Advancing Tactics

[Slon]

I am playing as the Seleucid empire and am expanding rapidly. Soon, all of the south-eastern provinces will be mine and I will have to expand towards the former carthaginian and numidian provinces (now controlled by Scipii) and towards trace/brutti/greece. What kind of tactics/tips do people here use when expanding rapidly? Do you use multiple armies filled with cheaper units in order to ensure that they will be retrainable in newly conquered provinces without having to retreat back into your territory to retrain? Do you just have 2-3 super armies expanding towards each end of the map? Do you create 4-5 units of militia hoplites + 8 units of peasants as garrisons for each city? I'm trying to avoid spreading too thin, ending up with multiple cities beseiged and running out of funds like I did last time. Also, I'm experimenting with the idea of just sending a general with 19 units of scythed chariots. Will this be effective against the romans/tracians/macedonians? If it is, then it will be extremely simple to retrain as these units only need a blacksmith. Has anyone experimented with anything like this?

[Jonny Dangerously]

Hi Slon,

You’ve posed a lot of questions but I’ll try and respond to each issue in turn.

General tactics/tips for rapid expansion.

Just like in life, break the task down into manageable chunks. Don’t just drift, randomly across the map, seeing what happens, think Blitzkrieg. Look at the map, see where the choke points are, decide on exactly how much territory you can take and hold in one decisive push, work out how many troops are needed for the job, build them (plus 50% for safety) and execute. Consolidate your position, and then repeat. In short, define your goal, achieve it, secure it and repeat.

Multiple armies:
Depends on what you’re going to face…. I know that’s a cop out but it really does. Your line of advance has to have enough armies to take the ground, and block any counter attacking armies coming the other way e.g. if I were sweeping East from Carthage into Egyptian territory I would use 2 or 3 stand-alone armies, spread evenly, with maybe a mixed group at the rear to provide reinforcements or garrisons (not to fight). This issue is so circumstance specific that you’ll have to figure this out from trial and error.

Army Composition
You are completely correct, you need to manage your army according to your likely ability to retrain it on the march. For example, I wouldn’t take Spartan Hoplites on a long campaign far from home because retraining them would be difficult or impossible. However, don’t take this too far. You want to fight/garrison with units good enough to fight, so drop the peasants. I don’t care what anyone says, if you’re paying army wages you might as well have units that can fight, especially when counter attack is likely. Don’t even think about taking peasants to war unless you are desperate and need some cannon-fodder. When considering which units to take (i.e which will be easily re-trainable), consider the tech level of the enemy, the period, the faction type and use spies to suss out the situation.

Also, avoid armies of one unit type. They are inefficient and lack flexibility. Check out some guides, but generally, you want a mix of line infantry, cav, artillery etc. For example, you are going to have a hard time defending your city walls with just chariots etc. You want a well balanced army.

Garrisons
I’m sure everyone has a different preference but….. depending on the size of the likely counter attack, the following is fairly reliable: a couple of onagers, 4-6 hoplites or the like, a couple of cavalry units and 2-4 archers or slingers. More or less depending on what they are likely to face. If your besieged, sally every turn, don’t do anything silly, just shoot the enemy over the walls with the onagers, put your slingers on the walls and carefully use your cav to lure the enemy towards the walls. If you do this right after a couple of crafty turns the enemy army will be down 75% and quit.

Last but not least, as you advance rapidly you can make your life easier:
Slaughter everyone as you go and take the cash to fuel your advance! (Get it? Better an empty house than a bad tenant!), destroy their cultural artefacts and replace with your own, retrain your troops and repair damaged facilities, move your army out and onwards and garrison the town/city with troops from your reserve unit(s). REMEMBER to retrain rather than merge damaged units. You want your army to become veteran fighters and this comes from experience. (another reason to avoid peasants, because even veteran peasants are appalling) Use them, repair them and advance. By the time the advance is over you’ll have a five star general and bullet hard soldiers.

Most importantly, divide your advance into discrete, achievable chunks, smash through, consolidate, and repeat. I’ll meet you in Rome for a goblet of wine and some war stories.

[Slon]

That sounds very interesting. For garrisons, I use the peasant units because by the time the city becomes huge, I usually can barely prevent it from rebelling by having 20 units of peasants, which is the same as 30 units of militia hoplites (number-wise). Yes, there are levy pikemen, which cost 150, I guess I might get them now that you mention this. Also, I find that keeping large garrisons's is kind of a waste. If an enemy assaults the settlement, 3-5 units of levy pikement will easily hold him off in the small city passages as they cannot be flanked. If the enemy just waits for me to surrender, I use a different strategy. Instead of filling each city with a meager garrison, I create one fairly large (although not first-rate) army between 3-5 cities. If a settlement gets beseiged, the large army can simply travel to the site and attack the beseiging army.

