How often do you lose battles?

**katank** · 11-23-2006, 18:54

I've lost 1 so far in my VH/VH English campaign (turn 39). I have all of Britain, France, western half of Germany, and most of Northern Italy and have been with constant war with 2-5 factions (5 right now).

I got jumped in Bruge by a Danish force. I only had 3 town militia units there and was surprised to see the amount of elite units by the Danes. Their stack wasn't that big (1/3 size but composed entirely of huscarls (both mounted and dismounted) and feudal knights (again both variants). My town militia got massacred.

Passive AI bug makes many battles with a missile heavy army ridiculously easy. I can routinely lose less than 10% of my force despite being outnumbered 2:1. Flaming catapults are useful for taking out mass formations and impacting their morale. I find the spear militia/armoured seargent hordes fielded by the AI early on quite easy to rout via missiles.

**rios** · 11-25-2006, 20:20

I find m2tw battles much easier than RTW, since units have lower moral and the threshold for routing is higher (less negative). Only played SP of m2tw so far but it felt alot like mtw/vi, overloading enemy flanks produce a significent amount of moral penalty and cavalries are much stronger than in RTW and BI.

The VH AI felt like a MTW AI with some RTW/BI flaws. Siege battles aside (those definitely don't work right but at least they have moral bonus and don't commit suicide), the AI ignores hight advantage and over extend its line just like in RTW, except here cav units are much stronger and larger. 2 HC charged at 1 spear or footknight would rout it almost instantly. Then once a flank or a gap opens senting everything through would rout the entire AI army. In BI (where HC could also do that) the VH AI would attempt to close the gap with infantries, but with the M2TW moral system it doesn't have the time.

If the M2TW AI is on attack and takes initiative I assume it can be troublesome, they put spears on the flank and HA harrassing outsides. However, it attempts to turn if you overload one flank, so charge some infantry in with an angle and overload the forward corner will allow you to sweep around them. Have some depth so your back isn't exposed (some HAs have good melee stats and the AI will charge them in) and you will at most sacrifice couple infantry units, setting them on hold would buy you enough time too.

The melee stats of pav xbows are crazy in this game, and 20 unit limit allows you to have a long enough line and plenty cavs, a pav army would probably give AI a headache too.

**Aracnid** · 11-25-2006, 21:18

Not counting my first campaign (on m/m), test battles, or realy unfair ones (e.g. me attacking a single generals unit trying to defend a city against a full stack) I would say I lose 10% of my battles. However that is realy uneven, I am England and providing equally numbers and odds I probably lose 40-50% of battles against the Mongols and Timurids and 2% against the French and Germans. Providing army make up is similar, heavy inf, archers, heavy cav no horse archers human nearly always wins, despite AI improvments, against eastern armies AI uses its advantages (it can run away from my heavy cav and inf and out shoot my archers (20 units vs. 5) to win a nearly half the time.

**ravinnder** · 11-26-2006, 12:06

I voted 10%.

In my M/VH campaigns I did pretty well, but I've learned that in general the AI is more dangerous in MTW2. However, I can say that the battles I've lost are due in part with the enemy outnumbering my army. Especially if the AI uses a heavy infantry based army without passive bug occurring and cohesively attacks your line.

I haven't been able to reproduce RTW type easy victories on VH except when I use Horse Archers and Heavy Cavalry or extensive use of gunpowder units. However, with gunpowder units, I find beating the AI too easy due to the ease of routing single units and the fact that the AI advances too slowly sometimes.