Charge through = better melees?

[Agent Smith]

I'm not sure if others have tried this, but it is a technique I remember from RTW.

I noticed, especially in city streets, that in melees very few units in the front actually engage while the others wait. If there are multiple units, the ones in the back rarely do anything. However, I tried a charge through after the melee was engaged and it seemed to work pretty well.

Basically, after the initial charge and when a melee is in full swing, select all of the combat units that are attacking and double click on a spot behind the enemy. The huge mass of troops will actually push through, attacking every now and then when they make contact, and it gets quite a nice push back effect.

Once there is a sufficient mixing in the middle, potentially with some soldeirs that have made it through to the other side, double click the enemy unit again. At this point, you will have a ton of troops within the enemy formation and get a good mixed melee from front to back that includes multiple units.

Has anyone else tried this tactic before with any great success?

[FactionHeir]

Yup, doing it all the time. Quite useful actually although you will lose quite a few units trying to push through and your units have slightly lower morale while doing so.
AI does it mainly with cavalry.

[phunkbot]

yeah i do that myself a lot as well, especially in city combat

[HoreTore]

Did it minutes ago, and lost a full unit of Granadine Jinetes because of it... Against a unit of town milita....

Actually, it wasn't to get the effect you described, it was so I could charge them from the back to make them rout. The method I usually use in sieges, is to select each unit individually, and attack individually. When you attack with several units selected, they seem to operate in a group of some sort, but you attack with each one, they tend to push more, and get more people in the fight instead of having 3 men in, and the rest of the unit standing about to take the place of the fallen.

[FactionHeir]

The pushing through really is only most effective in a siege environment, not so much in open field battles, and usually only for infantry.
If you want to use cav to push through, be prepared to lose almost the entire unit unless its very heavy cavalry. Cav is best pulled out and moved around the back in the field. In siege, you could push them through relatively easily though

[Doug-Thompson]

This tactic needs a unit with a good defense value — survivability, in other words — to work, preferably armor so the defense is all-round. Protection doesn't have to be extremely high. It's relative. It has to be high relative to the enemy unit's attack.

I prefer to drown the other guys with missiles, which is pretty much my standard answer to anything.

[Whacker]

I prefer to drown the other guys with missiles, which is pretty much my standard answer to anything.

Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Personally, I've been fiddling with the game in the form of my own homegrown mod. Not a whole lot changed, but some changes here and there. A few of the things that I've really done that make the game more enjoyable for me and more of an honest challenge are that I 1. increased the accuracy of missile/siege units all around, 2. increased the range of all missile/siege units to some degree, 3. drastically increased the speed of all projectiles, 4. gave all siege engine units 6 engines, and 5. increased ammo all around for everyone. Man did that make a difference. When I encounter a heavy ranged stack, it forces me big time to rush to engage them, because I tend to play with melee infantry as my primary base. It's also forced me to vary my stack composition and strength. Never was a missile unit man, and when I did use them in RTW my favorite unit by far was the cataphract archers. The changes I made above have really made archers finally enjoyable now for me, my complaints about unit cohesion nonwithstanding.

Sieges? Wow. I fiddled with descr_walls and increased the activation distance for all towers to 1000, so basically every tower in a city/castle fires now. Sieges are BLOODY hard, literally, and that's the way I think it should be. It forces me to take the right equipment for the job, and I am guaranteed some decent amount of casualties no matter what if I'm forced to assault to take the city. No more capturing a huge castle with a full stack garrison with only a handful of DFKs. The two things I'm still missing are 1. capturable towers (gawd do I miss this one) and 2. non-interlocking castle rings. The second bit makes flanking attacks esp. easy now. The AI still struggles with sieges, and quite often gets the tar torn out of it, but it can still make do.

[Omisan]

It's sometimes the only way to get more troops involved in a melee, but you get lots of casualties since the moving soldiers ignore the attackers and get slaughtered until they are given an attack order or stopped.

[sapi]

@the op - I agree; it's a good idea.

Made the mistake of doing it then focusing on something else for a few minutes a few days back, though, and checked back to find that a full generals bodyguard had somehow been decimated by a half strength unit of mailed knights

@HoreTore - I find that a pattern of "G, right click, R, G" works around the grouping problems

[Kryptonitus]

Yep. I do it every siege.