Re: How to defend with arbaless part 2 - Hill defence
2. Defending Hills
2.1 Why hills are your friend
Defending hills with arbalests is your dream battle. It doesn’t get much easier than this. Providing you have 6 or more units of arbalests and at least 5 infantry to string together a screen then you can win against most enemies. If you have the full half hex hill defence with durable screening troops and enough arbalests to reinforce with, then you will win against anything (even 8000+ golden horde nightmares on expert game setting).
Part 1 of this guide discussed the basic concepts and arbalest, the composition of your army, and the battle phases. This part will show the ideal formations to use, and some fine detail about managing them in the battle.
In summary; there are only 4 key rules to stick to, and the rest you can learn as you go:
1. Build a half hex screen protecting 2 groups of ranked arbalests on a hill at the map edge
2. Do not move off the hill
3. Manage your arbalests in 2 groups, left and right, to easily control massed fire mid battle
4. Do not move off the hill….. no really …..I mean it
Hills add hugely to your defensive strength, here’s how:
1. Arbalests shoot in a low flat trajectory. It’s very hard to get concentrated arbalest fire on one target on a flat battlefield, as the rear ranked units cannot see a clear line of fire to the target. Hills allow the rear units to shoot over the heads of the front units, allowing massed fire.
2. Hills also allow the screening units to be formed up in front of the arbalests, so the enemy has no easy path to melee your fragile missile units
3. Hills add range and accuracy to your arbalests firing downhill, and decrease the range and accuracy of the enemy missiles firing uphill. You’ve already got a localised firepower advantage, no matter what missiles they bring to the battle. The altitude advantage just makes any missile duel totally one sided.
4. They have to walk up the hill and get tired to melee your screen.
5. Your troops get a morale bonus sitting on the hill
6. If they do charge your screen, they won’t get up to full speed up the hill (depending on the steepness), so won’t get their full charge bonus (on very steep hills they won’t get any bonus).
7. Once any melee stats, your screening troops get a bonus fro attacking from up hill
8. In the unlikely event you do need to charge your screen at them, your troops will find it easy to push the enemy downhill, thus gaining the “pushback bonus”, and enjoying their full charge bonus for more than one combat round.
The map edge is also very important. A mediocre hill against a map edge is better than a steep round hill in the middle of the map. When you set up, the red “formation circle” within which you are allowed to place troops will probably only give you access to one map edge. Pick the best hill you can find, even if its just a slight rise. You’ll need to avoid setting up in a forest, but nearby forests are not the end of the world. They will block your field of fire, but the enemy still has to exit the forest to get to your screen. The forest will slow their advance, break up their formation, and they will probably route their cavalry around it not through it, so you get to shoot up their army in sections, rather than having the whole thing line up and charge you all at once.
2.2 The basic half hex hill defence formation
I’m going to assume that your army is a fairly generic catholic army made up of:
8 Arbalests
6 Halberdiers
1 medium cavalry (e.g. obsolete Feudal knights, Mounted sergeants, Polish retainers, valoured up Jinnettes)
1 High period Royal knights – the general
For the battle itself I normally position the camera over the hilltop, at the rear of my formation, looking at the enemy line of approach, pointed downhill so I can see most of my screening line and the front rank or arbalests. This way I can supervise most of the melee and all of the firing without having to move the camera.
Setting up the units:
1. Arbalests.
Set these up first, as they will define your formation, and show you the area that your screening troops need to cover. The unit guide by Frogbeastegg has an excellent picture shoeing how to arrange 2 ranks of crossbow style troops on a hill. Basically if you move the camera to a position in front of your formation, and you can see the feet of the rear rank over the heads of the front rank, then they have a clear field of fire. If not, then space the ranks out a bit more until it works.
Set the units like this:
• Each arbalest unit will be arranged as a 30 man wide, 2 rank deep formation, facing the enemy line of approach.
• Close formation. Loose foramtion does give better sighting through the unit for rear rank troops, but the formation as a whole ends up getting H-U-G-E, and its impossible to screen it all effectively. You also loose the concentration of fire.
