Dogs

[Khuyildar]

How do you people use dogs? Or do you use them at all? I think they're fairly powerful, because they chewed through two spear warbands head on in one recent battle killing everyone, and regenerated to full strength afterwards .

[Lucidor]

How do you people use dogs? Or do you use them at all? I think they're fairly powerful, because they chewed through two spear warbands head on in one recent battle killing everyone, and regenerated to full strength afterwards .

Like you do... They are insanely powerful. I let them in first through a battered gate to clear of a little people from the inside.

[Deecie]

As Scipii I used them to great effect against elephants; elephants seem to get spooked very easily by incendiary pigs and war dogs.

War dogs are also good as kamikaze's to break enemy formations; the dog trainers gain experience from fighting, not the dogs themselves (or so I understand), so as long as the trainers survive, they're good, expendable, easily retrainable units.

War dogs can pretty much charge right UNDER the spears in a phalanx formation and bite right away at those evil barbarians. Even if they don't get past the spears, having them right in front of an infantry or cavalry charge to break up the formation a bit is a great help.

[Loopy]

I'm trying to mod the wardogs to change them from rottweilers to Golden Retrievers, the best dogs ever. They will lick the ankles of the opposing forces and make them drop their weapons and run away.

[Upward Mobility]

How do you people use dogs? Or do you use them at all? I think they're fairly powerful, because they chewed through two spear warbands head on in one recent battle killing everyone, and regenerated to full strength afterwards .

Dogs are... well... I really don't want to use the b-word (broken), but they are so ridiculous, IMO, that I restrict myself to a maximum of one per army, if that. In fact, in my current game, I have a total of one unit of wardogs, and I got them from the Senate for free.

That being said, I usually only use them during sieges, after I get a hole in the wall or have the gates busted open.

[Khuyildar]

War dogs are also good as kamikaze's to break enemy formations; the dog trainers gain experience from fighting, not the dogs themselves (or so I understand), so as long as the trainers survive, they're good, expendable, easily retrainable units.

LOL, yeah, the game considers the dogs as some sort of projectiles . When I put the mouse cursor over a unit of dogs, it always shows only the number of dog trainers.

I've also realized the dogs are a bit too über. Scythian 120 "man" dog units with 3 exp (straight out from a city with a lvl 3 temple) are like homing missiles.

[TinCow]

Dogs are very lethal against unarmored or lightly armored units. Against heavy infantry or cavalry they are much less useful. Wardogs ripped apart the Gauls, Brittons, Spanish and Germans when I played as the Julii, but they are much less effective against the Greek hoplites in my current Brutii campaign.

[Shottie]

Ive never used them before. I think that a group of dogs charging armoured swordmen can be affective until the swordmen start swing but in RTW that doesnt happen to often I dont think. But I think I will try the dogs when i attack a city, or maybe as a defence?

[Theodoret]

I use them to chase down routing units and skirmishers, but they are also pretty good if you wait until your main battle line is coming into contact with the enemy and then release them. They will mess up the enemy formation.

Personally, I think the best thing in the game is to see the uppity 'we can't be bought like goods at a market' enemy general being savaged by rottweilers.

[OctavianAugustus]

oh come on guys
the war dogs are NOT THAT GOOD
they are balanced just fine

please play test your assertions before you come postings "i am sure about this " on the forums

go into Custom battle and try out some even matched battles

i had 4 units of wardogs vs 3 units of gaul warbands
and the warbands Creamed the wardogs easily ok!!??

ive played many battles w/ the wardogs and they are NOT UBER ok?
they are medium

wardogs on their own are ripe to defeat

simple unarmoured soldiers can beat wardogs in 1on1 battle
ive never won

BUT...if you send in a group of soldiers vs 2 groups of soldiers
then release the wardogs BEHIND them...you will probably always win

i usually have 2 or so groups of wardogs per stack of soldiers

agian, if i hear anyone say Wardogs are overpowered
IM Going to post agianst you because you obviously have NOT playtested
in custom battle

in 10 battles of wardogs 1on1 vs random infantry units of various factions

the wardogs won only ONCE!!!!

they get slaughtered without proper support

the developers of RomeTW arent that stupid come on guys

agian War DOgs are NOT overpowered

they only tip a battle in your favor if you use them With Proper support units like infantry or calvary

but they do seem however to die less often from friendly fire of arrows...

so if you want your archers to have a little extra time to pick off enemy units...sacrifice some war dogs to bog the enemy down while your archers wear down the enemy....

playtest before you comment....

