Basic Tactics

[dismal]

(Green) Eye of the Storm

Get eight or more hopilie style units form a circle, sit your general and one Crete Archer in the middle. Start Battle, switch the time to max speed and go make a coffee. Come back and count the dead enemies.

More ranks, having a roving reserve (Spartan Hopilites) and other improvements all help.

But the end of the day it is your general who is in the eye of the storm.

Excellent. I use this one all the time. Usually it's with more like 12-13 phalanx units and 4 or 5 archers. Oh, and ideally you want to get on top of one of those nice little round hills.

My basic tactic is never fight fair.

I never attack unless I have overwhelming numbers.

When I'm on offense, I always defend. Move your troops to a good spot, let the enemy attack you. (The only exception to this is attacking wooden walls, which is a slaughter when you bring archers.)

A good phalanx or heavy infantry line (12-13 units), a generous amount of archers (4-5 units) and a few horse on defense on a hill and it doesn't take a tactical genius to win.

[pezhetairoi]

I think bluerepper's experience will only come in custom battles when you didn't set the opponent to attacker and you to defender...

In campaign battles this never happens since the only time you can use this is on defensive, and this is when the enemy armies charge at you. So they won't just sit and wait. I once had 40 Roman units charging me (20 senate, 20 julii) but to their misfortune I was playing Germania, this was my grand army they were fighting, and my grand army had 13 spear warbands and 7 general/barb cav. So. The results speak for themselves--all 40 units massacred (not a single unit made it off the battlefield, believe it or not) and only 50 dead on my side. Whoohoo. It's vaguely therapeutic to see flags turning white en masse.

[Gaius Magnus]

Well I definitely set them to attacker and myself to defender. The AI attacked, but the cav just.... sat there.

They got all nice and set up and ready to sweep me off the battlefield, and then just let their cav go to waste.

Then I was all like

[pezhetairoi]

ah... you have a stupider-than-average AI. And that's saying a lot.

[Gaius Magnus]

Heh, well I wish we could train the AI or something.

It has a hard enough time just holding a phalanx together.

[pezhetairoi]

Yeah. I almost feel guilty beating up the AI like that. But, well, war's war. *shrug*

I've already done everything I can to make the AI more flexible and more of a threat, including that battle formation priority thing and modding starting units for them. But, to no avail. They die all the same. The only unit (and I mean the ONLY) unit that has so far caused my strategy problems are the Egyptian general units, because my standard LL anti-HA manoeuvres don't work on them because the LLs don't dare to get close to the chariots so the chariots can hold off my encirclement technique. Yucks.