Tactics

[bretwalda]

On strategical level:

Know you enemy, know its strenghts, possibilities and numbers. Know more about your enemy than it knows about you maybe more than it knows about itself


On tactical level:

Know yours and your enemy's strenghts and weaknesses and play to your strenghts and to your enemys weakness. If the enemy army is unbalanced then concentrate on the most important units (e.g. they have a Katatank...) OR attack according to your force composition. Yes, sometimes it is a good idea to do a frontal assault. (But sometimes it is time to skirmish...)

Dont forget to use the terrain to your advantage is possible...

[Ludens]

Sun Tzu said that the greatest victories are those achieved without battle. But if you are going to fight a battle, the best way to destroy an enemy is to divide his army into smaller groups and destroy each one individually. This is defeat-in-detail.

In many historical battles, commanders tried to divide the enemy cavalry from the enemy infantry. Since most armies deployed with infantry in the centre and cavalry on the flanks, defeat of one or both of the enemy cavalry wings allowed envelopment of the infantry (as cavalry combat is a fast and furious affair that is over quickly, in contrast with the slow slogging match of the infantry). Off course, it did not always work this way as the victorious cavalry quite often got either caught up in the chase, or went of the plunder the enemy encampment..

However, most medieval armies were too ill-disciplined and unorganized to allow for fancy tactics. In the end, it all came down to whose cavalry prevailed. Provided the enemy infantry had already been thinned by the melee, the footsoldiers would be at the mercy of the heavy cavalry. That is why such importance was placed on knights: good heavy cavalry won the battles for you. However, it was this overreliance on heavy cavalry that almost lost the French the Hundred Years War. They assumed that, because they had more and better knights than the English, the battle would be a walk-over. The English, however, did not cooperate. Instead, they set a trap for the heavy cavalry, using the terrain and their massed archers to immobilize and thin them, and then finishing them off with infantry, including their own knights, who had dismounted.

The game fortunately allows much better control of your troops than Medieval generals had. It is much easier to split an enemy army, especially since the computer is not so good at keeping them together. Both light cavalry and missile weapons can be used to draw off the enemy cavalry flanks. Horse archers are ideal for this: they can stay out of range and still entice the computer into attacking with his heavy cavalry. They are fast enough to stay out of range and, once you lured their strong units far enough, you can either take on their isolated units or envelop their army. In the first case the goal is to lure the enemies powerful cavalry into a position where you outgun them, in the second case it is to make the computer send strong units (knights, mounted sergeants) to deal with a light unit (horse archers) so that your strong units can envelop his army.

So the tactics to remember are:
1) Dividing the enemy army
2) Envelopment of isolated parts

[Del Arroyo]

Well, a lot of people like to be condescending about the tactics used in the Medieval Era, but the simple fact is that they were good enough and for the most part they worked. Also remember that it's pretty easy to feel condescending about real historical tactics when you are playing a GAME which allows you alot of flexibilities in tactics and manuever that would never have been possible in real life.

But, at any rate, a tactic used in many battles in the dark ages was the idea of a shield wall, that the main line of infantry, armed with throwing spears and swords or axes, would form a formidable wall of shields which would be difficult for the enemy to break. Archers, usually deployed out in front or in the first couple of ranks of this formation, would shoot arrows from a distance, and if the enemy shot back, they would pick up those arrows and keep using them, so that an archery duel could last for quite a while.

A good example of this would be the Battle of Hastings. Here we can see that the Shield Wall was effective in holding the Normans back and in stopping their heavy cavalry, but that with time, attrition due to archery, repeated charges, and the elimination of a foolhardy contingent of Saxons who pursued fleeing Norman infantry down the hill, gaps opened up which the Norman cavalry was able exploit.

..

Later on a common tactic was to recruit masses of unreliable peasants as infantry, and rely on a devastating Heavy Cavalry charge to win the battle. The English often relied on a devastating salvo of archery to be the decisive factor in battle.

Anyway, there's alot more to it, but that's a starter.

DA

[Ludens]

Well, a lot of people like to be condescending about the tactics used in the Medieval Era, but the simple fact is that they were good enough and for the most part they worked. Also remember that it's pretty easy to feel condescending about real historical tactics when you are playing a GAME which allows you alot of flexibilities in tactics and manuever that would never have been possible in real life.

I agree: medieval commanders were faced with a lot of limitations, so they couldn't use complex tactics. What I meant to say was that tactics of the Catholic armies were simple compared to those of the Muslims or the Byzantine Empire of the same period, not to the tactics we can pull off behind our computers.

[Patron]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia#Ancient_Russia

It seems Russia has spent most of it's history being civilised by european and middle eastern civilisations, only to be tormented by various steppe hoardes. Obviously due to their superior warfare skills on plains. They must have survived by guarding forested and hilly regions of Russia. Possibly camping there until their plains dominant enemies faced logistical problems and had to go elsewhere to feed their cattle. They would have had superior infantry, so in any area unsuitable for cavalry they would be king. I'm sure they would have also used their own horse archers when trying to drive their enemies from the wide open plains in open battle, which explains the boyars. Possibly with an elite anti-cavalry infantry line for support, which explains the jedi (for the dark ages) russian spearmen.