That's it, I'm giving up. Break out the alcohol.

[Soulflame]

Hey Colovion, well, I was going to play a bit further and try make a guide, but I don't think I can make a god enough one. I started the Greeks too as you know. And yes they are A LOT more difficult then the Romans. This is because the Greeks are just not flexible, while most of their opponents are.

In my game, I started the first (or second, can't remember) by Allying with Carthage. Then I build up forces in Sparta and Thermon, but I first build some ports and such. You get MASSIVE income from that, because you have the Collossus of Rhode.
The Scipii made a few attempts to siege Syracuse. And I had a bad feeling about it. I already told you what I did. From the rescued army, the governer got to Rhode (a very good upcoming town) and the rest of the army joined Thermon. At this point the Macedonians were sieging the rebel Athene, so I made my move and marched almost all of my stuff from sparta and began the siege of Corinth. Every turn I added units to that siege. Once the Macedonians had Athene, they came for me. The first time they waited out of range (I bribed another reinforment army), but the second time they attacked. I just had a new commander married into my family, which had 4 command and +2 in defense. He would lead the army (I also quickly used him to scoop up some mercenaries along the way, some Rhodian slingers, Mercenary Hoplites and Cresian Archers..) . This was one of the best battles I had so far. It ended with about 700 casualties on both sides. The Macedonians fled and rallied a whopping 3 times... both generals died, but in the end, I prevailed. After that I got the town. I bribed the three armies they wanted to send to strengthen Larissa, laid siege to that and then laid low on the Macedonian front.
My experience: NEVER let your town get under siege with the Greek. I fought 3 armies of the Brutii on the hills outside of Thermon, and it went MUCH better then sallying forth (in fact, 2 of those Brutii battles became sites of famous battle). They will attack primarily with velites the first 2 times, so once the hastati are going to attack, get your greek cavalry behind then and mob up the velites for a grand rout.
Along the way I bought Sardis from the Seleucids for some money, and am preparing to hit Pontus on that side.

This is on hard/hard. I have save games from nearly every turn if you want them (only the boring turns where I did nothing but press the end turn I didn't save). So you can see what happened. There are 51 saves, being about 65 mb (unzipped), so they are little more then 1mb a piece. Let me know if you want any or all (although I don't have a host place..)

But I must conclude that the Greek Cities at this point are not very fun to play. The battles are okay now, but you can build almost no nice units. After you get armoured hoplites, you upgrade your barracks to get hoplites +1 exp (joy).. and you can't have better cavalry then Greek Cavalry. So you'd better pack LOTS of them when faced with some enemy cavalry. For a faction so dependant on hoplites, it has just pathetic ways to protect the flank, so I often use more hoplites and make it a crescent shape. And you are just bathing in money. I got 400000 already.

[Red Harvest]

Not to do the little fanboy, but I'm somehow always astounded to see people who purposedly chose a difficulty level where their units takes big moral penalties and ennemies take big fighting bonuses, who are STILL surprised to see the ennemy rolling over their units

You know, people keep saying this, but they seem to miss the big picture. The hoplites are the weak sisters--higher settings just make it more obvious. Medium cav is tearing up everything (except elephants) on the SAME very hard setting. Does that make it more clear? The medium cav under human command should be hopelessly outmatched on very hard, shouldn't it? They should wet themselves if spears/phalanx are within 50 yards. It is not happening. Those same medium cav are deadly to AI hoplites. The proof of the "your setting is too hard that's all" theory is destroyed by the lack of any corollary evidence to support it--and in fact refute it, because they are the opposite of what one would anticipate.

I fully expect the AI to win 1 vs. 1 same unit match ups handily on very hard, but I do expect *counter* units to at least hold their own, especially the elite versions which should win, but by smaller margins (rather than a complete walkover.)

You can wait a lifetime for good strategic AI, it won't happen. Software companies see no benefit of investing in it to bring it past mediocre. That is why we use "very hard" or "hard" battles. Medium is not challenging.

[Colovion]

Ok a little update.

That RTW is a seductress - the slut pulled me back in for another go.

I reloaded my campaign before my disasterous battles and was pleasantly suprised. Now I own most of the Greek penninsula, haven't had a problem much with Macedon as my phalanx are actually chewing up their light cav like they should.

