What is your Army mostly made of?

[Eternal Champion]

I try to go square (4-4-4-4) or nearly square as much as possible. This gives enough flexibility for attack or defense. Lately I've cut down on the spears and added additional swords or cav unless the enemy is cav heavy. I always bring a couple of spears to stop/pin cav charges as nothing does it better. But more often then not, I'm patching together full stacks with the best combo of "full units" I can to continue or counter attack. Much like Patron I've run the gamut of fav combos and think experience and current game/faction conditions keeps the ultimate combo as an elusive goal.

[Talain]

That is the best way to tackle muslims in my opinion, however i would suggest that having missle superiority is important aswell. If a 1/3 of your units are longbows they will waste the muslim cav archers.

Longbows run out of arrows by the end of the first wave, and the stinking Egyptians or Turks always have a second and usually a third wave. I'd rather have arbalesters who will last the duration.

Nice informative post Talain-- good tactics .

and Welcome to the forums!

Thanks!

[Kommodus]

With most Catholic factions, I like to have lots of polearms and arbalesters in my army, with some cavalry (heavy, medium, and/or light) in support. The arbalesters provide superior ranged fire, and the polearms provide a balanced, capable infantry force that has no serious weaknesses.

The Turkish have my favorite army, and a good Turkish army includes a balance of JHI and hybrid infantry units, as well as a fair number of Turkomen Horse and a few heavy cavalry units for mobility.

The only factions I would go sword-heavy with are the Almohads and the Byzantines (although Byz armies should replace BI with VG wherever possible). BI and AUM need a lot of support from other units to truly be successful.

[antisocialmunky]

Longbows run out of arrows by the end of the first wave, and the stinking Egyptians or Turks always have a second and usually a third wave. I'd rather have arbalesters who will last the duration.
Thanks!

LOL, arbs vs camels and desert rats. That's the worst waste of AP arrows ever. In the desert, the only archers you need are regular archers and L-Bows. Anything else will roast.

If you ever have problems with arrows and reinforcements. Just make 16 unit stacks of nothing but archers. In the battle, you can just rotate spent archers out of the line as the enemy routs and sends in another wave.

[TwinMfg]

As a Catholic faction, I used to use about spears, archers, inf, and cav, all fairly balanced. Recently, however, I've reduced my spears to ~ 2 units, ~ 2 archers (unless defending), ~8 inf, and ~ 4 cav. I usually keep all my inf on hold formation until they're engaged, and then go Engage at Will. They can take a cav charge like that long enough for me to flank if I can't get one of my spears to intercept first.

[Talain]

LOL, arbs vs camels and desert rats. That's the worst waste of AP arrows ever. In the desert, the only archers you need are regular archers and L-Bows. Anything else will roast.

If you ever have problems with arrows and reinforcements. Just make 16 unit stacks of nothing but archers. In the battle, you can just rotate spent archers out of the line as the enemy routs and sends in another wave.

I don't usually have enough archers to spare for that, and anyway I've noticed that as long as they just stand still the Arbalesters will last an entire engagement without being exhausted.

[EatYerGreens]

@antisocialmunky & Talain

Any truth to my suspicion that arb/pav ammo only lasts longer because they have a slower rate of fire?

We've probably all seen the documentaries where they demonstrate how the LBman can get off about three or four shots in the time it takes the bolt-firer to hand-crank the device to be ready for his second shot?

I can see plusses on both sides here. The arbs provide a sustained missile-fire morale hit on one unit after another but maybe kill fewer men per unit, so your meleé units have to work a bit harder and you don't have to worry about the logistics of rotating units if it's uninterrupted holding of ground which you're trying to achieve. I have no qualms with rotating units around and the upside is that I may get more than one missile unit boosting their valour level in one battle. Given time, valoured archer units are good enough to join in the task of frightening the peasant-end of the enemy reinforcement queue off the field, at the end. Handy when my swords and spears are totally clapped out.

They can also march fast enough to be used as Cavalry lures, to draw their fresh horses towards my knackered ones, so mine don't have to run too far, yet my archers can still run to safety behind a spear line in time. I suspect that I wouldn't be able to be so reckless with arbs but I need to build up more experience with them. I kept abandoning campaigns (boredom, file corruption, HDD failures) before getting far into the High period.

[Patron]

Pavvies Are Useless!!!

Charrrge!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Patron]

"Longbows run out of arrows by the end of the first wave"

That's the point, isn't it?

[BAD]

"Longbows run out of arrows by the end of the first wave"

That's the point, isn't it?

Exactly. So you can rotate out your used Longbowmen or new guys as they are retreating and bringing on their re-inforcements. I just experienced this exact thing last night. It's my Norwegian (XL Mod) Conquest Campaign, Hard.