• Hold formation (+2 defence if they get into a melee, -2 attack – but who cares, the screening troops will clear any penetration of your formation, the arbalests need to keep shooting)
• Hold position. This is very important. If the unit is not set to hold position, then it will move to orient itself for the best filed of fire for the target it has at that moment. This can mean you loose a lot of firing time as the arbalests are moving instead of shooting, and your beautiful clean firing formation gets all out of shape, with arbalest lines crossing each other and sticking out in front of the screening line. You end up with high friendly fire casualties, and arbalests getting killed in melee – not good.
• Fire at will. This way if you fail to notice an idle unit in the middle of the chaos of battle, it will pick a likely target and shoot it. As arbalests take so long to exhaust their ammunition, its better to have the firing constantly at something random, instead of idle waiting for you to manually give them the optimum target. You will of course be managing them to shoot at the right target most of the time. It also meant that the arbalests will engage the lead enemy units as they some into range; this is your cue to pay attention and start choosing targets.
• Grouped into 2 groups of 4 units each. There will be a left flank group and a right flank group. When you direct their fire mid battle you will be selecting an entire group and massing its firepower onto one unlucky target. All this take 2 mouse clicks. Take care to check which group (left or right) in the unit display at the bottom of the battle screen corresponds to which group on the ground. It’s easy to get crossed over in the set up, and you don’t want to be ordering your left group of arbalests to fire at targets on the right flank and vice versa. Once you’ve finished the full set up just select one group before the start of the battle, and notice which actual units have their standard flags wiggling up and down. This is the group you have selected, so now you know which group is on which side of your formation.
2. The Screening troops
The screening troops are not really there to inflict massive melee casualties. They’re there to buy time for the arbalests to fire as many volleys as possible into the enemy. They do this in 2 ways:
1. Offering no easy path to attack the arbalests. This way the enemy mill around in the killing zone trying to feint and lure to disrupt your formation. You of course ignore this and reward their cunning tactic by shooting them up as fast as you can. This is why I prefer Halberdiers as screening troops. They have no real weakness against any particular troop type. Spears as screen tend to invite a charge by swordsmen. Swordsmen as troops tend to invite cavalry charges. Halberdiers can deal with both, so the AI often delays attacking the screening line for quite a while.
2. Actually being slow to die in a melee. In pure melee terms your screen is outnumbered. It’s better to take 5 minutes to chop through 1 unit of attacking enemy with very low casualties, than rip through them in 1 minute with higher casualties. You’re not going to get any flanking opportunities anyway, and once you have killed the first enemy unit, the next one behind it can engage your screen. Better to jam up the battlefield in front of your screen with a very slow melee, and shoot up the enemy units as they queue up waiting to join the fight.
Never leave a gap in the screening line, even if you have to stretch the troop formations very thin.
Never create a gap unless you are sure you can defeat the local enemy and reform before any other enemy arrive.
Spear based troops:
• Set these to be a formation 30 men wide, 3 ranks deep with a short 4th rank to provide replacements into the 3rd rank. This way to get the full spear formation bonus, but stretch the width of the covered area to 30 men, instead of the 25 you normally get with the classic 25 x 4 rank spear unit formation.
• Close formation, Hold formation (to preserve the formation bonus, and get +2def , -2 attack) and hold position to keep the screen in place. Remember: killing slow and dying slow is better than killing fast and dying fast. This may mean that you get a small melee breaking out one end of the spear formation while the rest of the troops watch. That fine. It’s a small melee, so there is slow dying and slow killing happening. Let it happen. Even if it’s a fight you expect to loose eventually (e.g. Chivalric Men at Arms vs. your Chivalric sergeants), let it happen, and try to drag out the fight as long as possible. Don’t throw extra screening troops at the mêlée unless your spears area about break. If they’re just loosing – fine, leave them to it and carry on shooting. If they’re wavering, then help them out, but this will make holes in your screening line, so managing the battle gets a lot harder, as the enemy will try to rush to holes.
Swords and militia:
• These are not ideal, but if you have to do it, set them up in a 2 rank x 30 man close formation, hold position and hold formation. Put then at the front of the formation on the steepest slope in your half-hex. The idea is to invite a cavalry charge, but force it to charge up the steepest hill, along the centreline of your formation, so suffering concentrated fire of 8 head on arbalest units. As long as you catch the cavalry early (as soon as they form up at the front of the enemy army), them chances are the first few cavalry units won’t even hit your screen.