The Scipii still won Syracuse from me. They had been at war with Carthage - but the Carthage armies tended to enjoy just sitting in their Province while the Scipii kept attacking my settlement. I lost it because some militia holites had a grand idea of running outside of the gates when they were supposed to go up on the walls.

That was tres annoying, lost me the city because of that and only that - I had the battle won until that happened. I must say that the enemy really knows when the gate is breached and will pile on the troops without regard for anything and will just pile their bodies up in front of the phalanx, but they will push through by sheer numbers eventually if you don't keep the center seriously buffed up.

I had the plague in Larissa but quickly built Sewers and Public baths - the Gov there still has the plague. It killed the amazingly Glorious General who had led the assault to there as well as Athens but a year after they took the city, poor guy. I just took Crete as well as Hellicarnasus - my navy is getting huge and now rules the Aegean and Adriatic area. My Western fleet is composed of 8 mighty tiremes, no one can stand up to such a formidable force. I think I'm going to have to declare war on Pontus soon as they are at war with my allies, the Selucids.

My problems prior to now were attributed mainly to poor control of armies, moronic pathfinding, bugs, glitches and phalanx units getting chewed up by inferior troops for inexplicable reasons (even with the kill bonus for Hard AI if I can't win with phalanx in a head on fight then.... yea..) It must have been a glitch because I've beaten troops now which are my equals (Mecedonian Phalanx Pikemen)

[King Azzole]

I am playing a greek campaign on very hard and managed to take all of sicily, all of greece and parts of asia minor so far. The trick to the greeks is to make the enemy attack you so you can fight defensively. Siege towns, hold armies in there provinces, ANYTHING to make them attack you but not attack yourself.

[Osbot]

Im not sure if im playing the same game as all of you guys. In my seleucid campaign my silvershield pikes massacre anything that attempts to attack them head on. I've had cataphracts, cataphract archers all charge my Phalanxes head on and the result for them horsies is not good.

I've found offensively in pitched battles a phalanx line is practically useless. In sieges they are juggernaughts of destruction. I will commonly use 3 or 4 silvershield pikes to take a town from 2k+ man armies. I will move them up to capture the gate area while I use archers as a suppressing force while they get established. I then pick my lines of advance and use bounding tactics with my phalanxes as they push down corridors towards the square.

The original poster in this thread mentioned something about his archers not shooting the entire siege. I've found that units when you group them together in the deployment stage sometimes will not attack. To correct this in the battle you must ungroup them. Im in the habit now of just grouping onc I hit start. Saves me a headache later if someone bugs out.

I have to say this however. Look at the unit stats for Roman factions, they field the best units in the game across the board. I always expected the Roman legions to be the best all purpose infantry and their stats reflect this. However I was floored by the high end roman cavalry. I was under the impression that Companions would be THE top heavy cav unit in the game. They ain't even close.

[Nelson]

The hoplites are the weak sisters--higher settings just make it more obvious.

Two reasons for poor hoplite performance IMO: the need to always be on guard and leaping horses.

The AI does not seem to put attacking hoplites into guard mode. It might be counter intuitive to do this but without guard mode the formation shatters way too easily.

Hoplites are indeed overly vulnerable to the front against cav. I have just tested a single Roman cav vs a single hoplite in guard/phalanx 6 times using large sizes 53 cav and 80 hoplites. Neither unit was upgraded in any way. The cav lost 5 out of six fights but the hoplites lost from 17 to 50 men even when they won.

The problem is the leaping cav on the initial charge. Several mounts jump into the phalanx at which time virtually the entire front rank of Greeks pulled their swords as well as many men in the other ranks. At that point there was no phalanx any more. If the infantry can hold on until the cav withdawls to recharge the hoplites will win. The subsequent charges were never as good as the first. Still, it was rare for horses to refuse the impact on the first charge. If the jumping horses would refuse to leap then hoplites would be OK. On medium difficulty at least, I can win with hoplites but I need to be more careful than I believe I should have to be if the enemy is is front of them. In MTW and STW I never had to worry about yari or pikemen if cav was to their front. Now I must babysit hoplites. That is wrong.

Hoplites not in a tight formation should be very vulnerable. However, Rome makes it too easy to disrupt them. On any difficulty.

