Unique/Third Party Armies

[Summa]

I got a general question on the unique armies (Daughters,Three Seers, Snake Army, Jatu, etc). In my game, and I'm sure in yours, these armies are massive- anywhere from 400-1000+. Are you guys just taking them on 1 to 1 and are your war parties that large? I currently can get 170 and am having a tough time keeping morale up. I can't possibly imagine getting to 400 or higher to even attempt to take these armies on! Any suggestions?

 

[mergaite]

Personally I wait till they have 200+ troops then attack them. If i olready have a kingdom then geather my armies and sloughter them and let my lords take there masive captures for them selfs. This way my lords become stronger

 

[Aetavicus]

It's possible to defeat them with your current party size. Most of the huge armies only have around 100 elite troops whereas the rest of their numbers are just fodder. If you can defeat the first few waves, the battle will become much easier. To have an easier time, change your army composition to counter theirs.

 

[Camcolit]

150-200 upgraded honor troops will beat most unique armies with very few casualties. 400 will crush everything on the map. Keeping morale high with a large army is easy, just don't auto-calc all the time, you don't get the morale boost, and you should have enough money to pay for feasts etc. if it gets low. Once you have an army consisting of upgraded honor troops you start running over everything, and your renown shoots up really fast, so you can then literally run over everything. Sad but true. Gets a little boring.

 

[Camcolit]

To have an easier time, change your army composition to counter theirs.

Here's the thing though, I often hear people talking about army composition and so on in M+B but honestly having a balanced army is just way more trouble than it's worth.

There are a couple of reasons for balanced troops compositions in real armies - one is a combined arms aspect e.g. archers supporting pikemen with cavalry on the flanks is more efficient than all archers, or all pikemen, or all cavalry. The whole balance of M+B makes this both unnecessary and almost impossible to pull off effectively. You have very limited control over exactly what troops you are going to have available in battle, and then the real difficulty is that setting up any kind of realistic battle formation is next to impossible and annoying as hell even with mods. I could have a line of infantry, archers behind, cavalry in reserve, but why bother when all cavalry will just run over everything quicker. The only time I do 'composition' is throwing a few archers at the top of the list in a siege and then spam heavy infantry.

All cavalry is just the way to go for quick and bloody field battles, since horses are godly and there's no real counter to them.

 

[M0rdred]

I strongly disagree with you there Camcolit. Tactics and troop composition is very important. Just spamming cavalry might win battles for you, great if they do. Personally I find that a good balance of Shield Troops (front line), 2Handers/Polearms (2nd line) and archers is a far more pragmatic and versatile forumla.

Because of the way you can now tag troops and give them individual orders you can now give commands far more effectively. I tend to deploy with shield troops in front to absorb charges and arrows, with the hard hitting infantry behind, who will rush through and do the actual killing. All these are supported by the archers / crossbows behind. I might field some light horses to deflect their own cavalry forces, or if I feel a tactical charge on their archers would be advantageous.

Doing this means I can win battles where I am hugely outnumbered and whats more - I can win these battles without a single honour troop and sometimes without a single noble.

You are wrong that there are no counters to cavalry also, Polearms (Halbardiers especially) and 2 Handers (Berserkers, Gladiators) are very capable anti-cavalry troops.

 

[NicotiN]

To have an easier time, change your army composition to counter theirs.

Here's the thing though, I often hear people talking about army composition and so on in M+B but honestly having a balanced army is just way more trouble than it's worth.

There are a couple of reasons for balanced troops compositions in real armies - one is a combined arms aspect e.g. archers supporting pikemen with cavalry on the flanks is more efficient than all archers, or all pikemen, or all cavalry. The whole balance of M+B makes this both unnecessary and almost impossible to pull off effectively. You have very limited control over exactly what troops you are going to have available in battle, and then the real difficulty is that setting up any kind of realistic battle formation is next to impossible and annoying as hell even with mods. I could have a line of infantry, archers behind, cavalry in reserve, but why bother when all cavalry will just run over everything quicker. The only time I do 'composition' is throwing a few archers at the top of the list in a siege and then spam heavy infantry.

All cavalry is just the way to go for quick and bloody field battles, since horses are godly and there's no real counter to them.

