Hoplites' primary weapons are useless! What's the point?

[OJ33DA]

Just from checking the stats, and from testing results, you can see that a hoplite's secondary is immensely superior to their primary weapon. Now, a spear may be useful when fighting cavalry but in what situation against infantry would you recommend to use it?

[Searry]

Hoplites are good if they are the elite variety. They are almost unbrokeable in defence. Offense is bad though.

[OJ33DA]

This article, https://www.quora.com/Who-would-win-...attle-play-out
, convinced me that you are right, their melee capability pales in comparison to cohorts/maniples. Most of my tests have been with hoplites vs the romans, and I just couldn’t help feeling disappointed that the romans would always steamroll even elite hoplites that weren’t set on guard mode and made to protect a choke point. Even then, I have issue with using tactics that the Ai never takes advantage of—e.g. guard mode, rank depth, secondary weapons, etc—and so I have been doing numerous tweaks to unit stats so I could possibly make hoplites more cohesive without the use of guard mode. Not even phalanx formation manages to keep cohesion if the spears are short so perhaps some tweaks to unit spacing and radius will do the job?

[Searry]

What do you mean? I have exactly opposite experiences. What exe are you playing with?

[OJ33DA]

I use Alexander the Great's exe. Perhaps my wording wasn't clear with, "I have issue with using tactics that the Ai never takes advantage of." What I mean is, I make it a personal rule not to do anything the Ai can't do. It's for this reason that I don't use, for example, guard mode because the Ai can't, nor do i make changes to unit ranks pre-battle. I try only to do things, in and out of the battlefield, that the Ai is capable of doing for the sake of challenge and fairness. It's to this end that I'm trying to achieve a similar behavior to guard mode--tight formation, units remains in a square--so that I can make hoplites do what they do best (defend) without giving myself an advantage against the Ai (guard mode). It's easy to get units to remain tight to each other but not to keep the "square" intact without guard mode, and that's where I'm running into an issue at the moment.

I also don't know of any way to make the Ai to use their (superior) secondary weapons so I plan on boosting ATK stats of spears--it doesn't make sense to boost DEF stats since that's the cohorts' specialty, and I figure that a boost in [the hoplite's] cohesion will lower death rate anyways. It's worth noting that after a short while, the individual soldiers will change to their secondaries on their own anyways, meaning that a boost in spear ATK actually has minimal benefits; raising lethality might rectify this issue so that by the time the soldiers switch to their secondaries, they will have made a decent amount of kills. Of course, I'll have to raise lethality for all units to balance out stats--I'l probably look in the IMPORTANT STUFF folder. Doing this is all for the sake of avoiding to use guard mode and ALT + RCLICK since the Ai doesn't use those.

[LoGaL]

Keep in mind AI units in the campaign spawn with silver chevron experience, you might not need that. I suppose you did your testing in custom battle mode.

[OJ33DA]

Yeah. I've been doing a lot of thinking and have managed to convince myself that not even hoplites could've maintained their rigid formation when up against the Romans. The Roman specialty is bringing out the enemy to fight on terms that benefit the Romans, and I would expect no less from soldiers with large shields and long stabby swords. I'll let that issue die.

What I could not convince myself, however, is that elite hoplites could be beaten by fresh cohorts. Roman incontestable strength over other nations lies in their ability to take a huge beating (lose a few legions) and raise another 3 legions by daybreak. They were masters of recovery, and they employed those same principles within the battlefield. The Romans didn't build super soldiers, however, especially within only a year. That's why it irritates me that some fresh meat, first-time in battle Romans can beat the best hoplites who are supposed to be the elite, right?

Eventually I decided that it was time to give good o' spears a boost. I think they earned it, and it shows when elite hoplites make mince meat out of the Romans, though they lose a lot of men in the process. Cavalry stand no chance against a dense, armored formation of a spear unit. Phalanx units are especially uncontestable from the front, as they should be. Even levy phalanx are a force to be feared but will die quickly if flanked or surrounded. Despite these changes, ap units will still clobber hoplites like no other, as they should. I also want to experiment with boosting missile damage as that's something I feel is lacking.

[Searry]

Elite hoplites beaten by fresh cohorts? Depends on the cohorts really. I have found Triarii to work well against elite hoplites while light troops or Polybians pepper the unshielded side with missiles. I think it's about battlefield tactics. Javelins are very effective if used right. When Romans sadly lose their spear troops at the middle point when they lack auxilias I try to not fight against Elite Spear users anywhere as acceptable casualties become difficult. I have found an elite unit or two have to lock down these while the rest of the enemy line gets destroyed, only after that the rest can be finished off.

[OJ33DA]

After numerous rounds of testing, I’ve made an interesting observation, and that is that the “push power,” the ability of spear units to push swordsman around, can work against them in certain situations. For instance, a spear unit with +4 ATK (through edu) should theoretically whip the floor with a sword unit, however, because of the increased hit rate (chance to hit), the spears will over exert themselves to the point of losing cohesion and opening themselves up to flanking. I’m going to experiment with mass to see if that can improve cohesion. Didn' t work so I'll just give spears +ATK anyways since I find it ridiculous that they die faster with their primaries out (spears) instead of their secondaries (swords).

Note: I’m not referring to elite hoplites as spear units with chevrons but rather, units that have baseline superior attack stats or are described as “elite” in their description

Second Note: Roman One-Turn stats are different from regular One-Turn stats so that the Roman units are weaker in the former. This is probably why you have different results from me. The edu for the Roman One-Turn campaign has been adjusted (Lower Defensive stats, Lower Price for Roman units) so that playing Rome would be more challenging. Perhaps I'll import the Roman edu into the base campaign so that their stats are more to my liking; I predict that doing this will ironically make Rome faction more OP (Lower Prices) but that's a given anyways so I might as well rush them along.