MA T'ien Ch'i - a little of this, a little of that and BAM!

[Baalz]

LA TC has a different troop makeup if I recall correctly, more emphasis on the cavalry. Cavalry seems like a sub-optimal deployment against Mictlan in particular. Against a mixed group of jaguar and eagle warriors plus some chaff I'd think you'd just want arrows, arrows and more arrows with a couple of blockers (who can shoot arrows). If you've got the production for it (production-3 scales and a couple early castles) I'd say mostly Imperial Archers are the way to go here (supplement with regular archers to the back if you're short on production). Those 100 horse archers would be more like 200 foot archers for the same gold. With the assumption you had a good idea of your enemy's troop makeup (spies) split them into about 3 blocks in your back row scripted to fire flyers. My guess is you'd take a few casualties in the eagle warrior's first attack (though your scale mail will help a good deal), inflict enough casualties in your first volley to route the eagle warriors, then spend a couple turns decimating the jaguars as they closed. If I'm wrong and it takes a couple turns to kill the eagles and the jaguars close without significant casualties, they still will likely engage one block of your (scalemail and short sword wielding) archers while the other two blocks hammer them. Meanwhile any slingers the opponent is using will probably inflict more friendly casualties than do anything useful. It'd probably also be worthwhile to put some small clumps of tower shield blockers out front just to tangle up your opponents and probably gain another turn of archery.

There is such a large difference in effectiveness against different troops across MA TC's varied lineup. You really have to bring the right tool to the fight.

[rdonj]

Hmm. Well, in that game I literally could not have had any more arrows flying, since light cavalry and archers cost exactly the same amount of resources and I was being fed gold by some of my teammates. However you are absolutely right, in a normal game with more than one fort per person I could have had quite a few more archers than horsemen (no one had more than one fort at that point in the game). I also apparently only had about 75 archers altogether, so I had a slightly excessive number of blockers from my mercenary group plus the heavy infantry freespawn.

I only had that insane of a pd because there was literally no way for anyone who attacked me to not go through that province. Otherwise that just would have been crazy. Anyway, thanks for your input. The further away from that game I get the more I see things I did wrong....

[LumenPlacidum]

It's worth mentioning that the Noobs Vs Vets 1 game in which rdonj killed all those jaguar warriors with PD was a late era game, which Baalz mentions has awesome PD.