fighting in walls

[janmichaeldave]

what units do you think ar best at fighting in walls

[Bonny]

Every Heavy Infantry Unit in the game (for Diadochi: Pheresapides, Hypaspistai)

[Avicenna]

Gaesatae!

[Mad Guitar Murphy]

hords of getai drapanei, they are so cheap and still so sweet...

[pezhetairoi]

triarii. murderers with their uber armour.

[Proper Gander]

Gaesatae, no doubt. they rip Triarii to pieces.... once they even tore 3 units of Triarii and a General to pieces...

[Redigo]

Gaesatae, no doubt. they rip Triarii to pieces.... once they even tore 3 units of Triarii and a General to pieces...

Which I don't get. Gaesatae might've been staggeringly good individual warriors, matchless in the open field, but in confined spaces they would've been slaughtered by a disciplined and well-armoured enemy. Hell, packed together on top of a city wall they wouldn't have even had room to swing those massive swords. But I guess there's no way to trigger different combat stats based on factors like enclosure.

BTW, in my first post I'd like to thank the EB team for singlehandedly making me a far less productive member of society.

-red-

[GodEmperorLeto]

Gaesatae, no doubt. they rip Triarii to pieces.... once they even tore 3 units of Triarii and a General to pieces...

Wow. That's strange. I always found Triari in defensive phalanx formation to be the best unit against Gaesatae, hands down. Even defending/assaulting walls, they hold their own against Gaesatae better than anything else.

[Proper Gander]

well, the scenario i mentioned was on the open field, and they mostly flanked. (though the Triarii turned round to face them mostly)

i have yet to encounter somebody who can take down my Gaesatae. of course they've gained a lot of experience by now, heh.

[edyzmedieval]

Hmmm... Depends.

I prefer Kleurochoi Agemata or the Basilikon Agemataalong with Toxotai to make some damage to defend on walls. Powerful phalanxes to keep my beloved metropolis' safe.

[Mujalumbo]

I usually take a page out of Rummy's book, and go with the "army I have, not the army I want."

As the successors, I usually go up the walls with pantodapoi phalangitai or pezhetairoi, as I never have enough elite units in my army. Almost always, I take pretty heavy casualties, but what do you expect? It's war, and you're assaulting defenses designed to keep you out. If the defenders have archers, then I'll spend an extra turn and continue to build more seige engines. And I never bother with rams; I find myself taking an undue amount of casualties for the results they (don't) produce. As the Ptolemaioi, though, I'll try to bring along some Galatian Kleruchoi.

I'm finding besiging a city takes a bit of strategy, too. I have to try and keep another force in the field to keep reinforcements at bay, and procure additional troops because casualties are likely to be heavy. If it's looking like I can keep the reinforcements at bay, then I'll just starve 'em out. (Unless, of course, I absolutely must have that city NOW, i.e. deficit budget, piles of reinforcements on the way, etc.)

[Teleklos Archelaou]

I virtually never go in through the main gate anywhere on wooden walled cities. I'd rather just starve them out with a long siege. It's got to be multiple ones for me, to draw them towards one, then try to burst in elsewhere with another. I can't wait to use those new Agranian Assault Infantry (makedonian and maybe epeirote) to attack walled cities and see how they fare compared to most other units.

[Mujalumbo]

Yeah, I'll just try and starve 'em out. Like I said, unless there's extenuating circumstances, I won't waste valuable soldiers on a costly assault. If I'm losing cash per turn, I'll probably go in and try to take the town by force. What to do AFTER taking a town is another subject entirely. ;)

Wooden walls are pretty easy. I'll build three, maybe four or five rams if the enemy has archers. Then I'll move 'em up and ram the gate, and the section of wall adjacent the game. My tactic is to send a unit or two through the main gate; more often than not, this draws the enemy's forces to the initial breach. Then I'll send my other units through the damaged wall sections; try to go for some kind of flank, y'know? This works well enough for Town or Large Town settlements.

Assaulting barb Minor Cities is an absolute pain. It almost always involves a brutal slugfest near the town square.

[Redigo]

Yeah, the eleutheroi towns with a population of 650 and garrisons of 3500 are a @#%^. Since I consider it inaccurate, I deal with it the same way: when they eventually generate a new unit outside the walls (probably because the stack's full) I just attack that and deal with the reinforcements in the open field.

Worst tactic of all in that situation is to drill the single unit with 2-3 cavalry units right off the bat. If you cause them to rout before the reinforcements enter the battle, you wipe out a few thousand enemies without even seeing them....

-red-

[Proper Gander]

Worst tactic of all in that situation is to drill the single unit with 2-3 cavalry units right off the bat. If you cause them to rout before the reinforcements enter the battle, you wipe out a few thousand enemies without even seeing them....

yes, that's how i wiped out the roman empire.

i wanted it to be an exciting last battle against them.

[Conqueror]

I just had that happen to me. I was playing as Makedonia and I had a full stack lay siege on a rebel city w/ full stack inside it. On the next turn a 1-unit rebel army shows up and attacks my army. The city garrison is brought as reinforcements but "delayed" (actually happens because there's so many troops that the computer decides to make them delayed) so that it's just the 1-unit army vs my 20 units. Needless to say, that 1 unit turns tail pretty soon. I could have finished the battle then but I decided to continue in hopes that the reinforcements would show up before the routing unit goes past the map edge. Well, they didn't. They just all disappeared and I got an empty town handed to me on a silver platter.

It's kind of hard not to exploit this when it's the AI that attacks you with it's single-unit army

[Avicenna]

Wow, that went off topic real fast.

Anyway, how often does the delay thing happen?

[Mujalumbo]

Fairly often, I've found. What, 3 times out of 4, a smaller force will show up in an attempt to relieve the beseiged.

It's only pretty nasty because the reinforcements never do anything but mill around on the battlefield. Usually the relieving force is a unit, a handful of units at the most...

Et voila! Free rebel town.

[Ho|2us]

Can i just say, dont mean to go off topic or anything, but if you dont want 'Reinforcements delayed' go to your 'prefences.txt' file and change 'UNLIMITED_MEN_ON_BATTLEFIELD:FALSE' to 'UNLIMITED_MEN_ON_BATTLEFIELD:TRUE'. And now you can have asmany as you want without any delayed.
Sorry for going off topic ;].

[Teleklos Archelaou]

That works for some people, but sometimes the program will automatically override it and switch it back to False. It did when I was running 1.2 on my computer, but now in 1.5 it lets me keep it on True. Weird.

[nikolai1962]

Assaulting barb Minor Cities is an absolute pain. It almost always involves a brutal slugfest near the town square.

I love those.

[Ludens]

That works for some people, but sometimes the program will automatically override it and switch it back to False. It did when I was running 1.2 on my computer, but now in 1.5 it lets me keep it on True. Weird.

I had the same problem with 1.3, until someone told me that the patch created a second "preferences.txt" in the map "preferences". The "preferences.txt" in the root map apparently doesn't work anymore after 1.3.