Retreat exploit

[Jetsk]

Greetings,

When you face enemies in a field battle, you can basically let all non-ranged troops retreat and only fight with (mounted) archers. They'll kill plenty of enemies while the enemies advancing towards your troops. If the enemies are about to reach your troops soon, you can simply ride to the border of the map and wait those 10 seconds to retreat (I didn't test the other option - TAB and retreat). This way, you can win, like me, versus any enemy that e.g outnumbers you, while having almost 0 loss of men. In my example, I was fighting vs 484 men (no cavalry) while having 221 on my side. With this tactic I managed to win small battles with an outcome of the following scores:
484 vs 221
435 vs 221
373 vs 221
335 vs 221
287 vs 220 (first time I lost one man)
247 vs 220
223 vs 219 (usually I could go for a fair battle now, but I wanted to test it to the end)
154 vs 219
081 vs 219
000 vs 212 WIN

Basically I don't think this should be a normal tactic, since you get 0 penalty for retreating.

 

[sermen]

It was the most common and most basic legitimate tactics of the steppe nomads for centuries - harassing with arrows, refusing close combat, retreating after depleting all arrows, replenishing arrows from carts and repeat the whole process. Time after time. Day after day. Non prepared enemy with less mobility and no proper ranged units was doomed.

Real life counter tactics i.e. during crusades was not to chase them with cavalry but to employ crossbowmen with big shields and shoot them with favorable kill ratio.

Restriction in Bannerlord should be you can't reengage again for i.e. 6 hours needed to replenish arrows, regroup and reorganise and let the horses and people rest. This time enemy army would be retreating to their castle decreasing number of times you could attack and harass them. Like IRL. And common sense.

But good finding of yours - reengaging constantly many times without any need of regrouping, resting, replenishing arrows is an exploit. A big one.


(It is actually stupid in TW serie when you can see you didn't loose your mounted archers, you see you break away from the opponent savely, you retreated your units savely and far from any enemy - and you see you have magically lost i.e. 125 warriors, just like that, killded by the wind.)

cheers

 

[Warrick]

I will take this even further. The tactic of retreating is broken. I can (and do) sit there with my archers behind and above (preferably) my shield wall plinking at whoever comes until their infantry hits my shield wall. I can then TAB and RETREAT and instantly go back in. Generally now I've decided that's less fun and go until my archers run out of arrows then TAB and RETREAT. I have beaten armies 2-3x my size by doing this repeatedly (5 retreats or so). The only ones that are challenging are those with horse archers.

This also applies to SIEGING a castle. You can use catapults to hit large groups of soldiers and then RETREAT when your guys start engaging in melee. Do this repeatedly and you can wipe out huge numbers of defenders.

This also applied to SIEGED castles. Sit there and plink with a ballista until they scale the walls and rinse and repeat.

I shirk no fight now if I'm willing to TAB and RETREAT.

The solution is quite simple. If you RETREAT you take a huge hit (20% or so) to your morale. I'd love to see this.