Sassanids (BI faction)

[Revenant69]

Just started playing as the Sassanids (BI v1.6 Hard / Hard) cuz I love playing factions with nice cavalry

My strategy was to do a two pronged assault.
1. Collect all armies from Artaxia, Phraaspa, Artaxarta (you should get almost a full stack) under the command of Melchior, the Eran Spahbod - Commander-in-chief of all Sassanid armies, and take Kotais. You'll have to spend a few years there teaching the Armenians about Zoroastra and pacifying the populace. You can then use this army, if your northern mountainous border is secure that is, to march across the mountains to Sinope and Caesarea.

2. Collect all armies from Ctesiphon, Hatra and in between them and quickly occupy the bridge between Hatra and Antioch. Let the Romans waste their forces in bridge attacks. After you have smashed their stacks in bridge battles you can move your army up to take Antioch. You can then use this army, retrained in Antioch, to take Tarsus and to march south into Judea and Aegyptus.

Sassanids have one enemy - the Eastern Roman Empire, so make sure to stay nice with the ERE enemies. The enemy of your enemy is your friend.
Another great thing about Sassanids is that you can use their generals as a solo rebel mop up army. In this way you can train a few generals pretty quick to silver and gold chevrons.

You can use Ctesiphon and Antioch as your army training centers. Note that one of your family members has two nice ancillaries (Decorated Hero and a Mercenary Captain) that help train troops faster and cheaper. For instance, Clibinarii Immortals usually take 4 turns to train. However, you can train them in 3 turns, just see the picture below:



Just transfer these ancillaries to a governor in your troop building city to make training units cheaper and faster. Indeed, 4 turns - 30% = 2.8 turns and I guess the game rounds it up to 3 turns. Although still kinda strange that 30% reduction in troop price actually reduces the training time too. I wonder if there is a way to actually attain a 50% reduction in price (and so in time as well) to train units. This would mean the Sughdians, Clibinarii, War Elephants and Cataphracts would take 1 turn to train. That would just be EVVVVIL =)
Hmm, will have to look at all ancillaries in RTW:BI v1.6. Anyone got a link to the list of all different ancillaries and their effects?

Will write more of my thoughts at a later point, once I advance through the campaign. Cheers.

[Revenant69]

First things first. It seems that I was wrong about the fact that Sassanids start the game with a family member who has a Decorated hero and a Mercenary Captain ancillaries - it's just that I got them realy quick in my campaign.

Secondly, I dug through the ancillary file last night and managed to find some interesting stuff and do some tests as well. What are my results? Well, a picture is worth a thousand words...



So, it is possible to halve the training time of elite units (and Sassanids have lots of units which take more than one turn to train). In fact, the ONLY possible (for Sassanids) combination of ancillaries necessary to get the desired effect is the following:
Decorated Hero - 20% reduction;
Drillmaster - 10% reduction;
Master Smith - 10% reduction;
Mercenary Captain - 10% reduction.

A question rises. How would one go about "breeding" these ancillaries? To this end, I compiled a little chart of triggers and condition necessary to get the ancillaries.


And now some information from my personal observations.
1. To get a Decorated Hero ancillary just send a lone general unit on some rebel/brigand hunt and make sure that this unit takes enough casualties to be awarded the 20% chance to get a Decorated Hero.
2. Drillmaster is tougher to get as the chances are lower. Just put a general with Command of 4 higher as a governor of a city, any city for that matter, and train infantry units. I got my Drillmaster when I put Melchior, the starting general, to subdue the residents of Ancyra and he was training peasant garrison. So training cheap peasants will suffice, they are infantry after all.
3. To get the Master Smith, your city has to have an Armourer building and have a governor. Then, at the end of each turn, you get a 2% chance to recruit this ancillary. May take a while...
4. Mercenary Captain is one of the easiest one to get, just recruit some mercenaries once in a while and you'll get him.

Once you have all four above mentioned ancillaries, transfer them to the governor of your troop production city and be ready to start the Sassanian Blitzkrieg!!!
Beware, however, the upkeep cost of a unit is not reduced !!!

[Severous]

@Revenant69
Excellent posts. Learnt something there. Thank you.

I will look out for that training effect on recruitment.

[Revenant69]

@Revenant69
Excellent posts. Learnt something there. Thank you.

I will look out for that training effect on recruitment.

Thanks Severous, I tried my best, although, as it turnes out, the information in my previous post is not entirely accurate. I took the information for the table with ancillaries from an old Excel file. As I later found out, this file was for RTW 1.2 or 1.3. To correct this mistake, I actually looked through the export_descr_ancillaries.txt file in BI/Data folder and RTW/Data folder and incorporated the changes.

The full and final description can be found here: Military discounts Ancillaries

Hope you find it even more useful.

[Severous]

This information is not restricted to this faction. It deserves a place in the research part of this forum.

See if you can find a suitable thread here..or get a new thread going:
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/forumdisplay.php?f=88

[Revenant69]

This information is not restricted to this faction. It deserves a place in the research part of this forum.

See if you can find a suitable thread here..or get a new thread going:
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/forumdisplay.php?f=88

You're right Severous, I'll request to open an appropriate thread in Ludus Magna.
Cheers.

[Flavius Merobaudes]

If you do that, it would be good to include other ancillaries' adding boni such as the army movement bonus (drillmaster +25%, geographer +15%, quartermaster +15%/ 55% total) or those adding command stars (quite a lot).

Imagine the impact of the movement bonus for factions like the Sassanids that can rely on all-cavalry armies.

When playing as the WRE, I accumulated some command ancillaries and shared them around between my new generals, so they all had the nightfighter trait which helped me a lot against hordes.

Good work until now but it's not complete yet.