Re: If anyone needs help
I'm a novice Rome II (vanilla) player. Like Yudishtira, I have not tried a siege assault against a walled city and would appreciate any advice.
I'm trying a campaign as Cimmeria. I thought that a combination of hoplites and slingers might work against the horse archer armies used by my enemies, but the horse archers ride close to my slingers, causing the slingers to run (and stop firing) while the horse archers shoot them. Soon after that, my hoplites are standing in between two groups of horse archers. My poor infantrymen can never catch up with the enemy cavalry and whichever horsemen they're not running towards will shoot them in the back. (I'm becoming convinced that I'm the most inept Rome II commander ever!) Can anyone advise on the best tactics against horse archer armies? Perhaps I should simply turn off skirmish mode for the slingers and keep the hoplites close to them? Presumably the other option would be to use different units. Is there a unit which is ideal for fighting horse archers - maybe citizen cavalry if they can catch them, or perhaps I should make a beeline for the technology which allows me to recruit armoured horse archers.
[Edit to add] Simply turning off skirmish mode for the slingers (on a battlefield in the countryside) got them massacred when the enemy horse archers ran them down.
I can consistently beat horse archer armies in cities using the obvious tactics of walling off both ends of a street with hoplites and putting my slingers and archers safely behind the hoplites. When fighting in open countryside, horse archer armies are still beating me when numbers are equal. I could try creating a box with hoplites (or other spearmen) with the ranged units inside - but that would require a lot more melee infantry than I normally have. Is the answer to put the spearmen in thin lines, to create a box with only a few spear units, or to simply recruit huge numbers of spearmen?
My first siege assault against a walled city was a challenge. I had researched at least a couple of military technologies relating to siege warfare, which seemed to help (I could make siege ladders and 'shields' - shields being a sort of roof-on-wheels, although they didn't seem to protect the soldiers underneath much.) The defensive archer towers killed more of my men than the enemy units, so it's important to watch for them (the towers don't have banners above them like units do). One archer tower seemed to have a little circle underneath it (at least, it appeared when a unit was close to the tower) and it seemed that, when I left a unit in that circle, the tower stopped firing.
Last edited by Alwyn; November 22, 2015 at 06:30 AM.