS also make thmselves quite useful in the otherwise rather archer-poor Pontic military.

The Seleucids still held out in Antioch and Hatra, and I actually fully expected the Egyptians to finish them. They didn't though. They were apparently taking over Seleucia and butting heads with the Parthians. I fortified the teensy-weensy pass between Antioch and Tarsus and for a while the "Southern Army" (as I'd dubbed it) pretty much ran between that fort and the passages into Cappadocia which the Armenians were constantly venturing into - this was actually a bit troublesome as Tarsus was a puny little village and the nearest retraining facilities were in Mazaka, so some troop rotation was required to keep them in strenght. Around this time I'd gotten my FamiCav upgrade (Perganum gre big enough and I made it the capital), and the old man (who was born a four-star Military Genius) in charge of this army was now surrounded by a hundred three-gold-chevron hardcases who regularly pretty much wiped out half the enemy army by themselves. Those Cappadocian Bodyguards are pretty tough.

The diplomat I'd forgotten to hang out in Greece as a sort of resident emissary showed me the Romans were giving the Greeks and Macedonians a beating - interestingly it looked like peninsula was getting split horizontally in the middle between the Brutii and the Scipii, the former taking Epirus and Thessaly and the latter everything south of that. The Macedonians actually held out for fairly long, until the Thracians decided to play scavenger and invaded Byzantium - that seemed to break their back. Apparently the Thracians rather overextended themselves, or perhaps got into a scuffle with the Brutii, as the Dacians overran them soon after and for a while they and the Brutii took turns besieging, occasionally taking, and failing to hold Byzantium which always revolted.

I figured I wanted to get a share too, so I took the scary old commander who'd spent the last half decades or so killing rebels and bandits in western Asia Minor (three gold chevrons here too), gave him an army mostly made up of Merc Hops, Thracian Mercs from Bithynia, some KREESHUN ARSHERSH plus a couple of Pontic Lights mostly for pursuit duties, and shipped the whole merry bunch over to Rhodos. For some reason most of the Greek troops on the island were in a big stack right next to the city, which held about two MiliHops and one Peltast. Right after I'd laid siege to the city this stack tried to pull a relief, got duly massacred (Hoplite vs Merc Hoplite is a pretty even match - until the Thracians get involved from the sides...) and the Greek Cities died out with the capture of Rhodos.

I was, of course, a happy camper - you don't need to be a rocket scientist or Alan Greenspan to figure out what that whopping 40% sea trade boost does to your budget. So I fixed the place up, built my own temples, trained a bunch of peasants to pick up the local drunks, and boarded to scary old general and his mercs on a ship - Byzantium was still rebel, and I figured I might as well take that one too.

The next turn there was a full Scipii stack laying siege to Rhodos. The old general and his ships made an about-face and the Scipii were duly driven into the sea - even Praetorians don't do too well against hoplites when they have a pile of howling Thracians on their arses, it seems. For the next several years this was repeated at least twice until I managed to build enough ships to keep the Blue Pox That Are The Scipii on their side of the Aegean, and grinned evilly the whole time as I trained a whole bunch of seriously buffed Cappadocians in Sinope (although just in case all the cities of western Asia Minor received stone walls ASAP). Let's see your Legionary Cavalry handle those critters...

Then I remembered I had no spare Pikemen around - all were preoccupied with Armenians and the Seleucids. So I trained those, too. Phalanx Pikes though. Bronze Shields are neat, but hideously expensive (upkeep about double that of the Phalanxes, although they *do* also have half again as many men) and I suspect retraining would be too problematic. Moreover, their shield bonus is actually worse than that of the Phalanx Pikes and seeing as how neighter defense skill nor the light armour of the phalangited is terribly useful against pila... And tried to save enough money every turn (more difficult than it might sound like, as my trade across the Aegean was now shot and those high-end building most cities had graduated to cost a lot) to recruit enough KREESHUN ARSHERSH to not have to worry about Archer Auxilias.

And then I started noticing most of my family members were getting worrisomely gray, the few who weren't were Hercules-crazed loons their own troops would flee from and the next generation wasn't yet in double-digit ages... As suddenly being left without a good general when fighting the Romans across the Aegean didn't sound like a very brilliant plan I set down to wait for some promising young fellow to make into a new warleader of the Western Army through the time-honored practice of bandit hunting. Although I was getting kinda worried the old guys would die off and take all their useful advisors with them...

Gave me time to thoroughly wrest sea control from the Scipii though and blockade all the Roman ports in the Aegean, though. And very possibly make a bit of a strategic mistake in going and taking over Antioch from the Seleucids on the grounds that if I didn't the Egyptians would and I'd far rather go to war with the big, strategically useful and quite rich city on my side from the word go.

Apparently my stack of troops wasn't nearly as impressive as the one the Seleucids had guarding their last bastion (they even had those first-level elephants in there), because that word came about two turns afterwards.

*Now* I understand why people keep damning the Egyptians to the lowest pits of Hell. Not only are their armies rather annoying, there's apparently no end to them. The Eastern Army by necessity turned casualty minimization (primarily achieved through heroics of the sixty-something superhero general and his merry, endlessly regenerating bodyguards) into a bit of an art form as Antioch rather unhelpfully had all troop buildings except the archery line exactly one step too low (the archery line, in turn, was up to the Catapult Range already meaning I couldn't "overwrite" it to lessen the culture penalty...) for my needs, and the nearest retraining station was still in Mazaka. I hadn't exterminated the city either (in the hopes of getting it to Huge size fast, to have a really solid forward base against the Egyptians), so given the huge culture penalty all that kept it from rebelling was the immense prestige of the old war hero who by this point went by the sobriquet Conqueror. Which also meant he had to be back in the city every turn.

