Chariots.... any good?

[The_Emperor]

Do not use them against:

Archers, as they simply don't have enough firepower to win (12 bows vs 40). If you want to take down archers always concentrate all your fire on them and charge them whenever possible.

That is not true. You can use them against archers and win.

I once did this as the Britons and practically wiped out a chosen archer warband in a missile duel. The key is to place them in loose formation and then to use the Cantabrian Circle... As a moving target they will be much more difficult to hit and you'll find that your light chariots are excellent marksmen (admittedly mine were at V2, but then those chosen archers are armoured).

Against unarmoured vanilla archers you'll rout them off the field in no time with the minimal loss of probably one chariot.

[Epistolary Richard]

That is not true. You can use them against archers and win.

I once did this as the Britons and practically wiped out a chosen archer warband in a missile duel. The key is to place them in loose formation and then to use the Cantabrian Circle... As a moving target they will be much more difficult to hit and you'll find that your light chariots are excellent marksmen (admittedly mine were at V2, but then those chosen archers are armoured).

Against unarmoured vanilla archers you'll rout them off the field in no time with the minimal loss of probably one chariot.

I've never tried this (somewhat ironic being a Cantabrian myself), but I will.

If light chariots can beat archers it makes them even more powerful. I think the only thing able to stop them is the computer slowdown as it tries to render the 10,000 arrows stuck in the ground!

[Kraxis]

Why not try and run down the archers with the chariots? I mean in confined siatuation where there aren't melee troops around.
The chariots fire on the move anyway, and any archer that is knocked to the ground or killed won't fire back (at least for a while).

[Epistolary Richard]

That can work, just remember to take Skirmish off!

From my own experience, the AI doesn't take many archers and tends to sit them in between its front line and its cavalry reserve so there's no great opportunity to charge them.

I would imagine a fresh tight formation archer unit would still be capable of destroying or crippling a light chariot unit in combat if you just left it there (see other posts concerning uber-combat archers around..., if anyone wants to test this one I'd be interested in the results) but against a loose, shaken formation it'd be an entirely different story. So it's just the usual thing of fighting on your terms rather than theirs.

[Fridge]

I found the scythed chariots useful for the Seleucids for a little while - blacksmiths are available much earlier than the buildings you need for your half-decent units, and the chariots dont use many men, so there isn't a huge hit on population.

When I had them, I used them either as shock troops - get in and target any missile or cavalry troops long before the rest of my army arrived, so that, hopefully, they're still fleeing/routing when the big boys turn up. That way, if (when!) they run amok, they're a long way from your army and continue to keep the enemy occupied while you march up. If they do run, they're fast enough to flee the battlefield and survive to be retrained another day.

The other use was to just get an army of, say, 6-10 chariot units and occassionally an inexperienced general, and just send them off on the map in advance of the main army. Any one they ran into, just send them in! They delay the opponent, can completely rout any weaker units, and will usually do a few hundred casualties to a large army, before running away to fight another day. It makes a perfect army to clear peasants away as well!

Once you get decent elephants, cataphracts and the rest, don't look at them again, but early on, they're the best the Seleucids have. Check out the 'guides' section for more details on the different factions' chariots - there are more details in the Seleucid and Brit guides.

[Watchman]

With the Seleucs I've found them quite useful for rebel clean-up work, not in the least because they're very effective for their measly 18-man head count and being outnumered gives general stars better. Those stacks of 3-4 Cilician Pirates plus maybe a Rebel General that regularly pop up in southern Asia Minor ? Two scythes, two militia cavalry (more for pursuit) and any two-bit general takes care of them just fine, often with zero casualties.

The Eastern Infantry stacks you get in northern Mesopotamia every now and then kill a few chariots before routing, but aside for their fairly hefty initial training price the things are dirt cheap (upkeep 110 ? Sign me up) and easily retrained.

Given that the drivers wear cataphract-grade armor (18; this appears to be the one ranged attacks "roll" against) and are thus almost armor-proof the things could also be good against those Parthian horse-archer stacks. Dunno, haven't yet tried it out in practice.

[Somebody Else]

Interesting idea a friend of mine proposed for using chariots - that is, those that are capable of the cantabrian circle manouevre. If they remain on this, and get engaged - they should keep moving through rather than being bogged down. I suppose the same would work with cataphract archers...