Good basic tactics?

[Mr_Smitt]

The tutorial and the advisors are complete rubbish and so far I've been winning through brute force. What are good basic tactics for this game?

[Vegas]

Have a nice balance of units in your army. Try to have at least 3 minimum artillery (more if you can) and plenty of line infantry to back them up. 3 or 4 skirmishers and 3 to 4 cav units.

Then its a case of keeping your army compact and in support of each other, supporting your artillery fire. Also, manoueving your army to the best ground is extremely important, especially on the attack, as you can manipulate the AI to correct its lines to face yours and a lot of the time they'll leave some artillery exposed to your cav.

Remember, if you have artillery superiority, the AI will soon charge with a frontal assault and a flank attack or 2. Timing this correctly so that you are spraying their line with cannister as they face your line infantry, will see most battles won..

So, army balance, good use of ground and army movement and keep compact. Try not to let units get isolated.

[Clodius]

Use higher ground - although remember foot artillery move with glacial slowness so that move to camp out on that nice hill in the corner can be disastrous.

Artillery in centre with infantry on either side and light infantry and cavalry on flanks always seems to work for me.

Keep a unit of foot guards or grenadiers and or heavy cavalry in reserve behind guns (if you are the French use chasseurs a cheval instead as they fire over the heads of the gunners and can save the guns by a last minute sabre charge).

Always send a unit or two of light cav on wide flanking movements - unless they have masses of cavalry standing about the AI almost always leave their guns undefended and even the most mediocre light cav unit like British light dragoons can quickly dash in and slaughter them.

This may also send the rest of their line into constant reform mode so that you'll have longer to pound them with your cannons from long range.

Always switch to canister as soon as the enemy get into its range - and be very careful with autofire as your own cannons are quite capable of traversing around mowing down your own troops to the flank or rear if they think there's a target behind them.

Tech-up to recruit howitzers as soon as you can as you can safely use these from behind your infantry line.

Carefully examine and compare your troops and enemies stats before hitting the attack button - if their line infantry have much better accuracy than yours then don't let them get into unit-to-unit firefights as they'll lose, similarly if they have lots of light infantry that could be a big problem as they'll stand out of your range and shoot your line inf to bits (although you can't rely on your own light inf doing the same without micromanaging them) and you may have to sacrifice cavalry units to get rid of them.

[Blackstar]

and build up your economy as fast as you can . as someone once said . the sinews of war are money money and more money . also dont discount haveing nations as protactorates they dont backstab you anymore and you get cash from them and they also raise there own armies . usfull for building a buffer zone at times

[SupAll]

Skirmishers. Skirmishers are key when going toe-to-toe with an enemy line infantry. If you stretch out your skirmishers in front of your line and place them in skirmish mode, not only will the enemy get hit early (and therefore lose several troops beforehand), but they will also end up contending with your line infantry's volleys. This greatly creates a disproportionate ratio of firepower in your favor.

[Mr_Smitt]

What exactly are the differences in terms of roles between skirmishers and light infantry?

[Clodius]

Well, there are two types of light infantry in NTW both of which can skirmish:

1. British light infantry, French chasseurs, Prussian fusiliers, Austrian grenzers etc come in units of 120 men (large unit size) and are recruitable from a level 2 barracks.

They can form a skirmish line, tend to have higher accuracy and longer range than line infantry but cannot form square.

2. British rifles, French voltigeurs, Prussian and Austrian jagers etc come in smaller units of 80 men and are recruitable from a level 3 drill hall.

They can also form a skirmish line, also can't form square but can put down a line of stakes to protect against cavalry and tend to have higher accuracy and range again than light infantry proper.

So the difference is that while your light infantry can be used either to skirmish or form a normal part of your battle line, the rifles, voltiguers etc are much more pure skirmishers and are wasted in any other role.

(BTW the main advantage of being in skirmish line or light infantry behaviour as its rather confusingly called on the battle screen is that every man in the unit gets to fire as opposed to only the front line men in a normal formation).

You do need to look at the detailed unit stats though as the French for instance are rather short-changed - their chasseurs for instance have no better accuracy than their line infantry fusiliers (40) while the voltiguers have much better accuracy (60) but only the same range (100) as chasseurs.

At least mathematically this means that your 120 chasseurs and 80 voltiguers should both score about the same number of hits per volley but the chasseurs being so much more numerous are much more likely to survive a firefight or melee.

In fact my voltiguers typically end up being destroyed or reduced to a mere handful of men after most battles - and suffer particularly disproportionately in autoresolve battles.

