Apart from all fine art of generalship, I always have the most exciting battles when I keep things as simple as possible for the AI.

For that I have to be the attacker. I cannot recall an AI attack that had caused much more than a little trouble - may be when I am extremly outnumbered, but that's rare too. The AI is coded to simple flanking manouvers without beeing coded to simple rules of flanking - like engaging the main line first.

So, when I am attacking I arrange my troops in a conservative formation with the missle units and light support troops in the front, right outside range. Alexander, Hannibal and Caesar were first class generals; but such men do not pop up more than once a century. The majority of my generals fight strictly after the manual. It might happen that now the AI is running left and right like a beheaded chicken, that is when my line is not exactly parallel to his. So I wait until he has finished.

Now I move my light troops in range, but keep the main line where it is to leave ample room for a skirmish battle. I also send the cavalry a little foreward, because often enough the only way to get a real cavalry battle from the AI is to encounter all those Kamikaze-riders, that try to chase my archers right into my phalanx, before that. If everything is going as it should, the AI now will send his missle troops foreward to encounter mine. I make them the target what should lead to a real skirmish battle with light troops chaseing each other between the lines. That ends when one side or both have spent their ammo. Sometimes a unit or two of either side will route (BTW, casulties caused by missle fire are most of the times 'healed' after battle).

Now I can go on to phase three: the advance of the main line. I try to advance parallel to his line and engage the enemy troops frontal on the whole length of the line. I only try flanking manouvers by breaking his units on that flank. The only exception is cavalry that returns from chaseing away enemy cavalry and can enter the battle from that direction.



The reason for doing all this is that I think the battle map is simply much to large (or the units way to small), I would say about 10 times to large. If I would make up 'historical battles' out of my campaign battles I would just display the zone were the forces engage adding some 1,000 metres left or right. But the in-game maps, scaled by the size of forces, represent about 30x30 km or even 50x50 km.