You are lucky that Pop is only single player, only cavalry is really a boring way to play and time consuming at one point...are you playing with cheats?
I used to play all cavalry but then....i got bored to always replace horseman killed by 3rd tier troops......and those charges against the empire or sarleon.......
The cavalry battles with the Jatu...pff, the horsemen traped like a nail in a board in the infantry mob....
Bleah, i play with archers and cavalry with infantry to suport and kill the rest after the initial charge of enemies.
It's a faster way to win battles than only cavalry.....geting troops killed and waiting for the 15 horsemen that ran after a fleeing archer.
No matter how strong the cavalry is...you can't beat a nice balanced elite army and why spend 15k denars a week when you can spend 8k for a nicer and easier to replace army
On topic: it's easy to maintain a large army.....the big crate from castles/towns......+30 morale(having 2 fiefs you can almost never run out) and another 5-6 food types....do some feasts and drinking in taverns....some battles and no decisions that will drop the morale.

 

[Camcolit]

@ Mordred

Just replace my honor knights with regular knights and I can (and did) still win battles while hugely outnumbered. F1-F3 start of battle, knights run everything over. Of course there are counters for the player! A bunch of two-handers will do a number on the AI's cavalry, but I've never met an AI army that can do much against an army of honor knights, including that guy Syla Uzas and his 200 immortals. A mass of heavy cavalry will just put troops in what we might call the 'grinder' - anything in the mass will just keep getting bumped and knocked down, interrupting their swings, and get slaughtered. I'm not at all saying that a balanced force is ineffective, just unnecessary and slower than all-cav.

@ Nicotin

Well multiplayer in any game is always completely different, so that point is irrelevant, especially since M+B is very largely a single player game. Yes it's boring, but effective. In fact I already said it was boring. You think you need cheats to kill people with mass heavy cav? I play full difficulty + realistic save. Charges against Empire or Sarleon are not a problem. Actually I don't notice who I'm charging since they all die just the same - immortals and halberdiers get run over like everyone else. Naturally they are more likely than a recruit to take down a horse, but they usually don't, and if they do who cares, it won't be many and they'll probably be wounded instead of die.

 

[Aetavicus]

I took 300 Knights of the Griffon and charged against a Metteheim army. Even though I won, I took heavy casualties. 147 Knights lost. @_@ So, I wouldn't say that heavy cavalry has no counter. However, I do agree that against any other army, pure heavy cavalry is a very efficient winning method.

However, going with a pure cavalry build really only applies to late game where you have access to knights. Going only cavalry in the early-mid game is suicide as you only have access to light cavalry (excluding hero adventurers) which get slaughtered by infantry.

If you want to have a balanced army, you're going to have to cap the amount of troops you have. ie, with a battle size of 300, I always strive for 50 archers, 50 infantry, 50 cavalry. This way, I'll always have a balanced army consisting of reasonable amounts of each unit type.

 

[NicotiN]

Battle size of 300 is too much, i only play with default setings...as i said before...playing with a big battle size can be considered a cheat. This way the game is a bit more tactical and every troop counts....and me rushing behind my troops to finish the enemies is kind of rare
Camco what's your battlesize? and why do you play the boring way?
Let's see how Pop 4 will look like, i am sure that cavalry will be further nerfed is some ways

Well yes mortred, i agree that sieges are harder but most battles are under 200. If you fight a lord with 300 troops and you have 120 troops it looks like it's better for him but he has about 60 good soldiers and the rest and quite easy.
Big battles like this make the player more protected, if there is 50 vs 50 then the player has a good chance to get target by a lot of troops. Then again....a lot of infantry, a lot of horsemen, a lot of low tier troops....are weaker when in big numbers.
The archers sometimes run out of arrows because with so few target they will miss quite a bit at long range/cavalry/runing troops.
And when you kill 50 enemy troops and the reinforcements arrive....if you don't regroup they will kill a lot of troops.
Depends on the point of view but after 120 battlesize if the enemy does not have many elite troops it's easier, it's a Pop feature, the high tier troops kill all small fishes with ease

 

[M0rdred]

I play battlesize 400, and I disagree that it makes the game easier. The Player tends to have better troops so doing this (especially outnumbered, as you often are) allows the AI to bring more of their troops into each round.

Sieges to are very tough.

 

[noosers]

Common consensus is it´s usually the other way round. The larger the battles, the more difficult they become as the impact of the player gets smaller and smaller.

Try a 1 vs 24 battle six times @battlesize 25 and a 1 vs 149 battle @battlesize 150.