And the stakes can only be used once and in my experience are not that effective in stopping cavalry - unlike in Medieval Total War they won't just stop dead in front of the stakes and let you shoot them down at your leisure but will take whatever few extra casualties they inflict and charge home.

On the other hand British rifles have scarily high accuracy of 80 (which I think may be the highest in the game) and much longer range (125) so look like a lot better deal than voltiguers,

FWIW if you wanted to accurately reflect actual proportions in the real French army you'd have 4 units of line infantry fusiliers to 3 each of voltiguers, chasseurs and grenadiers in each full stack (although historically the chasseurs or infantrie legere typically fought in line or column just like the fusiliers and only their tirailleur companies actually skirmished alongside the line's voltiguer companies) - intend to try that in my current campaign to see how it works.

The British on the other hand only had 6 light infantry and 2 rifle regiments in the whole army (compared to 100-odd of line infantry) - although one in 10 of their line infantry companies were light infantry as well - so their historical ratio would probably be more like 9:2:1 for line, light and rifle units.

[Chewie]

With the 120-man units, you can more or less leave them in front of your line infantry to take the brunt of AI fire (even with a solid line of men behind them your line units will barely get hit by volleys aimed at light infantry a few meters in front of them, weird I know).

The 80-man units require a lot more micro-managing. You can leave them out in front while the AI maneuvers into firing range but once the heavy shooting starts you gotta get them out of there or they'll be blown away very quickly. From there they'll go out to the flanks but from that point they all have to be independently controlled to be fully effective.

Also, the 120-man units may be able to absorb a cavalry charge for a few moments (albeit probably taking 20-40% casualties on impact depending on angle of attack) but the 80-man units will be instantly wiped out (no bayonets = dead in melee). The deployed stakes are ineffective because they are too wide apart and each stake is "used up" after a horse strikes it. Therefore if a cavalry unit is in a narrow formation (such as diamond), they can charge through the stakes with minimal loss and kill your skirmisher unit.

I just finished a world domination campaign with France (VH) and I must say I didn't care for the welfare of my chasseurs . Their mission in my army was to "pull" cav units into firing zones (though chasseurs a cheval do this better), break up and/or slow down advancing enemy line somewhat, and act as a bullet absorber for my line units.

[Clodius]

Yeah - unless you are obsessive about historical accuracy chasseurs are much more useful than voltigeurs - and they can be recruited anywhere with a barracks and their units don't mysteriously disappear when you autoresolve.

Same probably applies to Prussian fusiliers vs jagers.

Its also worth noting that chasseurs have more campaign movement points than either the French line fusiliers or voltigeurs - so can be combined with cavalry and horse artillery into a flying corps or light division for raids, rapid response etc.

Certainly preferable to have real light infantry in such a force than to dismount dragoons or whatever.

[Red Hue]

The best basic tactics I can recommend are:

Put your artillery more toward the center of your line. It draws too much fire when placed at the flanks. Make sure it has good fields of fire and you are not firing into woods or small hills at your front. Make sure you know when to switch to canister shot and don’t forget to use it.

Flank your artillery on each side with two units of line infantry. That usually provides enough fire power to overcome charges by cavalry or massed infantry. Deploying infantry two ranks deep will maximize their firepower but may weaken them for a big melee. Also deeper ranks are better targets for cannon, so when advancing spread out. Close them up for the charge.

Place light infantry in front of your line at the flanks so it can get in a few shots at the enemy before they reach the line, then draw it back to protect your flanks from other infantry.

Placing cavalry at your flanks discourages the AI from trying to circle round and attack artillery or generals from the rear. .It is also a good position to get behind the enemy if the line is in melee.
Try to always have one good cavalry unit to finish off the enemy’s cannon when the battle is almost over. Missal cavalry can fire over the heads of the line, it is also effective to mix missal cavalry and melee cavalry in a charge.

Try to keep a couple of units in reserve in case of emergencies.

[coppernail]

Bring at least four batteries of guns to the battle, site them well (I generally put them to the wings, but field of fire is more important), protect them from cavalry, put at least 2 cavalry on each wing. Then stand off the AI to start with, let the guns play and wait for the AI to attack. All the PBI generally have to do is stand there and fill in the gaps. Properly sited 4 batteries of 12 pounders will trash an AI stack in quarter to half the clock. Like the quote in the game says, guns win battles.

Wellingtons strategic offensive combined with tactical defensive.

Horse artillery are far more mobile and can move to take better advantage of ground, which offsets shorter range.