[Divico]

I never really knew what to do with them. I have some units sitting in towns. Better get them out in the field against the Gauls.

[Warhammer]

I only use them once one of my forces has already engaged a formation. Then they can be fairly powerful since they act as a flank attack for most purposes.

[OctavianAugustus]

what im upset about is that my lovely wardogs get so much flack
i love my wardogs most of all units
and they are mans best friend

anyway where are the crocodiles? *alligators?

i Swear!! i saw a photo of some egpytians unleashing some crocs before this game come out! it makes me so unbelieveably sad to have so much difficulty finding my precious crocodiles....

i even think i saw the photo on the main TW official site?
or was it just a wonderful dream heheheh

anyone else remember seeing a photo of the crocodiles?
i coulda swore the egpytians could recruit them....
well Creative Assembly if u took them out; Put em back in!
i bet everyone else wants the crocodiles tooo

what can be more sweet than seeing a dozen croc's munch down on some peasent rebels

[Khuyildar]

@OctavianAugustus

Indeed. I did a couple of tests myself against several light inf. types, and the dogs always lost. My success with them must have had to do with my good generals then. Under leadership of an inspiring (like the dogs would care) general they are still awesome killers, and they regenerate. So IMO they're a bit über.

When spear warband goes head on against other spear warband and takes heavy losses, money and population are wasted. If dogs lose to warband, they'll spawn back (unless you commit the trainers into melee, which isn't very smart).

So overall the Custom Battle results are quite trivial to me, because I only play custom battles to test things out.

[Ashitaka-san]

I would have to agree that they wardogs should not be able to respawn as they do currently. However, I, like some others here, would not say that they are overpowered.
True, they can rip some enemies apart as their attack is excellent. But, if you face an enemy, especially an armored one, head on, the dogs won't fare so great. Also, the fact they you can't control them after the inital charge definately works against their effectiveness.

[Reddog]

I use wardogs to go after archers other skirmishing units so that i dont have to waste my cavalry chasing them down and can worry more about the main fight.

[InsaneApache]

IMHO they are most effective when besieging towns/cities as u can unleash them in the town/city and they can run down those side streets and help flank the defender, whilst ur men have to march the 'long' way around.

[OctavianAugustus]

great ideas guys ... ill try to unleash my doggies on a siege next time

my only city expierance w/doggies is on defense

after your archers run outta ammo u can unleash the doggies to do a little extra damage while your soldiers stay inside safely
*i had about 500men , gauls attacked me with about 1400 men

plus when defending you can sally as many times as you want in One turn! yes one Turn LOL

so in one turn i had about 5 or 6 sallys

i kept the main soldiers inside; used all my arrows....then unleashed to doggies to wear down the enemy

around that 5th sally i caused the enemy to route with no more than 15 or 25 total men lost while the enemy eventually lost over 1000 men

i did lose a thousand doggies overall *and this might be a bit :uber:
so yes, doggies should require retraining to regenerate

it make my one turn 5 sally defense Very Easy to win...took awhile but still defense was Very easy with this strategy....

just wait for the time limit to go out and re-sally agian

i know...Its Cheap huh ?

but as the Romans i WASNT gonna lose a Roman City to those "hairy mad gauls"
so cheap ya but those gauls dont deserve a victory over Rome now do they


lol if you play as gauls im sure you feel that way about Rome huh

*goes to check out cheap tactics using doggies during sieges
lol thanks for the tips guys

[ah_dut]

IIRC the imo 2 best ways to use wardogs are against elephants and phalanxes. They're so cheap to support for the damage they do against god damn elephants that i rather like them.

[katar]

wardogs... or four legged cluster bombs as i call them are definately a nice unit to use.

i usually unleash a couple of them to disrupt advancing enemy units (be they Gallic warbands of Macedonian phalanxs).

when i first started using them i used to launch six units of them at the enemy, just to soften them up, but it just made the battles far too easy so nowadays i never have more than two in an army.

when using them against highly armoured units they just hold the enemy in place while i bring my veltes and archers in for the killing blow.

they have also come in handy as furry fire and forget missiles, when an enemy general comes too close to my lines, just unleash the dogs and have them pin him in one spot, thus leaving me plenty of time to concentrate fully on his units without him annoying me .

