Quick tip about bridge battles

[Sammyboi]

A common mistake when defending a bridge battle is to repeat the tactic from RTW of jamming your side of the bridge with spears in defend mode, and not let the enemy set foot on your side of the crossing. This is actually not the best approach in M2TW, as the enemy will penetrate your ranks pretty fast and your spears won't be able to keep them confined to the bridge. Better to set your men up as per the image below, which gives the enemy a small amount of space to occupy. Why? Because now they'll stop running before engaging your men. If you'd just lined up straight across the bridge end, they'd have run 'through' your line because of the way unit cohesion works in this game. The sheer mass of bodies will pass right through your men if they are busy fighting - i.e. if a man is engaged in an animation, then he can't stop another man from simply walking past him. If your front line is outnumbered, as it will be when the enemy crams his entire force onto the bridge, then very quickly you'll have enemy troops rushing right through you and out the other side

However in this formation the enemy is forced to fight on multiple fronts, and will generally do so slowly giving you ample time to rain fire arrows into the throng of bodies. If you're feeling brave have a catapult set up on higher ground to drop fire rounds into the middle.

Bonus - as an added bonus when using this formation, if the enemy begin a mass rout they will most likely rout forwards, not backwards for some reason. Trying to rout through your lines means you'll end up capturing hundreds of them. I suspect there's a calculation going on behind the scenes which tells the routers that running backwards means crossing a bridge, and that's 'bad', so they rout forwards straight into your men. See the attached screeny for an example of that (the big blob of corpses on the right were all routers).

PS don't expect this to work against a human player, who will simply cram the bridge with artillery and blow you to bits.

[Shocktoop]

A good strategy, but there is a better one. I find defending bridges is easy when using the "L" defence. Basically:

SP=Spearmen/Pike
SW=Swords
C/A=cavalry/Artillery

..C/A.................................SW
..C/A.................................SW
..C/A.................................SW
........SPSPSPSPSPSPSPSPSPSP

Your spearmen hold the line. The swordmen are positioned so that they can attack the unshielded side of the enemy. The cavalry charge repeatedly from the open side or the artillery shoots (works best with ballista). Enjoy!

[Recluse]

If you don't have elite units, I've used this method with great success:

______|....|_____
....A...S....S...A....
.......A...S...A.......
.........A..I..A........
LC........AA.......LC
...........AA...........
......HC........HC....

S = Schiltrom
A = Archers
I = Infantry
LC = Light Cav
HC = Heavy cav

It gives the attacker room to reach the other side. After going through a wall of fire arrows the hit the schiltroms (set in guard mode) and get chewed to bits as the fire arrows continue to rain. Routers come towards you and can be run down by the light cav.

Also, if your perimeter starts to leak or break (especially when the second stack comes through) you can send in the cav and clamp down on your lines.

I did this with an english fullstack consisting of 2 levy spear, 1 armoured sgt spear, 1 merc spear, 10 peasant archers, 1 merc pilgrims, 1 merc xbow, 2 hobilars, plus 2 generals for heavy cav, and defeated two fullstacks of Portugese, one right after another.



Of course, all my spearmen died heroically, but it is an effective poor man's bridge defense.

[HakanSherif]

Hehe best bridge defense is using horse archers, disable the skirmish mod at the beginning, place your HA's as a big V , enable the skirmish mod if u sense that your HA's will be forced into melee, if the opponent manages to pass completely enable full skirmish mod and finish them up with the heavy cavalry. If the terrain gives u a height advantage the better.

Horse archers FTW.

[dmcheatw]

is the unshielded side of the enemy really weaker? in the faust does it not have the same value for shield (50%) on each side of the man?

what about this type of formation:

.......................Enemy..........................
...........................|.............................
....................|......|.....|......................
....................|.....\/.....|......................
....................|............|.......................

Inf/Spear..............................Inf/Spear
..........................................................
..........................................................
.....................Inf/Spear.........................
..........................................................
..........................................................
..........................................................
......Cav.................................Cav........

The main point is infantry making a small pocket so in theory individual units are attacked at every direction as they step off the bridge not just from the front. the rearmost infantry should be reinforced first, or assisted with cavalry and maybe should even be in guard mode, to block the forward momentum of the enemy. if you dont get spread out too thin as to break, you will see a much larger amount of your units engaged over a greater surface area whereas much smaller percent of enemy units are doing attack animations over a smaller surface area, most are packed together in the center of the kill zone. i find the only time i back off the bridge like in the orig screens is when i have a fairly substantial hill behind the bridge like in the pic

what do you guys think?

[dmcheatw]

and somehow i missed the drawing showing basically what i outlined above. regardless why not put the arcs on the extreme flanks and even a little forward of the infantry, right on the beach so as to increase their range? and to rush the sides when things become crucial

[Thehouse1]

I always get a kick out of shishkabobs though

[LuciusCorneliusSulla]

Try this. Really mangles them suckers when they have to pass through the "cogs" formed by the 4 schiltroms.

And it concentrates all your archers fire on their unshielded sides. If you use flame arrows it demoralises the enemy and they start to flee, straggling along the banks of the river where you can crush them with your cavalry wings.

[Poradain]

I just want to add that Schiltrom as stated in formations above absolutely owns. Put 4 armoured sergeants on Schiltrom last time with crossbows and light calv. and I defeated 1000+ enemy with only 13 losses. It was unbelievable!

[Dogman]

In any bridge defense you want your missile units firing into the right side of the enemy, so place them to the left of the bridge. Shield values don't count when being attacked from the rear or the right side. The best formation, no matter what kind of infantry you have, whether it be pike, spear, heavy or light, is formation concave to that of the bridge, like this: \_/

However, a few Schiltrom in the middle there wouldn't hurt.