Hayasdan Questions (and some general ones)

[noosh]

I stopped my Hayasdan temporarily because of dumb ai diplomacy...Pontus and Ptolemei stabbed me in the back while I more or less beat down the biggest cities of SA.

Here is what I did.

While you can, take your whole army and invade the two cities north of you. I dont remember their name, one gives you a port and another is right above ur capital. They both have mines though. As soon as you have those captured, disband all your infantry units except 1. In the two cities that you captured, built the foreign levy baracks and voila, you get Sythian horse Archers. After this the Selucids are relatively easy. Have 6 HA and 2 Princes and wait for an opportunity. If a big SA army comes, just use ur horse archers and speed to wittle them down, then charge wiht ur princes the units because the Ai just spreads them around. Then retreat, then do it all over again. In the meantime save money to build mines. After you have mines in your three cities, and if SA hasnt captured any rebel cities yet, go on the offensive. Invade SA cities that have light garrisons, assault them by using the lone infantry guy and when u capture them, sack and burn down every building. Each time you do it, you get something like 30k. Edessa, Antioch, Selukeia, Arbela and Ekbatran were all sacked by me. This way I had a ton of cash and had 3 armies full of HA. One always stays on defense around my capital. the second army is a conquest army, aiming at geting all the royal Hai lands + edessa because the SA will just keep coming at it and ull be able to kill them with HA. The third army will be the combat army. Everytime you see a stack of SA, because the ai almost never keeps huge stacks in its core lands but always has 4-5 units meeting somewhere attack them one at a time...

It gets a bit tedious though, because in all your battles u have to micromonage your cavarly and once u have like 10-12 units it gets really tedious. For some dumb reason the cavarly ai likes to CHARGE pikemen head on...after the central regions of the SA are devastated and instead of facing Elite Silver Shields or Armored Spearmen you are facing with only hellenic pikemen you can actually either invade Anatolia (assuming you arent backstabbed by Pontus) or take over the now desolate and devastated lands of the SA...

The Sarmations by the way are a bit of a pain in the butt, but if you capture whichever that town is that is beyond the mountains and keep a bunch of armenian medium cavarly to chase his CA then you will be fine...

again, Hayasdan gets pretty tedious because as soon as you break SA then Ptolomei show up with a full stack in ur heartland. And Ptolomei, unlike SA mixes in ranged units which make the tactics that work oh so well against SA backfire...


And if you do it right, you should basically have almost every victory a heroic victory. Soon youll have highly experienced horse archers that really really do alot of damage to armies with no or limited ranged components, as most SA armies tend to be.