Armoured Sergeants and England

[Ahab]

Hi iam wondering if the the armoured sergents like in the tutorial are avaliable in the campaign when playing England or do you have to make do with spear militant, levy spearmen
hope some 1 knows what iam on about.

[katank]

They are not. You'll have to make do with merc spearmen and crusader seargents (when you crusade).

[nokem]

They are not. You'll have to make do with merc spearmen and crusader seargents (when you crusade).

Lusted's Lands to Conquer mod adds the units from the tutorial (among other stuff)... if you can find it. It seems to have dropped off the In Development forum.

[Shahed]

How come Armored Sargents are not included for England ?

[Comrade Alexeo]

Balance...

[nameless]

Billmen are suppose to be England's armored Sergants. Though at the moment their poor against cavalry without the fixes so hopefully the 2nd patch will correct them since the blog stated something about that.

[katank]

Install zxiang's 2h fix or do it yourself. With a set of nonbugged animations, billmen can chew up cavalry pretty well. DEKs and Heavy Billmen are esp. powerful.

Besides, merc spearmen are equivalent and are quite plentiful throughout Europe. Crusader sarges can be hired by any crusading general for dirt cheap. Your longbows can also deploy stakes to turn charging cav into shish kebabs.

[FrauGloer]

As others have said, Armoured Sergeants were left out of the English campaign for balancing reasons, it is however theoretically possible to get them via bribing. Shame that bribing is way too expensive.

If you want to be able to recruit Armoured Sergeants as England, you'll have to unpack the packs files (for instructions go over to the modding forum). Look for the "export_descr_buildings" file and add England to the recruitment line for Armoured Sergeants, like this:

recruit_pool "Armored Sergeants" 1 0.5 4 0 requires factions { england, france, hre, milan, venice, papal_states, sicily, Normans, }

Don't forget to do this for all levels of the "barracks" tree.

Voilà, Armoured Sergeants for England!

Besides, merc spearmen are equivalent and are quite plentiful throughout Europe. Crusader sarges can be hired by any crusading general for dirt cheap. Your longbows can also deploy stakes to turn charging cav into shish kebabs.

I have to disagree with this. Merc/crusader spearmen may be as strong offensive-wise as armoured sergeants, but their armour cannot be upgraded, they are more expensive in upkeep, and in the case of crusader mercs, they cannot be retrained. IMHO, it's always better to not use mercenaries as the army's backbone, as their slightly higher attack damage compared to regular troops does not make up for their increased upkeep cost and their rather high purchase price.

[Foz]

I agree that Billmen are intended to be England's Armoured Sergeants... too bad they got the bug.

As for what to do (outside of hacking them into the game if you have to have them, which was just explained), my best bet has been to rush up to armoured swordsman production in both starting castles. Initial offensives can be conducted well enough with spears, but usually once you've grabbed up the various rebel settlements, you'll want heavy troops for assaulting your neighboring factions, especially where sieging castles is concerned. To get the barracks required for those heavy troops, you need to upgrade the castles first. This is best done by emphasizing growth.

As for how to emphasize growth, I've found the following useful:

- Build farming upgrades. Castles are easy to keep happy since you can't up the tax rate at all, so the squalor this causes later on is nothing to worry about. Each upgrade causes 0.5% growth.

- Build a port/granary. I don't know the specifics of how or why this works, but trade generates population. The least I've seen in Nottingham or Caen when I had a port/granary was 0.5% bonus to population, and it is sometimes more than that, though there doesn't appear to be a direct correlation between trade income and population growth. Anyone have a better idea what determines how much growth you get from trade?

- Build the Church line. Building churches can (maybe always does?) give your governor chivalry, which directly causes a 0.5% growth bonus per point of it.

Since they all cause the same 0.5% increase, it's not obvoius how to prioritize. Typically I build whichever will finish in the least number of turns, and break ties by favoring the best economic option. It still takes a while to get to swords in Caen due to its much lower starting population, but if your plan goes rebels, scotland, france as it feels like it naturally should... then Caen should be online with swordsmen and Dismounted Knights before you have need of them. In my experience there's even time after you finish all those growth upgrades to upgrade archers and artillery equipment a bit before Caen finally gets to the right population to upgrade...

[Shahed]

Love the search function.

Well IMO currently BM (Billmen) are not England's AS (Armored Sergents), since AS can stand cavalry charges (using PureFixer 1.13), while BM cannot.

So it seems that unless you mod AS into England, your best (vaguely) anti-cavalry infantry is Levy Spearmen (LS).

LS cannot stand a cavalry charge (PureFixer 1.13) as well, but they can ?

Sort of.

They take very heavy losses if charged, however they survive intial impact whereas BMs do not survive intial impact. They are annihilated to the last man within 10 seconds of impact, maybe less depending on upgrades and xp level of both parties.

LS can also rout on impact but I've seen this more rarely in campaign.

[TevashSzat]

IMHO, the only real counter to cav is to charge with your own cav into theirs seeing as how pwerful cav charges are

[HoreTore]

No real need for heavy spears as the english...

Put down some stakes, and the enemy cav are no longer a problem. They probably wont charge through(at least not with a lot), but they will screw around, giving you the option to charge them.

[Whacker]

This thread brought up a really good point and idea. I've been somewhat yearning for the old MTW lineup which allowed for a lot of commonality between the various factions of the same cultural type. It'd be pretty cool to try and duplicate that... be a lot of work though. Might try to do that after 1.2 is officially out as a personal mod.