Flaming Pigs, Wardogs and Gladiators

[The_678]

I have to say I have found pigs to be very useful against elephants. Anytime I attack an elephant country (carthage, selucid etc.) I bring along 2 pigs. If there's no elephants, it's no big deal and they are fun, but if there are elephants they are awesome. Those invincible elephants are toast instead of killing your whole army. Great unit when needed.

I had a really fun custom battle last night. I was Carthage and had 1 unit of Armoured elephants against 1 unit of pigs. I charged and they instantly routed, I chose to continue battle. The next second/moment after I clicked continue battle my elephants ran amok, so I killed them. After that the pig trainers stopped routed and came to atttack the carcasses of my elephants then just stood there looking at the carcasses. It was funny and weird. I had to exit battle manually though.

Also I don't know where else to say this but I don't think they should tone down archers. They are a little too good, sure, but if they were nerfed what would happen to Parthia, or Scythia or Armenia? If archers were nerfed those factions would suck ass and nobody would want to use them. Honestly I NEVER used archers in MTW cuz they were too weak and now I try to always have a couple archers in my army. I'm glad they are as powerful as they are.

[m4rt14n]

leave the archers be on HA's heavy nations, nerve the rest. Simple. Effective. Elegant.

[Husar]

I agree with 678. I didn´t think archers were worth any money in MTW and I don´t use them that often in RTW, if they would be worse, I would never use them and the factions like Parthia would be completely useless with their horse archers. Personally I don´t have any big problems with archers, heavily armored armies can survive their fire long enough and other armies have to engage them with cav, I often use my generals to chase them so they can relatively easy gain experience.

[Red Harvest]

Also I don't know where else to say this but I don't think they should tone down archers. They are a little too good, sure, but if they were nerfed what would happen to Parthia, or Scythia or Armenia? If archers were nerfed those factions would suck ass and nobody would want to use them. Honestly I NEVER used archers in MTW cuz they were too weak and now I try to always have a couple archers in my army. I'm glad they are as powerful as they are.

Not wanting to derail the thread, but I do want to comment on the Parthia/Scythia part. Scythians and Parthians are from different times and don't need to be nerfed as much as the Roman archers and Egyptians, etc. The problem with Scythia is that they can't produce many units because they have no real economy. That seems a bit odd to me because the barbarians should probably have hoards of men available for base level units relatively cheaply. So I think they should have more ability to build forces (from economic means) but weaker archer units overall. I didn't have much trouble taking out large Roman stacks with my Scythian horse archers.

The Parthians are really modeled on a later version of the types of archers the Romans faced I think, not Punic War era. The Punic War era Parthians should be more like the Persian archers that Alexander faced (since their recent ancestors served in Darius' armies.) Archery was not all that effective against Alexander's armies... I could see Parthian archers having weaker stats in the current campaign and higher (closer to what we presently see of the vanilla Parthian units) around the time of the Marian reforms. This gets back to the idea of breaking the era's up a bit and offering different starting points for campaigns. According to "Fighting Techniques of the Ancient World," Parthian composite bows were improved over the Scythian types by addition of stiff straight strips of bone to the tips called "ear laths." These are later era weapons of the first century BC. I've not seen anything to give an idea when improvements came.