Best ways to kill Trolls (Instructions)

[Hermes Trismegistos]

I had no good success with ballistas, as you say they are not accurate enough do fight them reliably. With Dale I would use the cheap units in masses: Rivermen and Dalesmen combined. Both have AP and it won't hurt you to loose some of them. A rain of arrows first to weaken them is of course not a bad thing either. Troll Catapults you can charge again and again with Dale Cavalry (Or your best cavalry available) from behind.

[beginattackrun]

Hermes summed it up well. You shouldn't have any significant difficulty with trolls if you follow his advice.

[Seleukos_I.]

As Hermes said: One line of Archers (I have most of the time about 10 in my armies) and then Barding Hirds or a cheap followed by Dale Swordmasters and Aiwothuada Horseguards which you should charge into.

[Akbar]

Bragging post: Found out today that trolls are not a problem for Isengard, at least. Softening them up somewhat with crossbows, then killing them with Berserkers. Almost to easy. Slaughtered three Mordor armies, one after another, without having to retrain any of my units. My army included 4 Berserkers, stationed on the flanks of 4 Uruk Pikes. Total losses about 50 berserkers (most to friendly fire) and 80 pikemen (when some trolls charged them instead). The three Mordor armies had in total 9 troll units.

Setup:

B B P P P P B B
II XX CC XX II
W G W

B:Berserker
Pikemen
I: Uruk Infantry
X: Crossbow
C: Catapult
W: Warghs
G: General

[Duke_Dutch]

Last time I attackt one units of Trolls from the orcs of the MM. with 3 units of Dwarven pikeman. I formed all the 3 units on a narrow front with all the units stationt on the same place. so I got a huge pike wall agianst them. pitty the Troll run trough the pike with out being hurt. But thanks to the pike wall I lost 0 men from the troll charge. the pike man push them back easy, because of the many spear the Troll where unable to attack. I lost 37 men and all the 12 trolls and there genereal died.

[Alex-ander]

So far playing as the HE i have not found the such a big problem. Its a case of surrounding them with infentry and using them and the archers to wear them down. The archers are quite effective against them in one recent battle of a unit of 12 Trolls only 3 managed to reach my lines.

The Troll catapults are much tougher especially if you meet with an army with 4 or 5 catapults in it

[Withwnar]

As a common response to "trolls!" is "if, after all these suggestions, you still think Trolls are overpowered then adjust their stats yourself" I thought that maybe the opening post could include instructions on how to do it.

If so then here's something I wrote in the latest Troll thread...

---

1. Find export_descr_unit.txt in the {M2TW install}\mods\Third_Age\data folder
2. Back it up (copy and save that file with a different name)
3. Open the original export_descr_unit.txt in a text editor: Wordpad, Notepad, etc.
4. Make the changes (see below)
5. Save the file
6. Play TATW and wreak vengeance
7. If something went horribly wrong then you can always replace the modified file with your backup - just rename the backup file back to export_descr_unit.txt after deleting the modified one

For example, to modify Olog-Hai...

Search/find "Battle Trolls". There are about 32 lines of stats; I'm only showing some of them here...

type             Battle Trolls
...
stat_health      6, 3
stat_pri         34, 12, no, 0, 0, melee, melee_blade, blunt, mace, 0, 1
...
stat_pri_armour  14, 25, 0, metal

Hit Points
Attack
Charge Bonus
Armour
Defence Skill

(This is from a 1.3 game so the numbers might be different in your copy.)

Be careful not to delete any commas. I don't know if spaces are necessary after the commas but keep them just to be sure.

This is just Olog-Hai. Repeat for any other units to be modified.

[kingtigertank]

best way to kill trollls is to just send a unit of fountain guard or some dwarven elites like iron guard or guards of khazad-dhum.

[Rero]

@Withwnar:
hibbitses now pwn thanks to you

[Gharbad the Weak]

Arnorian pikeman do a good job of killing trolls too.

[sir diman]

in my humble opinion the best way for ur faction to kill trolls is the follow:

play custom battles and test all ur units 1 vs 1 and see the result then make a combination of 2-3 units that did well against them and u have the troll killing units u want

p.s. in most cases a heavy unit with combat bonus in woods and good against armour will do the job

[seregras]

anything that gets the "armour piercing" bonus. Example.. units that throw javelins. hold the trolls with another unit.. then have all your javelin units launch their projectiles into the fray. Unfortunately.. the unit "holding" the trolls in place is going to get devastated.. but its much better than having them smash through your lines and wreak havoc.

[Russian Gondor]

Well. On my Silvan elf campaign I took the Black Gate on turn 28 and then fought a stack of Mordor uruks and 5 units of olog-hai. ( God himself does not know how they got it by turn 28 but what the heck, it was the devils work ). Anyways, their trolls romped through my men and when they got to my inner walls all I had was 2 units of bodyguard and about 250 spearmen/archers. They had about 500 uruks and 3 full troll units. After using Light of Celeberth I managed to completely whipe out the trolls, route the orc army, and actually defeat Mordors auto span devil stack.