• There are some occasions (fighting an evenly matched enemy unit, with no other enemy units near the line) that you will want to put your swords onto engage at will, to allow them to fully engage and disperse an enemy unit. You don’t want to let them chase the enemy routers down the hill, and you want to get them formed up again to close the gap in your screening line as soon as possible. This is the weakest part of your line, so inviting further enemy pressure at this point is not ideal.
Pole-arms
Billmen and Swiss halberds are not ideal (although +2v billmen from Mercia with a master spearman and armourer bonuses are quite nice :-). Treat them like militia who do well against cavalry.
Halberdiers are my bulk screening troop of choice.
• They are reasonably priced, reasonably easy to produce, available to many factions and very very slow to die.
• Their morale is not great, so I build churches and monasteries in halberd producing provinces before armourers.
• Non armour piercing enemy foot troops can’t really hurt them, and they will chop them up eventually.
• Enemy knights can hurt them a little, but with the hillside advantage, the halberds +3 attack and +1 def vs. cavalry and the armour piercing bonus the halberds will dispatch knight faster than their bases stats would suggest.
• They’re also arrow proof due to the high armour.
• Their biggest weaknesses are enemy arbalests (which you target with massed fire as a matter of priority while they are at the front of the enemy army – once they get overtaken they can’t see very well to shoot), and enemy pole arms – which are generally slow moving, so take an age to crawl up your hill, so you can shoot them up a lot before they arrive
• Set up your halberdiers in 2 x 30 troop lines.
• If you need to stretch the formation to screen all of the hex then do it. A rank of 40 backed by a replacement rank of 20 is acceptable. There is little need for a dense formation to resist a cavalry charge as the hill and the massed fire will have taken the fire our of anything that does arrive at the screening line on horseback. It’s worth noting that a unit of 60 halberdiers can be stretched to cover a 40 man wide space much more effectively than a 100 man unit of Chivalric sergeants.
• Close formation, hold position, hold formation. You might take them off hold formation in similar circumstances to those for swordsmen, but I rarely do it. Better to drag out the local melee, and rout the rest of the enemy army with massed fire.
Chivalric foot knights
You only get 40 men to a unit, but they are like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre version of Halberds. They are just as durable, but kill very fast too, and have sky high morale. If your general was a Chivalric Knight, and you dismount that unit then the effect is even more hyperactively homicidal.
• I’m quite happy to have a 30 man wide formation with a 10 man replacement rank. Note that this provides the same coverage as a 100 man Chivalric sergeant unit.
• If the enemy thinks the line looks thin and weak at this point they are in for a rude shock.
• They re good for screening the corners of the hex. Line them up so they overlap the flank of the other corner unit. That way the other, lower morale unit, gets its flank covered (so gets morale bonus), and the high morale foot night doesn’t need the bonus anyway.
3. The cavalry
This includes your general if he’s mounted and not part of the screening troops.
The cavalry is only there for luring the enemy onto the correct line of approach, and emergency bracing of a failing screen.
Most of the time you want to keep them well out of the way. They are set in a 4-5 rank deep formation to keep it compact and out of the line of fire of the arbalests, even if they have to fire to the flanks. The cavalry are not deployed in a useful fighting formation; you’re just trying to store them somewhere safe. Knights have a bad habit of getting bored and charging off, so keep them on hold position, hold formation, and be ready to catch them and turn them around if they do charge without orders. They’ll just get in the way of the hail of bolts if they do, and get themselves killed. For very unruly knights try forming them up with their backs to the enemy. They’ll loose their shield bonus against missiles, and get a slight morale penalty, but you’ll have time to turn them around if you do need to attack with them.
2.3 Off Centre attacks
It’s a rare battle when the enemy simply marches up to you in a straight line, dead centre and lets you shoot them. Changes are the AI will fancy trying to flank you, or will start the battle in a distant position off centre to you, or the terrain will offer a less steep approach to your position that is off centre. None of this is a problem if you’re ready for it.
In normal conditions arbalests have an effective field of fire about 45 degrees either side of straight ahead. Beyond that their fire becomes less effective, as the view of the rear rank is closed off by the front rank. Beyond about 75% the front rank are also becoming blocked by the man standing next to them.
