OTOH, if you’ve already taken the gate from the wall - always the preferred method, if you have the infantry for it - then elephants are terrific for the initial break through the gate. They’r mess up the enemy formations, and if you send infantry in right after them you’ll be able to avoid the bottleneck. Elephants are great street sweepers.
A question here - is there any way to avoid friendly fire deaths? Between my archers and my javelin-throwing infantry, I’ve had battles where I’ve killed more of my own troops than the enemy did. It’s especially annoying with bridge defenses. While putting a couple of archer units on each side of the bridge will decimate the enemy, they’ll also keep on shooting once the melee starts at my end, with disastrious results. I’ve never lost a battle because of friendly fire, but I hate having troops die who don’t have to. I get attached to those little guys.
You can disable the “fire at will” button for missile troops, then they will only fire at units you specifically click on. Friendly fire is an especially big problem for slingers, since they can’t seem to fire arching shots…they will shoot directly through units in front of them. Plus they can’t really fire over city walls.
The biggest trouble with elephants is that after getting many elephants killed I’m always afraid to commit them since they are soooo expensive, unless I’m facing peasants and second line troops. And in that case the elephants are pretty much overkill anyway. I love elephants, and always build them if I can because they are so damn cool, but they just don’t seem cost effective. 1300d for baby elephants, 2300d for war elephants, and 2500d for armored elephants. You could recruit a dozen cheap units for that or 4-5 elites.
How do people use elephants so that they are more effective? Do you always get the expensive missile elephants, or the cheaper melee only elephants?
I do often turn off the “fire at will” button, but I don’t like directing archers at specific units out of the fear that as soon as I stop paying attention they’ll start changing position and exposing themselves. Archer placement is crucial to victory, and I don’t want them going anywhere I don’t specifically tell them to. I don’t even put them on “skirmish” unless I have to - if my infantry can’t protect them, the battle’s already lost.
As to elephants, I don’t have that much experience with them. I’ve only played the game once, as the Julii, and the only elephants I’ve encountered were a mercenary unit I picked up on a West African expedition. I found them very useful as shock troops - send them in to break up fromations, and then pull back; or else use them as a flanking force after you’ve taken care of the enemy cavalry. You shouldn’t let them get into a slogging match - they’ll win, but at an unacceptable cost.
They can really make a difference. I’ve used mostly the cheap melee only ones, and the key seems to be to make sure they’re not attacking a unit alone. They actually kill very few enemies, but they wreak havoc on enemy formations and morale. So, just as your infantry makes contact with the enemy, send in the elephants. (Alternatively, have light cavalry following a few steps behind.) If they can run right along the whole enemy battle line, so much the better. As their formations are disrupted, they’ll take heavy casualties from your infantry, and within moments the entire army can be routed. The one thing I’ve noticed, though, is that hoplite/phalangite units will annihilate elephants if the elephants are at the pointy end of the phalanx. So make sure that doesn’t happen.
Ah, that makes sense. Don’t use the elephants to fight, or to crush the enemy. Use them to break up their formations and scare the crap out of them, and exploit using other troops.
Oh, and I have an answer to some of the pathfinding bugs mentioned earlier. You get terrible problems when you select a group of units and order them to move to a place that is too small for their formation to fit. Try some experimentation in a city. If you select a group and try to order it to a street, they want to end up in the same formation they started with, lined up as the AI sees fit. But if there is no space for that battle line, the AI just goes crazy, and the units typically try to turn around…I think the pathfinding is going back outside the city and through another gate. But if you select the units individually they will go exactly where you tell them. And if you charge a group of units they will take the correct path as well. Odd bug. Now I always pause, select each unit card in a group in turn and order them individually. You can do this more easily by tabbing between unit cards. You can also ctrl-click and shift-click to select mulitple units as per standard windows functionality.
My experience has been that towns tend to revolt quicker if you leave the population intact…or even enslave it. Whereas if you put it too the sword, most of the time the town will either take a LONG time to revolt or never revolt at all. When I take a border town I don’t use it to build armies anyway…only to rebuild the formations that took it (if possible). Fronteer towns are strategic defensive positions…so I don’t really need them to be going concerns right off the bat. I’m more worried about the possibility of endless revolts where they toss out my troops and I have to siege and take em back. I’ve been in enough of those endless revolt cycles that I don’t even bother fooling around anymore…kill off the population and have some peace is my motto now. Obviously YMMV.
I do this to an extent also…though if I find a city that can be taken to the gold level of shields/weapons I build everything there (eventually)…it becomes my major field army formation center. Then what I do is ship in troops from other cities with lesser armies and then ‘fix’ them…which you can do several regiments at once per turn…and STILL build a unit in the city at the same time.
Definitely. This is why I try and have only one field army at a time. I do garrison my fronteer towns fairly heavily, but as the fronteer moves out I get rid of the garrisons back to bare bones. If I have a revolt in the interrior its a lot easier for me to take back than one on the fronteer IMO.