The Egyptians own over half the map. And the Spanish just re-emerged in Northern Africa. I had mobilized a previous army to storm all the desert regions from Morrocco all the way Tripoli and Syria/Mesopatamia. It consisted of a stack of Vikings, a stack of Highland Clansmen, a stack of Welsh Longbow's and a stack of Jinette's/Mounted Seargants. With some Heavy artillery for Siege's and a Bada$$ General and some extra RK's to restock him.

So I advance up to the Spanish with my frontline of Highland Clansmen and Vikings, closely behind are my 4 units of Longbows, General and 2 units of Mounted Sergeants on the flanks. I massacre the first wave due to the massive and constant morale hit of casualties from archers and being underfire, oh and of course the slaughter by the crazy guys. As they are retreating off the field I rotate out my used Longbow's and less than half strength Infantry. Repeat for 3 waves and what was a complete massacre of the Spanish. Because of that I now have 7 Units of Valour 2 Longbowmen and I just got to the Eggie's.

[Talain]

"Longbows run out of arrows by the end of the first wave"

That's the point, isn't it?

I'm more interested in the morale hit from missiles than the damage, usually. I'm also generally opposed to rotating troops because if I have anything but a single unit type in my reserves I can't pick which one to reinforce with, which is spectacularly annoying.

Also, I absolutely hate Ghulam Bodyguards and Kataphractoi. They never break, so I end up always having to kill them one by one. And since archers do jack to them, I like having Arbalesters, who can whittle them down and get that lucky general-shot. The only thing better for tagging their general is a retardly high valor catapult and how often do you get catapult teams to high valor?

[Talain]

words

Heh, this would be a wonderful strategy except I've never had an entire stack (jesus that's a lot) of Welsh longbows to spare, or a stack of Highlanders for that matter! By the time I've settled my backfield well enough to have a couple provinces capable of producing Feudal Sergeants, some jerk has declared war on me/presented an unbelievable opportunity for me to backstab them, and war is on! From then until I've got about half the map I'll never be allowed peace again, because AI factions hate not stabbing you in the back. Highland Clansmen have a bit to high of a mortality rate for me to ever have 12 regiments, and Longbows are needed on every front.

And considering that even when I'm pumping troops out of every province I control my enemies invariably outnumber me on every front, I don't usually have the luxury of setting aside three provinces for 12 years to make a super stack.

Always too much going on.

[Ulair]

Here's a Viking campaign answer: archers and Viking landsmenn. Maybe a raider cav for mopping up routers, but that's optional. Whatever's coming, shoot it up then chew it apart. Never seems to fail.

Is it just me or are the Viking units pretty darn invincible? Churning out landsmenn and even huscarles is really easy and they just chew through pretty much everything. Landsmenn will even take down horsemen without taking many casualties.

[EatYerGreens]

I'm more interested in the morale hit from missiles than the damage, usually. I'm also generally opposed to rotating troops because if I have anything but a single unit type in my reserves I can't pick which one to reinforce with, which is spectacularly annoying.

Sounds like you've given us yet another excuse to plug the VI upgrade.
The pre-battle screen allows you to set the exact sequence in which you want your reinforcements to come onto the field.

This is very handy when you want catapults for the follow-up siege assault but you don't want them involved in the battle (vulnerable to cav, static placement when you want mobility, frequently rendered useless by defenders hugging the map edge, out of range etc), so you stick them on the back end of the reinforcements queue and ensure they never appear.

If I open up with 2 HAs, giving harrassment on both enemy flanks, my reinforcement sequence will be something like

HA, HA, Archer, Archer
Sword, Spear, Archer Archer,
Sword, Spear, Skirmisher, Archer,
HA, HA, Archer, Archer,
(repeats the pattern)
Cav, Cav, Cav, Cav
Junk, Junk, Cat, Cat

The sequence basically attempts to anticipate the order in which missile units will run out of ammo as well as the rate of meleé unit casualties. For instance, there's no point bringing the third pair of HAs on until the second lot have had time to do their bit and withdraw. I'll need foot replacements in the meantime. The Cav replacements are way down the queue as I won't want them until the closing stages anyway. (These are Light/Med Cav, not knights, as I have Byz in mind at the moment).

In Shogun, there was a way to 'sequence' the reinforcements to some extent, by assembling the reinforcement stack, adding one unit at a time and in the reverse order of how you wanted them to appear. Top left in the info window enters the field first, bottom right last.

MTW defeats this somewhat by constantly reshuffling the sequence during assembly so that similar unit types are next to one another in the info window. Pre-VI, I still tried to use the Shogun trick but can't remember if it ever worked as I intended due to having similar troop insufficiency problems as you describe.