If you follow the basic half –hex defence as shown above, then you’ll have a devastating kill zone of 45 degrees either side of dead centre where all 8 arbalest units can be brought to bear, some ability to fire out to 75 degrees either side, and a narrow gap of 15 degrees against the map edge where you really can’t fire at all, and the enemy can safely close to melee your flank screen.
Even if they don’t actively flank you, an initial charge from off-centre can spread as the follow up enemy troops walk around the sides of the initial melee to engage, and they can spread all the way up your flank where you can’t fire.
The solution is shown in the diagram below: at set up, angle both your arbalest groups about 15 degrees towards their respective flanks.
I’ve shown some contours in red here. This particular hill is steep from the front, but less steep if approached from the side along the map edge. This will tend to make the enemy approach you from one flank or the other, so you need to angle the firing zones out towards the flanks. It is very worthhile trying to lure the enemy using a cavalry unit into the centre zone. Even if you succeed they will almost certainly try to manoeuvre towards a flank, but they will have to do that move within firing range, so will be shot up as they march.
This angle formation is a good standard to use, as it can deliver solid firepower in any direction, so the enemy don’t really have any options for surprising you or forcing you to redeploy to a different formation. It allows you to keep to the golden formula: they manoeuvre, you shoot.
If the terrain invites even more obvious flanking, then angle the arbalests further out – up to 30degrees is fine as you will still have a small kill zone for all 8 arbalests covering for the centreline.
Often you will have a battle where one group of arbalests has far more firing opportunities than the other, and runs low on ammunition. The front unit of the frequent firing group will run dry first. Simply run them to the back of the formation, and then withdraw them to allow reinforcements. At the same time run the rear arbalest unit from the other group to take the position of the retreated unit. If you can afford it, stop shooting during this manoeuvre to avoid friendly fire accidents, but if you’re hard pressed then keep shooting, you’ll only loose a few men. This way the lightly pressured flank will loose firepower where it’s not needed, and you can keep maximum fire going into the heavily pressed flank.
Asymmetric formations
On some battle maps it will be very obvious which direction the enemy will want to approach from. Defending a hill that has a ridgeline leading to it will funnel the enemy along the ridgeline, as they try to attack with the minimum altitude disadvantage. Where this direction of approach is not dead centre you will want to skew your formation towards the direction of approach.
Some things to note about this set up:
• The arbalests are pointed in the direction of the enemy threat. Group 2 on the right will fire more often at good targets, so will run out of ammunition first.
• It is worth trying to lure the enemy more to the left using the cavalry. Once the cavalry gallop back behind the screen the enemy will probably march back up to the ridgeline, but under heavy fire
• Most melee is likely to happen on the right, so the general in on the right to offer close morale and physical support to the halberdiers
• Our best halberdiers (most valour) are positioned to receive the brunt of the enemy assault.
• The left flank looks weak. The halberdiers are stretched thin to cover the line, and the group 1 arbalests do not have good firing angles to the left flank. This is mitigated in two ways. 1: it’s a very steep slope for the enemy to attack up. 2: the group 1 arbalests are actually arranged so that the left end of each unit line is much lower down the hill than the right, so if the unit has to fire at a target far to the left then the troops to the right end of the line can see over the heads of the lower troops to the left. It’s nowhere near as effective as firing forwards, but they can thin out an enemy unit flanking to the left. If you do get a lot of pressure on the left there will be room and time to rotate the rear 2 arbalest units in group 1 anti-clockwise to face the threat and fire down the steep slope with a good view.
Next time ... fine tuning the hillside defence, including.....
forests
hillside slope profile
getting stuck in the middle of the map
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, the ones that look like billmen anyway, 2 units of horse archers, 2 units of the Vo-cavalry and 1 unit of armoured spearmen against a pretty superior Hungarian army (tooks some heavy casualties though, as the Huns had some 6 units of Pavise crossbowmen and 1 unit of Mounted crossbowmen, which ultimately forced me to attack them instead).
Originally Posted by Innocentius
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and then let them mop up around the black sea, Balkans, the Adriatic and finally Rome. Although the enemy fled much of the time, and I never stayed to besiege a castle, I had a few "interesting" battles. Seems like the years of the mid 14th century was a BAD time to live in Balkans.
I have to admit I don't think I've ever seen a battle formation like that before, however. Was that simply how the countour of the hill was shaped then?
I can hear the corny theme music in the background.
Iä Cthulhu!
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