For my attacking armies (the biggest ones), I use 2 units of armoured elephants, 4 units of silver shield pikemen, 2 units of silver shield legionaries (to hold flanks/absorb arrows), 2 units of companion cavalry, 1 unit of caraphracts, 3 units of onagers, 3 units of scythed chariots (to panic the enemy a little bit before they hit my phalanxes, now if only they didn't run amok into my silver pikemen's flanks...) and 3 units of archers. I usually use my faction heir/leader to lead this army. I'm not afraid of being unable to retrain because I am currently moving into parthian/armenian/pontic territory and their cities are pretty advanced by now. When I start to attack the barbarians/greeks/romans, I'll just leave the armies behind to serve as guarding armies, just in case the enenmy breaks through my defenses. My problem now is that my family members are too few and too horrible at management. I had a 72-year-old guy who had "Stunningly Incompetend" and "Despises Farming" as his traits. Still, when I moved him out, the city actually got worse public order-wise.

Also, what do you mean by merge armies? I've never seen this option. Oh, and I tried the "attack, use up ammo, retreat, repeat" strategy. For some reason, when I tell my units to withdraw, some of them are missing when I look at my army in the strategic map. Why does this happen?

[Jonny Dangerously]

Hi Slon,

Sounds like you have figured nearly all the important stuff for yourself! You are totally right re pikemen, garrisons and using a roaming army. The reason I usually do it differently is that I always try and guarantee that production in all of my cities is never interrupted by being besieged. Also, every city rebels periodically, you can delay it, but not prevent it. I like to have a garrison that’s just big enough to instantly besiege the town/city, and start doing damage every turn. (using the onagers to put holes in the wall, burn down critical structures and shower the occupying troops with flaming ammo). Maybe I’m over cautious…..maybe I’m not.

A quick note on garrison size and squalor: squalor increases exponentially as a function of garrison size, so there is a catch 22 between public order and the increase of squalor. That’s why when you get a squalor problem somewhere increasing the garrison rapidly makes less and less of a difference to public order. There are loads of post about this….

I like your army composition. I did exactly the same when I played Seleucid….silver shield pikemen “corked off” at each end by legionaires to defend the flanks. The only thing I did differently was I gave up using chariots once I got the elephants because they freaked out so many times I didn’t trust them. Instead I used one unit of the biggest elephants I had, and 1 or 2 units of cataphracts on each wing. I used slightly more pikemen and I did away with archers all together….as you may have guessed, I am fanatical about developing highly experienced batteries of onagers as the main artillery line. Sounds like your going to have fun in barbarian territory, I love leading a sophisticated well trained army against fanatical, but largely clueless barbarians. It kind of makes all that building, development and training worthwhile.

As for your useless governors: Even a total sh*t head of a governor can help public order if he has high influence. His other traits may make income reduce when he’s governing! I have read that governors pick up some bad (or good) management traits related to their activities as governor. Eg if they under tax they get associated bad traits. Generally speaking, I like my governors to have seen some serious battle action first because they tend to get improved influence, great retinue and better traits. Also, always manually set taxes every round so you never under/over tax AND squeeze every last penny out of your empire.

When I say “merge” I mean that if you have two depleted units you can drag the guys from one into the other unit to make one bigger unit. Unless you are desperate NEVER do this. Always retrain them because you keep the unit experience bonus when they retrain, so instead of one merged veteran unit, you get two re-trained veteran units.


"attack, use up ammo, retreat, repeat"
Correction, “attack, use up ammo, pull back to the edge of the map, let the battle time-out, repeat”. If you withdraw or quit the battle you get screwed because you bottled it from the battle. If you let it time-out you don’t seem to get the same penalty. Also, take care to watch out for generals when you use this strategy because they will frequently clock up “Draw” s and “Defeat”s which can reduce their star rating. I regularly remove my general from the battle group if possible to avoid this.

[Slon]

I know what you mean about the chariots. They're good at scaring troops, but are VERY unstable. I once had 2 scythed chariots run amok even though the enemy hasn't even ever been near my army. So, basically, I ended up with 2 routed scythed chariots before any close-combat action occurred while they were "Impetuous" and "Fresh". Perhaps I should just bring along 2-3 extra onagers or maybe 2 onagers and another unit of pikemen. Also, I can't wait until I get to fight the barbarian light/heavy infantry. They won't stand a chance against Cataphracts and Companion Cavalry (I probably won't risk losing a single elephant since I won't be able to retrain).

Also, is there a cheat to make the game never end? I don't think I'll be able to win in the alotted number of turns.

[Jonny Dangerously]

I know what you mean. I have also had them rout instantly when I sent them forward "to smash the enemy lines" or whatever it says in the manual. Unless your general is really brilliant they just wet themselves and crash back through friendly lines. Still, in the early game, when you don't have much by ways of specialised units they can be pretty handy at a pinch.

Fighting barbarians rocks Slon. Watch out though, some axemen have brilliant anti-armour stats and I have occassionaly sent my cavalry in just a little bit too early and got a nasty surprise......but you will still crush them like the filthy scum that they are.

As for the cheat....the game gives you the option to end or continue....I think you'll get at least 40-50 years. I was cracking the faction file last night but I didn't see anything like that. Maybe search the forums and you can let me know what you find.