 

[dulahan]

I have to agree with those saying combined arms is possible and more devastating.

I have some all cav games.  And yes, they do rock.  But are expensive as hell and take casualties.  (Annoyingly, it seems like my top tier stuff like Hero adventurers and other maxed out types die more often than they're saved by wounds, yet low tier ones rarely die and always get wounded.  This holds true in my infantry games too).

But my combined arms game?  Running a roughly 1-1-1 split on Inf, Cav, and Archers?  There's many battles I can win with less than 10 casualties.  The archers (A mix of Pendor sorts, Barclay Sappers, Merc crossbowmen and armored crossbowmen, and Ravenstern Rangers currently) - (They also tend to get some more haphazard, depending there they're deployed, support from my Jatu, Singalian, and Adventurer cavalry troops, but I never count on this, though probably should be more creative with it)... but anyways, the archers can many times do the job on their own depending on the map, though when the enemy gets too close I'll order a charge of my Infantry and Cavalry to finish things.  Only armies with strong heavy cavalry with shields ever does a lot of damage (Jatu, mainly).  Can't wait to get some Noldor Warriors added to the mix, 30 of those and... yikes.  Yeah, I doubt much will matter.  And I'm definitely saving three Qualis Gems for as soon as the Noldor City is open to me and getting 45 of them right then and there to mix with some Barclay Sappers (If I can find anymore of them.  My glorious original 37 I found early on has slowly wittled down to only 9. ) and watch my enemies fall before me!



My other main game currently has me running about 2/3rds cav, the remaining third archers, mostly Noldor.  Order the archers to hold their ground near the deployment zone (Preferably on a hill) and have my cavalry follow me for sweeping charges.  This is nearly as devastating most of the time.  But my cav tends to take a lot more damage.

And I've seriously destroyed Jatu armies by kiting a Noldor PATROL into them  (That was hard) and joining the battle with the Noldor and watching them mow down the Jatu charge like they were the Light Brigade charging into the Russian's cannons.  It was sick.

As for the uniques.  In general I've found the Adventurer stacks and Jatu to be the worst (Well, and Noldor as well.  I just try to drag Jatu armies towards them until they're manageable :p ) - though Heretics can be ROUGH when the freaking Demonic Magnuses are spawning in droves.

And Snake Armies are wimps.


EDIT: and I completely disagree about larger battlesizes being a 'cheat' - if anything I'd say smaller ones are cheating.  As others mentioned, much less player contribution the larger they are. Leading to more of a necessity of using tactics to make up for things needed.

 

[Camcolit]

Seems to me larger battle sizes would be harder, I don't know since my system sucks and I can only run 100 with all the graphics options turned off  . Still, I don't see how increasing it would lessen the effectiveness of mass heavy cav. I know mass heavy cav should be awesome, they are after all the most expensive units in the game, but since you don't have anything better to spend money on late in the game any other army is just inferior I think. I do love my KotD though. Taste steel tree huggers!



Thinking about starting a Mettenheim game. @ Aetavicus - Forlorn hopes are one of the only units can can hold their own against heavy cav, but then they are seriously buffed units against most anything. Your casualties seem very extreme though, I've killed mettenheim armies a few times only taking 10-20 casualties.

 

[M0rdred]

The lure of Mettenheim compels you!
The lure of Mettenheim compels you!
The lure of Mettenheim compels you!
The lure of Mettenheim compels you!
The lure of Mettenheim compels you!

 

[Aetavicus]

I was quite surprised at the amount of casualties myself. Maybe its because of my larger battle size (more bunched up infantry) that so many Knights died. And 147 is just counting the killed, not the wounded which adds the total casualties up to 200+. T_T

 

[noosers]

Well among the things not to do is a straight cavalry charge into a dense formation of hardened, top tiered, heavily armoured infantry cluster wielding those damn effective, absolutely awesome 2h swords they know to use so well.

The way to deal with Mettenheim is to pepper them with arrows. You trample the ungodly, but Mettenheim needs arrows as it´s their greatest weakness.

They´re pretty good against cavalry - as you may have noticed yourself.

 

[Summa]

Well thanks guys. I am managing with 170 troops and I only have three villages for now. I am still pretty new at the mod. That being said, I'll hold on and keep prodding along and will eventually try and take on one of these groups and hope to be triumphant.