[ChosenManTim]

Useful topic. Most of what you've suggested worked in my experience. When you're forced to use only infantry to stop trolls it's best to absorb their charge with an expendible unit, then send in armour mashing units to cause some real wounds. When I used dwarves I found that catching the trolls on something cheaper like warriors, or spearwall units (vaut wardens, or halbardiers), then hitting them with axemen, halbardiers, or axemen of erebor worked fine. Still took a lot of casualties, but the halbardiers really shined in this fight because they had both armour penetrating attacks, and they had a longer reach than axemen. Vault Wardens, and other pike units don't work so good, because their attack is too weak, and armour too weak.

With missle units, javalins work better than arrows, but they are way too short range for a comfortable fight against trolls. Maybe use a sacrificial unit to stop their charge (milita) then shower the whole combat in javalins, and balista shots to mash the trolls. Don't use arrow units for this though, the arrows will probably only kill more of your sacrifice unit, and not really do enough damage to the trolls.

[Malinos]

I typically have my main army that is defending a city somewhat close to the city, a little more than one turn's worth of movement away. The attacking army will tend to attack that army before approaching the city and attempting a siege. In this open field I place my units near the rear of the map on any high ground I can find. I focus fire on the trolls and wargs with masses of archers, and if I manage to kill all of them I then kill all of the heavy infantry I can before it reaches me. Then I retreat with almost no casualties.

I generally try to place this defending army far enough away from the city that the attacker cannot follow up their attack with a siege, so I can move the army out and repeat the process. I simply wear them down and remove their biggest threats with archer spam and retreats. If they have siege machines I will circle around with cavalry and take them out asap, then retreat the cavalry.

Once they do reach the city with the scraps that are left, I position this army next to the city then sally out with the small garrison. If they go ahead and attack during the sally, I hold them at the gate and slam their rear with the main army. If they retreat during the sally I will destroy their siege and pick them apart with archers until quivers are empty, then retreat behind the walls and exit battle for a successful sally.

[Rusery]

Trolls are NOT overpowered. Why someone would bring this up is beyond me. First of all there are 12 of them in a unit and cost roughly 1200 to produce and 500 to upkeep. They are an elite unit that by lore standards are extremely hard to kill in all respects. Second when trolls are overwhelmed by infantry they die quite quickly. Armor piercing does not effect trolls as much as you think as their defense skill is the bulk of their overall armor score (which i highly disagree with) why people think javelins are the bane of trolls is because the accuracy of javelins far surpasses that of arrows at very close range and do more damage. Artillery destroys trolls, especially balistas as they are pretty accurate. Keep trolls busy with fodder if you have no average infantry and position one group of archers 50 feet away, turn fire arrows on and watch the trolls fall.

[Baywatch]

Trolls are NOT overpowered. Why someone would bring this up is beyond me. First of all there are 12 of them in a unit and cost roughly 1200 to produce and 500 to upkeep. They are an elite unit that by lore standards are extremely hard to kill in all respects. Second when trolls are overwhelmed by infantry they die quite quickly. Armor piercing does not effect trolls as much as you think as their defense skill is the bulk of their overall armor score (which i highly disagree with) why people think javelins are the bane of trolls is because the accuracy of javelins far surpasses that of arrows at very close range and do more damage. Artillery destroys trolls, especially balistas as they are pretty accurate. Keep trolls busy with fodder if you have no average infantry and position one group of archers 50 feet away, turn fire arrows on and watch the trolls fall.

You're lucky that you weren't here back in the day when "OP trollz!" topics could be found on every page. You're quite right, trolls are one of the most cost inefficient units in the entire game and are very situational if you want them to make up for that hefty price tag. While AP isn't needed, it certainly helps bring them down faster since trolls tend to get themselves caught up in the middle of an infantry blob and get hit from all sides, thus negating their defense skill for many of the attacks made against them. But, as you said it's not needed to turn them into a huge cash sink. Simply swarm them with any inexpensive infantry and you've countered them. Any AP unit will also bring them down very quickly. There really isn't much that you can do wrong while facing them, and many things you can potentially screw up while using them.

[LH47]

There is only one thing trolls are good at and that's chasing down routing enemies, and even then a standard cavalry unit is better

[BazzBrother]

Iv been playing as Rhun and have been fighting against Mordor with two 'golden' armies (all Locke troops) and iv noticed that neither the elite archer nor the ballistas kill any trolls, but the Locke Gimp can slaughter the trolls with little more than 20 casualties.

Who the heck did the testing with the ballistas? they are garbage in almost every situation Iv used them! including fighting Trolls, seiging, and defending

[Tokugawa77]

I think that trolls are way underpowered. they can barely take out a unit of gondor infantry, and even then they suffer 75% casualties. combine that with their massive upkeep costs and all you get is a vulnerable, expensive unit. Note that I'm playing version 2.1, so they might have nerfed the trolls, but they way over did it.