[Norfleet]

Originally posted by tinkthank:
Anyone use this command? No sorry stupid question: How do you make the best use of this command, in what situations?

Fire and Flee is useful when you want to perform, say, a drive-by priesting in conjunction with your archers: Set archers on fire and flee, set priests on Banish, Banish, Banish, Flee, and you can perform a handy drive-by priesting. It's not really strictly necessary to use Fire and Flee, though, since you can't control the duration of the firing, and if all your commanders flee, your troops will also.

I have had pretty much zero success with Caelum, which is a shame; I just cant keep those flying infantries from impaling themselves on enemy pikes too quickly. "Hold and Attack" is too short for me, I'd like a "Hold Longer and Attack" too.

Once again, commanders are the key: If you want tighter control of your flying infantry, bind them to a commander: Attach them to a Storm General or other melee commander, then order the commander to Hold (up to 5x), and attack. When the commander attacks, the troops set to guard him will follow him into the fray. This puts him at somewhat of a risk: Be sure to have other commanders, so he's not the only commander, in case he bites it.

But I thought "Fire and Flee" might be nice, because Illwinter explicity writes in the only description of Caleum (in the Choose Nation screen) that they are fond of "hit and run" tactics. Now what could these be? I figured I could use some "fire and flee". But had also zero success with those. My great archers leave the field, and then my remaining troops teleport/fly to the enemy and get wiped out by all but wimps.

The problem with fleeing is that instead of withdrawing in good order, the troops still scatter hither and yon across any neighboring friendly provinces: If ordered retreats caused all retreating units ordered specifically to withdraw to return to either: A. The province they started from, or B. Any, but the same, friendly province for all such units, it would be less of a mess. As such, it does kind of reduce the effectiveness of the order, since your archers will wind up everywhere unless there was only one province to choose from. The hit-and-run stuff is largely flavor text.

And remaining troops? If you're performing a fly-by shooting, you don't NEED other troops: The entire point of a fly-by shooting is to minimize your potential risk while inflicting attritional losses on enemy troops.

[ March 05, 2004, 18:08: Message edited by: Norfleet ]