largest battle you've fought

[Lycan]

I just completed my first VI campaign as the vikings. Skål! When I took out every faction except the Irish, thier island was untouched and they had 12 almost full stacks sitting about on the little island. not much threat seeing as i had all of england and more but i wanted to make things a bit.. interesting. so i disabled auto save, gave the irish a few more turns to build up, and made two stacks of mostly elite vikings with all my faction hiers in the stacks and shipped them off to ireland to do some bloody work. When they landed every last son of ireland was moved into the province and next turn they hit me. I had a small hill to defend and two waves of men. They irish had about 11 waves and a surprising amount of cav. Damn but that was some battle, they hit me and retreated over and over again. battle must have taken far over an hour. the field was thick with dead irish. they never brought thier very last wave in which was good cus my last thin line that kept the field was exhausted and weak. I never seen any battle close to it. Huzzah! Anyone had something like this?

[bamff]

Hi Lycan

I have had a couple of similar ones, with different results.

In VI, my small Saxon force got completely overwhelmed by the Irish hordes - just ran out of energy basically...all of my huscarles got made into Irish pincushions (seemed no end of Irishmen wanting to hurl pointy things at my guys). Wound up being a bit "Little Big Horn" - they just kept closing in all around us and massacred the entire force.

In another campaign, as Sicily (in Late), I had just under 2000 troops in a province that was attacked by some 9000 Danes. My guys held the high ground doggedly, with every arbalest/crossbowman/archer loosing every arrow in their quivers before being rotated out. We won the day, and the Danes came back the next year with a new force around 7000.....and we did it all over again. These two battles took literally forever to get through.

I set my defensive position very close to the edge of the map from which my reinforcements arrived (and far from the AI's reinforcement point), and high on a hill. so the AI troops had to march a long way to the fight and then go uphill, all of which helped. I also had a couple of troops of Turcopoles harrying their reinforcements as they appeared - towrads the end, some broke and fled before even reaching my main force.

[Martok]

A couple years ago, I was playing a campaign as the Egyptians (MTW/VI, Early, Normal, Domination mode). I was by far the most powerful faction: In addition to owning the "Southeast Triangle" (the lands anchored by Constantinople, Georgia, and Egypt), I also occupied North Africa, the Iberian peninsula, Sicily, Naples, the better part of central Europe, and the eastern steppes. Imams were everywhere spreading the teachings of Mohammed, and most people under my rule worshiped Allah with a fervor that was unmatched. By the year 1230, I was well on my way to winning the game.

Now don't ask me how I managed it, but I actually forgot the Mongols were coming. As a result, I had stationed only a modest garrison in Khazar--maybe 500 troops at most. (I should probably also mention at this point that I hadn't saved the game in almost 20 years.)

Let me tell you, it quite a rude shock to suddenly see the message about the Mongols appearing. (My then-roommates were more than a little amused to hear me utter a string of expletives that normally would've never left my mouth--and probably would've made a sailor blush too! ) So the GH had arrived, and immediately ran over my garrison in Khazar with little trouble. I vowed revenge, however.

It was then that I first utilized a tactic I'd read about previously, but had yet to try myself: "spamming" Jihads. All across the Caliphate, Imams called for the heathens to be driven out of Khazar....and my people answered. I trained no less than 10 Jihad markers (maybe even more, but 10 for sure), most of them in my hinterlands of the Triangle. Zeal was high in most of my provinces, so I had little trouble picking up more men as the Jihad armies passed through my territory.

When all was said and done, an Egyptian army of some 35,000 troops marched into Khazar to reclaim what they held was theirs. Facing them was a Mongol army of smaller size, though it was still formiddable (around 18-19,000 I think). After a bloody battle that literally lasted all day--I started fighting around 10 a.m., and didn't stop til around 8:00 that night (with maybe a total of 1 hour's worth of mealtime and bathroom breaks)--I finally wrested victory from the Khan, forcing his men to flee.

I should note that I've had very few battles that approached anywhere near the scale of that one, however--I could probably count on one hand the ones that have. (Not coincidentally, those others usually involved the GH as well. ) Most of my larger engagements are relatively modest in comparison, with maybe a total of 10,000 troops in both armies combined.

I should also note that I no longer spam Jihads. After doing it 5-6 times, I realized it was simply too cheesy and too much of an exploit.

[Ironside]

Depends on how you define large. Most men on both sides, over 100.000 (and about 99% of them was mine ), most men in a battle fought fairly and manually, about 5000 vs 9000 and largest the auto-calc battle was about 25.000 vs 20.000 (mongol horde, I usually auto-calc those due to the very long time those battles would take).

[caravel]

For me it's probably the usual Turks vs the Mongols in Georgia and Armenia when they first appear. Some of those battles have lasted, on average, for about 1 1/2 hours with reinforcements continuously being moved in on both sides.

[macsen rufus]

The largest battle I've fought (IIRC...) has been in PMTW, where my 3000 Englishmen (in Prussia, I think) were attacked by 27,000 Russians. However troop quality was heavily in my favour, and I whupped their skinny little peasant behinds with my first 16 units, and most of them ran screaming.

I've had a few 15k vs 15k size of battle, but they just take too long, wave after wave of reinforcements.

In one particularly silly battle, it ended with that little message in the corner of the screen saying "Reinforcements: You have 145 units waiting to enter the battle". Overkill, I thought, in hindsight