That said, we should discuss unit performance on medium difficulty so as to eliminate stat disparity issues. We need to compare apples to apples. (And I don't mean road apples )

[Husar]

I´m currently playing the greeks on medium/medium(I don´t want anyone to have a combat bonus, but the AI is not that good).
In the beginning I lost Syracuse to the Scipii, but captured Corinth and Athens and then crushed the Macedons. Later I destroyed...erm...that other faction up north you need to destroy in the small greek campaign, because they wanted no peace and even refused to become a protectorate as I laid siege to both of their 2 last cities.
All the time Pergamum was under attack by more or less big armies from Pontus, but they never ever managed to get in. In the beginning I had only palisades, so I set up 2 units of militia hoplites so their pikes formed a triangle with the gate and as soon as the eastern infantry charged in they got decimated and routed. Later on i got some stone walls and better units like hoplites so I set up a unit of hoplites right behind the gates, pikes facing at the gates and fought off their eastern infantry on the walls with other units of hoplites. Soon they began to send in pikemen, but on the walls, fighting with swords, they seemed inferior to my hoplites. I recognized aswell, that since I had stone walls, nobody tired to come in through the gate after a ram broke it, they just stood the getting decimated by tower-arrows, while they lost on the walls. Then there came a day when I first had archers on my walls and since then I will never miss them in defensive siege-battles. Rams are pretty useless, because 2-3 units of archers can burn them with fire arrows, siege towers are more tricky, sometimes they burn after 2 or 3 salvos, sometimes my archers run out of arrows, trying to inflame them(I like that, it gives both sides a chance). The only way to prevent the enemy form setting up ladders seems to be killing the guys that carry them, but because my archers are usually busy with rams and siege towers, I have to use my hoplites or armored hoplites to fight off the invaders. I was really pleased to see that a unit of 77 or so archers can kill >100 enemies in a siege.
Later on the Brutii came to fight me, fielding hastati, hastati and hastati( and some velites, but they can be ignored in sieges ;) ) But against armored hoplites on the walls they still lost, getting decimated by my archers(btw: friendly fire was common on walls, but giving the archers other targets and preventing fire at will helped).

So today I started to attack the Brutii who slowly began to upgrade their armies with first a few principes and then a lot of auxiliary troops and early and normal legionary cohorts, but I managed to defeat them and they lost all their non-italian provinces to me(somehow I can´t remember these battles right now, but I won ). So I had to face the Iulii, thinking the Brutii were almost crushed and that the Iulli would be easy to defeat, but there the interesting part began.

It seems that the Iulli like auxilliary archers, putting 2 or more into a lot of their armies, combined with lots of early and some normal legionary cohorts as well as roman cavalry and auxilliary cavalry. At this point I got a problem with my armies consisting mainly of hoplites and some archers, I didn´t take greek cavalry because they even lose against roman cavalry(Rome´s cavalry is not as weak as it should be, I think, never had pretorian cav, but legionary is pretty good already). So these auxilliary archers and roman cavalry can be a big problem for hoplites. The legionaries themselves get mostly crushed by my phalanx, especially when I setup a defensive formation, but roman auxilliary archers have a longer range than my greek archers and I´ve got no cav except my general. In the end, the romans always lose, because getting my hoplites in standart formation after crushing romes legions let´s me run after those archers so they will get caught most of the time(their fatigue is mostly lower than that of my hoplites), but it´s a very long procedure and a bit boring.

while I was busy with my campaign against the Iulii, I didn´t notice a Brutii fleet in my territory until the unloaded a huge army and attacked Athens. I had never ever been engaged by sea until then and was really surprised, in the battle my archers tried their best, but couldn´t prevent a unit of onagers to break my walls. I had only two units of militia hoplites for close combat and they got overrun by a massive army of legionaires, legionary cav and others coming through that hole, so I lost Athens. Some roundas before an army of mine returned from the front to retrain spartan hoplites in Sparta and I used this army to recapture Athens...I thought. first I shot a hole into their walls, thinking my spartan hoplites were superior to their troops as a phalanx in the streets. So I charged my 4 units of spartan hoplites into the city, leaving my greek cav and some archers outside. What happened then was a real desaster, my hoplites could do quite well against a few defenders in the streets, but the Brutii had archers on the walls who rained arrows onto my hoplites and as I sent my hoplites onto the walls, they got killed one by one as they came out on top, in the end I had to retreat and lost my whole army(the general got burned somehow in the beginning of the battle, think it was an onager). That teached me the lesson that spartan hoplites can be easily countered by archers.