[Sin Qua Non]

Honesty, I use them like furry cruise missiles.

As for balancing their effectiveness, the only change I would suggest is to make them non regenerable and retrainable-only like other units. Dogs don't last long among armored units.

[Divico]

after some 50 SP battles I really start liking them. I mostly use them for sieges on offense and defense. The first unit I let run through the crasehd gate.

[Magraev]

There are some issues with them. The dogs steal XP that your equites should get chasing routers. Since they don't level up the xp is lost. This is especially a problem for julii, since they get no xp-temples.

In the later stages of the game the diff between a silver chevron equites and a rookie one could be the diff between life and death.

And the 5-sallies-pr-turn-strategy is incredibly cheezy...

[AngryGerbil]

In response to OctavionAugustus:

Sending 4 units of wardogs against 4 foot units is not play testing. I hate to break it to you. Alot of the power of the wardogs comes with their regeneration rate and the way they can bog down units for free allowing your troops to flank

Another thing you may want to "playtest" is how you deploy your dogs. If I have 4 units of dogs and you have 4 warbands, would it be wiser for me to send 1 unit of dogs at each of your warbands or send them all at one warband? Or maybe send 2 dogs at 2 warbands and try to flank with the third while using the fourth as a decoy? Get creative, playtest before you comment.

Taking two units and smashing them into each other head on in a custom battle does not constitute playtesting. Having a full army of dogs is not going to net you a sprawling empire, of this I can agree with you. But there is no question that they are too powerful as they stand. CA needs to either tone them down signifigantly, require a retrain before they replenish, or make them more expensive.

[Red Harvest]

They seem too powerful to me, but most of the "special" units have been beefed up relative to infantry. It is similar to elephants, the dogs weaken enemy morale while you are hitting them with infantry or cav. Part of the problem I have with the wardogs is that I'm not personally afraid of dogs. (Among my personal experiences was chasing down and beating a rottweiler into submission that was chasing a cat in my yard--it never came through the fence again and was a good "neighbor" after that.) Given the choice, I would gladly volunteer to move to the rear and fight the dogs while the other guys fight the men in front.

[Dex]

I tend to use wardogs to cover my flanks and to help hunt down fleeing generalls

[Tyburn JIG]

To my mind dogs are fine just the way they are.

I sincerely hope the vocal minority don't achieve their goal of nurffing this unit to suit their own personal preferences.

@Khuyildar

As mentioned in above posts,dogs are good for various jobs on the field.One thing that works for me is sending them against chariots(particularly the archer variety).Seems to get them in a right little mess....spinning around in circles rather than trampling my lines.

[Thrudvang]

Why is it so bad for dogs to regenerate?

I'm sure they could raise up dogs within the turn time period.

[Sociopsychoactive]

Dogs are great.

They are the best weapon you can have in a siege situation, break a hole or batter down a gate and then "Release the hounds!" and the defenders will be to busy going 'SIT!' to halt your infantry or cavalry charge into the cleared breach.

On defence, I don't find them quite as great. The complete lack on control once released often means you have a full 90 odd ogs chasing down one routing cavalryman that they will never catch, while the rest of your army is still slogging it out.

They almost always HAVE to charge head on into a unit, so they almost always suffer massive casualties from the initial impact. Under the right conditions they may chew through lightly or unarmoured units, but they won't win the battle for you.

The best way to use them outside a besieging battle is to release them the moment you see the whites of the enemies eyes. The charging enemy will be severely disrupted, slightly shaken and ripe for flanking. If I did the exact same with a unit of infantry the blocker may well rout before the flanker gets into position, so the fact that the dogs themseves never rout is very usefull.

As to overpowered, well, they NEVER earn experience. Any chevrons you see will be on the trainers, not the dogs themselves and only a fool or a desperate man puts the trainers into battle. Every time they are a fresh, rookie set of dogs. That ofsets the regeneration rather well don't you think?