MP help guide

[romeo_longsword]

Hi there,

I have been playing R: TW since the end of January, 2005. I am mainly interested in playing R:TW online and I think its a great idea to express a few tips and personal experience here, but to make a full guide, it would require some work I think, especially paper warfare is always lacking of something, due to many things are situational :)

Although I don’t think I have the time to produce a full guide, I like to share my personal experience as follow:

Against Onagers and their cheesy fireballs

It is a well known method that some players would pick a number of onagers and throw fireballs towards to your army, a successful hit could take out half of your troop of unit, and this usually make people feeling insecure and broken their formation or plan that they had in mind.

Relax.

It is true that it seems a big massive deal while watching half of your troop turned into black pieces of things, but from my personal experience, I have only lost one game that against with cheesy fireballs user, and that was the first time I ever seen them online (or in the game, as I started to play online before single player).

As long as you don’t stand there eating the shots, you should be fine, if you decide to attack, just relax and move towards to them, there will be a range where they can not attack you if close enough, try not to rush into them, as they usually have a defensive formation, such as placing a large pack of spearmen surrounding it.

There was one time somebody taken a high advantage in placing about three of his onagers at the top of a very tall hill, in fact, it’s a mountain, he typically had his spearmen surrounded the onagers and some horses were ready to charge me. By the time I got up there, 50% of my units have already been lost due to his fireballs, but I still managed to beat this player.

The more onagers they have, the lesser money they had in spending on other units.

Another effective method is to use your archers and their fire arrows to shoot at the ongers, it will set it on fire and disable its usage.


Fighting against phalanx

In my view, Phalanx is one of the most powerful feature/unit in the game, don’t be fooled by the lower number in their attack and defence which shows while you studying the units, its long range could stop its oppositions getting in range to contact, not to mention against horses no matter what quality, it is extremely effective. Horses falls to phalanx’s feet is expected, but they can even hold their ground to the Urban Cohort face to face.
They can even take a lot of arrows in their faces, so shooting at them from the front, or, even sometimes in the back takes ages to really damage them. Their weakness it’s of course the sides and the behind from melee or the good old charge from the horses.

Cheesy phalanx box

The phalanx box is an also another common formation for phalanx lovers. Basically, they will create a formation as follow

Ppppppppppppppppp
Ppp {space} pppp
Ppp {space} pppp
Ppp {space} pppp
Ppppppppppppppppp

With that, they would place whatever required protecting in the middle of this box, such as archers and ongers for example.

Some might think it’s a nightmare, but its actually really easy to break this box. I usually would surround this box, and using my archers or missile units to shoot at the backs of these units, until they are weaken, then, attack with whatever method you have in mind.

Added: You can charge the phalanx's sides with your horses, usually this will bring a rout impact to them, since they are only about average in their morale. However, when you are fighting a phalanx box, you are usually only left with a very small gap, so I usually would not charge my horses into the box until it breaks.

To charge into a very small gap in a better formation, the quick way to do it is drag the formation into a long and thin shape for each of your units (you are do it for more than one unit at one time by selecting all of them) then group them by pressing G, and press shift-8 (I think), this will make them line up into a very thin line.

However, using cavs charging at a box its very risky unless you know its a now or never type of situation.

There are also talk about how a horse unit can "jump the line", meaning that (I think) a few of your horses could get behind the phalanx formation, but since most of them will die or stopped at the front of it, from my experiments, I would not employ it. [end]

Another version of the box I have saw once was that they made a phalanx box as the one above, but this one, it has no space in the middle at all, just a solid box of spikes sticking out in all of the four directions. But its can be broken with the same sort of method.

Phalanx vs. horses

It can be a hard game if all you have left are your horses and the oppositions are left with a large number of phalanxes. Under a reasonable condition, such as that you are not overly out numbered, you can defeat them.

They can only target one of your unit at a time, most of all, you have speed, you can surround them in all directions and flank the target’s back and the sides. Of course this would be that you are better to target one unit at a time with enough number of units to post as a target and the flanker.

I have two replays that show how I was able to defeat 3 players, 1(me) vs. 3 (them) with the condition that they almost had two full armies worth of spearman and horseman, against me who was having an army with 95% horses. The other one was saved just today. I was lucky enough to defeat almost two full armies (some random online players who was my team mate at the time managed to get beaten and lose all of his units at the start of the game), two players with also full armies with plenty of phalanx spearman as well.

If anyone would like to see them, please message me, however I am going to Hong Kong tomorrow, so I will not be able to do that for you guys for three weeks.

But of course I have got beaten many times in this sort of condition also.

Elephants

Against horses, elephants are very effective, they could make the horses run away even the horses are much larger in number.

Whenever you see these elephant units, call up your archers and shoot fire arrows at them, even though they provide fear to their opponents, but they can get scared easily as well. So try to make them go amok and keep the horses away form them .

Sometimes some players think they are very clever by combining their horses and elephants together and charge at you. This is a situational thing, but if you could shoot fire arrows at the elephants enough to make it go amok, it actually because a disadvantage for the horses that was accompany them.

Grouping up

I thought it’s a great advantage to have your units grouped up in a certain formation and moving around the field in the desire shape.

But when it comes to a mobile units/group, very oftern I find that after your command, some of the units would go to a completely irrelevant location, which on the battlefield is highly, umm… not good. The full detail I would not explain here, but when you are commanding a selected units without grouping, this problem does not exists, so I would advice people not to group up their units, since its easy enough without it anyhow.

Don’t talk/respond to the immature players

Some players would mouth you down, taunt you and very oftern they world ask you to play in a certain way, such as, “com chage me yo9 chicken, n00b!”

You could leave the game, or kick them out, but of course you want to pay respect to the game for your sportsmanship, so you continue to play, which is understandable.

I used to be immature back to them! But from my experience, its totally waste of time, as they usually would develop the “conversation” and spoil the game. I see this aspect of the game also a test of discipline, it is especially important on the battlefield!