Best way to capture kings?

[drone]

Just guessing, but I imagine you want to surround the bodyguard unit with low attack/high defense units, and somehow get the unit to rout. In my experience, the most successful scenario is to lure the King onto a bridge and cap both ends with spears/pikes.

The easiest way might be to isolate the King on the campaign map and capture him when he can't flee to another province.

[Beirut]

Just guessing, but I imagine you want to surround the bodyguard unit with low attack/high defense units, and somehow get the unit to rout. In my experience, the most successful scenario is to lure the King onto a bridge and cap both ends with spears/pikes.

The easiest way might be to isolate the King on the campaign map and capture him when he can't flee to another province.

Low attack, high defence unit. Interesting, Never thought of that angle.

Usually it's whatever cavalry I have and billmen. But billmen are a high attack against cavalry. Hmmmm....


Thanks. You too, Bunnyman.

[drone]

It's just a guess, since I don't really know how the capture mechanism works. It may be moot, the game might just randomly choose killed or captured regardless of the kill chance percentage. You have to get the unit routed though, which is difficult to do for a bodyguard unit.

I put a placeholder in the wiki regarding killing v. capturing when I wrote up the melee combat page, if anyone has info on this I could clean it up some.

[Martok]

Just about any time I've captured a faction leader, I've had to force his BG unit to route first. If he simply stands and fights without running, he'll usually be killed instead of captured.

Certainly the most foolproof way to capture a king, however, is (as the others have already pointed out) to leave him no province to which he can escape to. Even if a faction leader makes it off the battlefield without being caught, he'll still end up in your clutches if he has no place to go.

[caravel]

Just about any time I've captured a faction leader, I've had to force his BG unit to route first. If he simply stands and fights without running, he'll usually be killed instead of captured.

Certainly the most foolproof way to capture a king, however, is (as the others have already pointed out) to leave him no province to which he can escape to. Even if a faction leader makes it off the battlefield without being caught, he'll still end up in your clutches if he has no place to go.

+1

The problem with the high defence/low attack unit approach is that the faction leader's/general's unit will always be "winning easily" against them. So his morale is unlikely to break and he will most likely go down fighting. I find that the best way to capture a general/faction leader is to rout his other elite units around him first, and then take on his unit. If this doesn't rout him, then his morale is probably too high to rout anyway and he will probably fight to the death. In general terms if you've wiped out his army and the rest of his unit, then you'll probably end up killing him before you capture him.

[Roark]

Just surround him with spears. He'll usually start running eventually, and as long as he's got rank upon rank of spears around him, he'll eventually get captured.

If he's massively high valour, though, quite often it's just plain impossible. In this case, just javelin him to death.

[Ignoramus]

A 100% chance of capturing a king is in the Late Era with England. You can grab your army from Mercia and Wessex and invade Denmark. The Danish King always retreats, and so falls into your hands. Because the Danes hold Estonia, you still get around 10,000 florins.