Anyway, the Egyptian armies are a pain for two connected reasons - Pharaoh's Bowmen and chariots. Either of the two is easy enough to deal with - pikes trample over chariots with little difficulty, while cavalry can run rings around the usually all too few Eqyptian phalanxes and rip their achers apart. If both are present, though, it gets tricky as I'd really rather not have my Phalanx Pikes shot full of Pharaonic arrows while closing in, and chariots are plain too dangerous to horses for the usual cavalry assault to work. As an intermediary measure I trined two sets of Onagers in Antioch - outrange that, you damn archers. But since if nothing else the Egyptians get Heavy Onagers (with even longer range) and I don't that's not going to work for too long, and I'm not actually sure if it's actually worthwhile even now. Skirmishers make a halfway decent job as chariot hunters, but their moreale is too brittle and they're too vulnerable to arrows for that to be relied on. I've been thinking if I should just build a bunch of Scythed Chariots and introduce the Egyptian sunday drivers to some real road rage...

Thankfully I'd finally had enough of the next generation mature to start training the future leader of the invasion of Greece, and send another promising lad to take over the job (and ancillaries) of the old hero in Antioch. I'd also gone and taken over Kotais in the meantime, more to get the trade money than anything else, and then proceeded to Chersonesos which the Scythians still hadn't taken. That army had had to beat feet back to Kotais pretty fast and when I noticed the Egyptians seemed to be pushin into Armenian territory from the south (the Parthians were already out in the steppes) I figured I might as well take over the big cities of the Caucasus before them.

That's the current situation in the 200s BC. The nasty army to take on the Romans on the Balkans and Greece has been assembled and is ready to go, and I'm gathering another which I intend to ship over the Med into the Nile Valley and give the Egyptians something to think about. The Romans have several rather large and strong stacks and good generals in Greece, but my spes tell me they're been maneuvering so oddly as of late I wouldn't be surprises if they go into civil war soon (the Scipii are probably getting strong enough to trigger it) - perhaps I can persuade the Dacians to give them something else to worry about too... The Armenian capital at Artaxarta fell to my Northern army only last turn - the few relief attempts were so feeble they're probably on their last legs. The Egyptian armies swarming around Antioch don't exactly seem to be diminishing in number in spite of having tended to die at the rate of about two per three turns, but at least I think I'm done with most of their silver-chevron veterans and I've pretty much owned the immediate seaspace (one of the veteran Aegean fleets sailed over and wiped the slate clean). Overall it's been quite interesting thus far and hasn't been getting stale yet; given that I'm now going to take on the Romans too on the field I'm looking forward to some pretty interesting matches. The Brutii even have gladiators in their stacks...

[Goalie]

Pontus is a pretty solid faction and one of the better eastern factions. They have solid phalanxes, pretty darn good calavry, especially Cappadocians, and you can always hire Cretan Archers. They can be a powerful force early on and into the middle of the game. However, when the Seluecids get elephants, and the Greeks and Romans come it can get difficult.

[Diurpaneus]

If you use pontus phalanxes as backbone of your army (minimum 8 units) and at least 4 units of cappadocian cavalry,2-3 units of chariots and the remaining archers....I think will you manage to resist against the roman and egyptian invasions

[Craterus]

I'm into a pretty nice Pontus campaign. It's on Mundus Magnus, so there's loads of territories for me to take (The Seleucids own ~25 at the start of the campaign).

I started by heading straight for the Armenians, my long-term plan was to expand west but I didn't want them attacking my homeland whilst I was concentrating on Asia Minor. I took them out as fast as possible; the battle against all their generals and horse archers was scary, but I managed to get through it relatively unscathed. The siege of their only city was pretty easy because it was ungarrisoned (their final stand used all of their troops, bar some peasants).

After taking out Armenia, I moved my grand army back to Asia Minor and attacked the heavily defended barbarian settlement. On Mundus Magnus, it is defended by a garrison of upgraded naked fanatics, upgraded archers, a good general and some upgraded warbands.

There is also a field army full of upgraded troops and a formidable general. I attacked the city when the field army moved towards Nicomedia. Obviously they saw the attack and came back for me when I sieged the city. They attacked, but I retreated, not willing to risk taking on two armies (garrison & field). The field army attacked me near the mountains north of Ancyra. I defeated the field army in a really cool battle - one of my most memorable, definitely (I'll post some screenshots later). It was completely even (numbers-wise).

For this battle, my army was comprised of:

2 Generals Bodyguard, 6 or 7 Pontic Light Cav, 1 Barb Cav, 4 Scythed Chariots, 1 Eastern Infantry, 1 Merc Hoplites 2 Barbarian Inf Mercenaries.

I lined the infantry up, and placed my generals behindn the infantry line. I also kept 2 units of Pontic Light Cav behind the lines, in case they broke against the well-equipped Nakeds.

I placed most of my other cavalry on the right flank. On the left flank, and at the highest point of my hill, I put my scythed chariots and some cav.

The rebels advanced towards my line, and with little trouble to my chariots (the key to my plan). I had to send the cavalry on that flank to deal with the barbarian cavalry who were looking to take them out. And as the barbarians got close to my line, I sent the scythed chariots thundering down the hill into the side of their lines. They cut through the unarmoured barbarians like a hot knife through butter. I used my cavalry to cut into the other flank, and from there that battle was won.

The battle ended up as a heroic victory (screenshots will prove) and I was pretty pleased with how the battle went - exactly to plan. My infantry, as customary in my battles, did not see any action.

I'll now attempt to carve my own slice of the HUGE Seleucid Empire. The Ptolemies are looking strong, and they'll be my next foe.