sassanids infantery

[Cras]

maybe a stupid question.. but can the Sughidian Warriors zap? (i too have found them useless on the walls)


My Sassanids strategy: I first make 2 all cavalry armies who can preceed my siege army and can kill any ERE army wondering around the territory.

What usually happens is that a city will empty to create an army and the city garrison that will remain is apporimately 1/3 strength. I will attack that 2/3 army with my cavalry army (and decimated it without much losses, max 150). After that I will lay siege to the city with my siege army.
Covering the back of my siege army will be the cavalry armies. Either they will have no other armies near or will not attack me due to the concentrated strength. I will lay siege for quite a while and they will become so weak that even Sughidian Warriors can conquer the walls.

another tip after sacking a city as Sassanids:
Kill their religion and start the sassanids religion and destroy the Roman barracks. They are no use to you anyhow. You will see that if they riot (and they will) they will have NO strong infantery units (since they have no barracks :-) ), this way your Sughidian Warriors will also be some use to you in the field after they riot. They can only make peasants, archers and cavalry, and all those 3 are like candy to the great Sassanids cavalry. From this point on they will again create an army, leaving a garrison for 1/3 total strength and you can start over again.
And their rioting is an awesome way to make money and after destroying the barrack they are so easy to get back :-) You'll also notice your armies will be extremely experienced after a while, I have several single and double silver experience chevrons cavalry unit(now also with silver armor) in the all cavalry armies. They are now besides very mobile also very strong
With this strategy I have now taken the upperhand in the region and am slowly going from city to city making them mine and finding less and less armies of ERE to oppose me.

[hoof]

I forgot about sapping, because usually sapping costs me more men than I'm willing to lose.

The overall goal as a Sassanid army attacking a city is to get your Clibs/Cataphracts inside the walls. Once in, about the only thing that can stop them is a RTW-style Phalanx, and they don't exist in BI. Sapping works, as do onagers or other artillery. With those, you will be unstoppable.

An alternative I've used in my last Sassanid campaign was to recruit as many merc of the Roman front-line soldiers as I can (I forget their name). These guys are as tough as the best Roman soldiers, and I'll use them for tough sieges. If they start losing the wall-fight, I'll send in my clibs as fire-support, since their armor lets them shrug off most of the fire from the walls (at least the regular stone walls).

If you're interested in what I call an "exploit", you can turn on "fire at will" mode for your siege towers. On large/epic wall sizes, they fire gatling-style ballistae (this is a bug I think), which can clear a section of wall of any defenders in a very short timeframe. Even the arrows shot by regular stone wall siege towers are pretty effective. I don't use this because it's obvious this is a bug because there's no way that a single siege tower would be able to fire 30+ ballistae shots per minute with their tech. If they did, they'd use these in defensive towers (built into the walls), and/or in the field, and nothing else in the game has quite this kind of firepower.

[Garvanko]

I forgot about sapping, because usually sapping costs me more men than I'm willing to lose.

I don't how you're sapping then, as it doesn't cost me anything at all. If anything, using Seige towers and ladders is far, far more dangerous. More spectacular of course, but too much of a risk, imo.

Sapping is safer and more effective.

[Conqueror]

To make sapping effective, you must build lots of sapping points. I'd say about 10 minimum. This way you have better chances to have at least one point in a place where it's out of the range of the wall towers and any archers that might be on the walls. You should also set the infantry unit to a very narrow formation before marching them to the sapping point. If they are in a wide formation they'll be more likely to take fire from towers/archers. You should sap as many sections of the wall as you can (safely). This will force the defenders to divide their units to guard every opening, while you can concentrate your attack on 1-2 holes and overwhelm them.

[Cras]

I have never sapped... but 10 points sounds like a LOT..

one would need 10 units that can sap, and would they all have losses as they dig?

[Garvanko]

10? I only ever build two or three..

[Conqueror]

You only need *one* unit that is capable to sap. It can take care of multiple points, one at a time. And the reason why you want to queue up lots of sapping points is because they are automatically placed on the battle map; you can't choose where to put them. When you build many of them, there's much better chances that at least some of the points will be well-placed.