Casse campaign report (long)

[athanaric]

So another chariot story. So I'm rolling through puke gr... I mean Averni (heh) like a hot knife through butter, with 3 separate stacks taking cities at once. At any rate, my swordsmen stack, together with my faction leader, attacks one of his cities. I get inside and kick his butt all the way back to his little city square area. He has almost nothing left by this point - literally a unit of naked gallic swordsmen (forget their actual name, but you know what I'm talking about). .

Some points:

1 - I don't know if you prefer to play in a more historically accurate or in a fun fashion, but making stacks of only one type of unit (plus FMs) isn't really accurate. Especially if it's swordsmen (quality longswords were - and still are - expensive). IMO you should have mixed stacks based on an infantry line made up of spearmen (preferrably Gaelaiche if you fight in Gaul - they are the most reliable regular spearmen for Celtic factions, and retrainable in all of Gaul). Shortswordsmen are also pretty historically accurate core units, but weaker than spearmen. Also, at least one unit of Teceitos and either slingers or archers each. Belgae units are also useful, as you've already discovered.

2 - Cavalry is only useful against Gaisatoi when on an open battlefield. Even my customized, toned down version of them (I reduced their HP to one, like for every other infantry unit) can take care of most melee units. Moreso if they are "unroutable" due to standing on the town square. I'm afraid you have to use missiles, and swords after that (axes are less efficient in this case because there is, obviously, no armour to crack).

3 - When assaulting an Eleutheroi Belgian (or British?) town, I once killed an entire unit of chariots with one unit of Milnaht - without losing one man. This might help to reinforce my point that chariots are useless in static melee - and unfortunately, the engine bugs city fights in such a way that charges count as melee (due to being executed as such).

[Nightmare]

I don't know if you prefer to play in a more historically accurate or in a fun fashion, but making stacks of only one type of unit (plus FMs) isn't really accurate.

Thanks for the tip, it is much appreciated. But in fact I don't like to play in a historically accurate fashion; otherwise the game might as well just be a video where I don't even participate, and where it just shows me what happened. I already know what happened - Rome eventually won and killed everyone and everything else.

I like to change history. I like to be better, in generalship, in strategy, etc. than whoever or whatever it was that came before me. And I play to win, meaning use whatever units, tactics, and strategies are available to get me the victory. Which is leading me to something that seems somewhat disturbing. It seems all I need to win the game easily and cost-effectively is stacks of slingers :-( which I'm starting to build and just utterly dominate with. But I guess that's another thread for another day.

EDIT: Re-reading that, it came off sounding... not like I wanted it to sound. I respect the way you play. It sounds fun. Perhaps I'll give it a try sometime.

In truth, I've actually played this particular campaign a good bit as you described, not because I wanted to or intended to, but simply because I couldn't build much else except low tier units. The enemy would send swordsmen stacks at me, I'd throw skirmishers and spears back at him out of necessity. Most recently I've been able to build swordsmen stacks of decent quality, but again that's a recent development.