By far my favorite nation is the Selucids…I’ve played them more than any other. Basically, whether you attack the neutral cities or not is irrelevent…you are going to be in a multi-sided war reguardless. Certainly you will be at war with Egypt if nothing else…and I’ve never played where at the beginning I was only at war with Egypt. What I try and do now is build diplomats and get my cash up sufficiently to buy off smaller armies going after my peripherial cities…and then form a single field force and crush everything the Egyptians throw at me. Like you, I defeate their field forces until their cities are low enough to start picking off. I basically go until Egypt is defeated, staying on the defensive everywhere else…then turn on the next enemy.
Elephants are one of the coolest and most powerful units in the game. I like the heavy armored elephants…they have great armor, have a ranged attack, and you can use them to destroy enemy formations unlike anything else in the game. Basically you just have to use them wisely. I NEVER send in my elephant regiments alone. Certainly they can usually charge through anything, but eventually they will go berzerk and then they are useless…and more vulnerable. I like to send them down the line…get them on the flanks of the main battle line and charge them at say the middle of the line. This has the effect of forcing them to charge through the enemy line one regiment at a time. They dont’ kill a lot of folks this way, but the scatter their formation and give YOUR line troops a huge advantage in killing. And I usually don’t lose any (or very few at least) elephants this way.
You are right though…don’t send em into a town. In fact, I don’t send in my heavy cav either, unless I have the walls completely captured and the enemy is basically broken and falling back to their last stand. But then…I usually don’t bother with a city assault anyway, unless its so lightly defended that I can take it easily. I’m never in that much of a hurry that I can’t wait for the siege to finish.
How do ambushes work in the strategic map ? The manual said you could only hide in woods… but a unit of mine was kneeling in another type of terrain.
Do you guys keep embedded spies in your main field armies ? In order to increase spotting range … or spies don’t see much better than generals ? What about spies in cities… do they really help control upset citizens ?
**Watch towers ** don’t seem that effective in increasing visual range… and it seemed they might help trade ?
Just standing on a road will block **enemy trade routes ** ? What about naval trade routes ?
I build watch towers out in the boonies between cities. It allows me to see if bandits or rebels are messing up my traide.
Yeah, standing on a road will block enemy trade routes, so long as the road leads to somewhere they’re wanting to trade. To block naval trade, you have to blockade the enemy port.
Spies see less of the map then an army so I doubt embedded spies would help see further. As for unrest control they don’t do a damn thing. I hope this addressed in the patch that’s due sometime this month.
I actually was so tired of all the little bugs and loose ends I stopped playing until the patch. I nearly went back to MTW because I needed my total war fix so bad but then HalfLife 2 and World of Warcraft had me going “Total war? What’s that?”
Hmmm. I hardly ever wait for a city to starve, probably because I’m really concerned with tempo, especially since most units have huge maintence costs relative to their purchase cost. A unit that sits there for four turns…for some units even three or two or even one turn…costs as much as buying a whole new unit. What that really means to me is that you don’t really buy units like in many other strategy games, you RENT them.
A unit that isn’t needed as a garrison or isn’t traveling to attack the enemy or isn’t attacking the enemy is worse than useless. If units are going to sit around for 4-5 turns gathering dust besieging a city you are better off attacking even if almost all your attacking forces are killed because rebuilding a new army isn’t much more expensive than keeping an existing army in the field. I do try to preserve my experienced and/or cool troops, but I tend to treat non-elite and green units as expendable.
This also means that when you kill an enemy uberstack, you have to press the advantage right away, since he’s going to have a flood of new cash to buy new units with now that he doesn’t have to support that expensive army. Attack, attack, attack. If I have a turn where I don’t take at least one city I feel like I’m falling behind. But taking enemy cities isn’t really about strengthening your economy (except when taking enemy cores) it is about depriving the enemy of friendly bases for resupply and defense.
As far as spies and assassins, I hardly ever build them. Diplomats you need for trade deals (you should have a trade deal with every other faction), but there’s no real need to kill enemy diplomats or leaders with assassins, and they usually fail anyway. Better to just bribe them to your side. Spies don’t do much either, when I attack a city I’ll be able to see the enemy troops anyway.
Enslave chops the population by half, massacre by 3/4. But the interesting thing is that the buildings a city can construct is limited by its palace type, and that doesn’t decrease even if the city is knocked down several levels. If you want money, extermination is a good option, but you don’t really need it to keep the city from revolting, usually knocking it in half is enough. And you don’t need to do either with small cities. Enslaving or exterminating small cities is a waste of time, since they don’t require much to keep them from revolting, and the slight decrease in population doesn’t make much difference to the rebellion risk, you don’t get much money, and the cities will probably never recover about the 2000 limit.