[Chris Byler]

Originally posted by Daynarr:

quote:

---

Originally posted by tkobo:
Okay, how about giving me an example of an army you would field and the orders the units are under in it ?

Ok here are some general advices.

1) Place heavy infantry to the center right of the field (closest to enemy) and give them attack closest order. They are your front line and they have to engage and hold enemy units.

2) Place cavalry at either top or bottom (or both) right side of battlefield (they will be at the flanks of your heavy infantry) and order them to attack rearmost units. They will try to outflank the enemy and strike at their archers or commanders.

3) Place archers behind those front troops and order the to fire NONE. That will allow hem to choose their target for themselves. This is important if your opponent is fielding units with high protection. If you order them to fire at closest enemy, that enemy can be heavy cavalry and their arrows will be completely ineffective against them. They will often choose targets they can damage and sometimes they even target commanders.

This is just basic design and there are, as you will surely discover, more effective ways for dealing with various opponents. A big fun in the game is discovering new tactics and seeing their effects on battlefield.

Hope this helps.

---

Just a few additions:

1. The most important point: there is no best army composition or script. It depends A LOT on what you are facing.

2. Sometimes it's better to have heavy infantry hold and attack, and/or start further back. Their role is often to stop the enemy advance and pin them in place so the archers can shoot them.

3. Going along with this point - archers work best with heavy infantry. Light infantry will take too much friendly fire casualties, and cavalry will engage the enemy too far away where it's harder for the archers to fire effectively.

4. Fire NONE is usually a pointless order for archers: it's what they will almost always do anyway (if given no orders). Also it can be dangerous to allow them to choose their own target: sometimes they will choose to shoot at enemies that are in melee with your troops, which can cause as much damage to you as to the enemy.

IMO, if you're going to use archers, you should either use an archer-heavy infantry setup so your archers can shoot the enemy as they close in, use an all-archer army and try to rout them before they reach you (risky but can win without casualties if you have enough archers), or set your archers on "fire archers" and hope they don't do too much friendly fire damage because they are firing at the rear. (Annoyingly, "fire rear" is not allowed, even though it would reduce friendly fire more often than any other target choice.)

5. In my opinion, one special ability deserves special notice: trample. Trampling units can run through any units smaller than they are, pushing those units aside and damaging them. Size 3 tramplers (minotaurs, fey boars, shambler thralls) can trample infantry, size 4 tramplers (chariots, war lobsters) can trample cavalry, and size 6 tramplers (elephants, mammoths, Great Mother and Dagon) can trample almost anything. In order to counter trample effectively, you should try hard to get some units that are big enough to resist being trampled. Against minotaurs, cavalry are fine, but against chariots or elephants you may have to rely on summons or constructs to stop the tramplers. Most trampling units have poor combat abilities aside from trample, and are expensive, so if you can make them pick on someone their own size (literally), they aren't much of a threat. (Trampling Gods are an exception - even if you counter the trampling, they're still Gods and usually pretty dangerous.)