Ok, I didn´t want to rite that much, but it just got me.
In the end I want to add, that armored hoplites work well in sieges and are pretty well covered against arrows, that the greeks have no good cavalry, that the only annoying thing is hoplites moving sideways while fighting(it causes my defensive positions to break up) and that I am looking forward to a faction with better cav, but still the greeks are fun, especially in defending sieges, and cav is no big problem for hoplites on medium.

In the end I got a question that can perhaps be asked by the devs, it is concerning pikemen, hoplites and armoured hoplites, bcause, as the unit description say, they got three weapons, their long pikes on the ground for the phalanx are obvious. But when deployed on a wall they often have some two pointed spears in their hands, like the triarii, but whenever there is a hand to hand fight, on walls or on the ground without phalanx, they use swords, even against cavalry. It would be very nice if they would use those spears against cavalry, but right now, they only equip them when waiting on walls, but never when engaged.

Thanks for your patience if you read through all that, it´s more or less straight out of my mind.

[Akka]

You know, people keep [...] not challenging.

I do agree that cavalry is a bit too powerful, and should have a harder time to disengage, and a slightly less powerful charge.

But I do NOT agree that the hoplites are the "weak sisters". I'm currently playing a Greek campaign on medium, and I've found that the phalanx formation is extremely strong.
Sure, hoplites get cut down if some good mélée units, like roman legions, close in to swordfight. Hoplites aren't good at swordfight. But well, their strenght lie in spike wall formation, and as long as they are in, they are formidable meatgrinders.

I've had hoplite stopping dead (in the litteral sense) chariot and cavalry charge. Hell, I've even had MILITIA hoplite stopping and butchering light cavalry front charge.
I've had the "hopping effect" that is talked at lenght, but though it somehow disorganized my front line, it seldom really disrupt it, and usually, the chargers are pushed back and the line reforms, with big losses for them, and much fewer for my men.
Granted, the worse I've eaten so far are general bodyguards charge, and I haven't encountered some heavy cavalry like the parthan cataphract.

I also know that there is the "AI effect", ie I'm able to win most battle because the enemy is stupid, which make my units appear stronger than they would be against better opponents.
And there is the effect of experience and upgrade, which usually favors the human, who is able to develop its cities better.

But still, all in all, at least in the solo campaign in medium (the default setting), I've had so far tremendous success with my hoplites, massacring everything up to principes and war chariots.

[Osbot]

I wonder if part of the discrepancies we are seeing here is comparing phalanx units with shorter spears vs the really long ones.

I mean, when stuff charges at my silver shield pikes. They don't reach the men. They are simply slaughtered by my first or second rows of pikes.

In my current campaign, the Macedons sieged one of my back water cities. Consisting of Levy and Militias. They had a couple units of Royal Phalanx I believe it was. My levy/militias could not fight them at all. As they formed up through a breach my units were torn to pieces as the reach of their pikes was more than double mine. No contest, luckily in the end I held on for the victory by the skin of my teeth ;p

[Red Harvest]

I wonder if part of the discrepancies we are seeing here is comparing phalanx units with shorter spears vs the really long ones.

I mean, when stuff charges at my silver shield pikes. They don't reach the men. They are simply slaughtered by my first or second rows of pikes.

That is part of it for some. But I've tested and played with those long spear phalanx (20 odd feet) and compared to the 14 feet long types. The long spears are able to stop things frontally much better, and the unit size is bigger which is important for morale as losses mount. But they sill are easily disordered and they still collapse in seconds if you hit the flank or rear.

Folks are right on about phalangites being too easily disordered. Frown at the formation, and it becomes disordered. That is why they are so tough to use (and the AI is helpless with them.)

When I face AI armies that are half light cav, half armoured hoplites, I don't worry at all about the hoplites. I fear other heavy infantry more, because they are not so formation dependent and can meet an attack if given a few seconds. I've lost to heavy infantry sword armies with medium cav, but never to hoplites, even when they were backed with lots of cav.

[King Azzole]

Guys a tip for hoplites on offense:

Take them OUT of phalanx mode, and charge up to the enemy line full blast, and at the last possible second hit em into phalanx mode. Although it takes em a few seconds to organize a bit and its alittle sloppy, I swear it works. And im doing this on Very Hard! Its the only way to use em offensively against heavy missile units.