My battle stories
I've had Rome Total War for a few years now, and I must say I love it. I like it so much, I even introduced the game to my 58 year old father, who became addicted to the game and plays it every chance he gets. Naturally, the thing to do when you have two people in one household who love the same game is go against each other. So far me and my dad have only managed to go head to head in three battles, as I hadn't picked up the game for more than a year.
When I did pick it up again, this is what happened:
Fight One:
I set up a custom battle in flat terrain, with a few trees spread around. (can't remember the name of it though.) He picks the House of Scipii because he loves them so much, and I picked the Seleucids because they have something of everything, basically. I choose to go defensive, so I set up my four units of silver shield pikemen dead center of my field, with my two silver shield legionaries guarding the flanks. I have three units of archers behind them, and some slingers in front and slightly to the right, set up as skirmishers and hiding in the trees.
On my left, fairly close to my main body of soldiers I have another unit of archers set up in front of my two untis of heavy onagers. Farther to the right are two units of cataphracts.
On the far right of me are my heavily armored elephants, and my one other unit of cataphracts. My general, naturally, is behind the archers and the pikemen.
The battle starts. I go to inspect his troops. Damnit, he's on the defensive too. Oh well. His army contains almost all legionary cohorts, along with two units of heavy onagers, and six units of praetorian cavalry. His general, it seems, got placed in with his onagers. On top of that, he has a bunch of auxilia archers.
He goes on the attack though sending the cavalry he has on my left side into some forest to hide. The cavalry on my right starts walking forward. The rest of the army follows.
He moves his onagers up front, and I'm in range. Luckily, he misses almost all his shots, and the ones that hit only take out one or two of my spread out archers. I decide to charge my elephants at the onagers, as there were two cohorts of infantrty in between them. One lucky hit on my elephants by the onager later and my hopes were crushed, only a few seconds away from charging distance. They go berserk and run back towards my own men. Bfore they reach my lines, I put them down. Damn, my elephants gone already. But hey, this is my first time playing the game in more than a year, gimme a break.
His cavalry on my left come out of hiding and go for my onagers when they start firing on his advancing infantry. They get hit pretty hard by my archers and a few good hits from the onagers, but eventually they get close and start tearing me apart. I send my silver shield legionaries to go hlep out and charge my two units of cataphracts at him. Big long struggle underway, and that fight might last for a while.
Meanwhile his infantry are almost at my pikes. Two units split off and go towards the big cavalry fight to my left, and the others start spreading out to get behind my pikemen. There are five of them there, so I decide to go one on one on all of them and break my lines of pikemen and use my other legionarries to engage them all. He didn't spend any money on experience points, judging by the size and status of his army. His archers and mine are firing back and forth, but since mine are spread out and his close together, I seem to be doing just fine there.
However, on my right I'm not doing so great. With the loss of my elephants, it's three units of praetorian cavalry against one unit of cataphracts and some slingers set to skirmish. Oh boy. My forces are pretty well enveloped and crushed, but I got a good full units worth of cavalry down too. But that means the rest of his cavalry can go help his infantry too. Lucky me. Stupid me. They've got my legionaries pretty well pinned down and basically surrounded with a first cohort of infantry and one half unit of cavalry. The rest of their cavalry are mowing down my archers. I know I can't handle them with my general unit alone so I take him and bring him around to hit the backs of the guys who are harrassing my legionaries.
Then I focus my attention back on the fight on my left flank. His cavalry are pretty well worn down, and almost all gone, but the infantry he used to hit me from behind are destroying me. My onagers and one unit of infantry rout, and soon so do both of my cataphracts. Luckily, the cataphracts recover before they leave the map. Woohoo.
Leaving my general alone in a mass of fighting men was stupid too. My archers finished, he brings those cavalry about and goes to finish off my infantry. One of my pikemen units have routed, the others are doing good but slowly losing. Soon my general is killed, and my infantry are either all gone or rout.
There's no saving this. He's got a little under half his army and I'm down to about 90 cataphracts. I use the smaller unit (they had 32 or something left) to charge his advancing army to slow them down. A few units of pikemen recover from the rout as well and I send them to join them, and I get my big unit of cavalry to go around the whole army and get the general and the archers.
It works, mostly. I manage to make my way to his onager units where the general was and effectively kill him and rout the onager engineers. The archers I get a small piece of before being forced to run away, as the rest of my army had been finished with and now it was down to 40 cataphracts on my side.
I get a fair distance away, then stop my men to let them rest for the final charge. If I can break one unit I might be able to rout a few and then I won't have lost so horribly badly. My father organizes his forces and slowly marches towards me in full force. I charge his infantry. I get through the first unit before my cataphracts begin to get slaughtered and they rout. Clear defeat. Horrible defeat. Having not played in a large amount of time is my excuse for this one.
Round One: Clear Defeat. Winner: My dad.
Fight Two: I'm going German this time. Full army of berserkers, (but with two things of dogs) see what happens. He's Greek. Fine by me. We're in the Germanic Forest, with "dense fog" (that was barely noticeable) and it was at sunrise. I put my whole army in a clump in the trees, so all he sees is one unit of berserkers which is my general, and my two units of dogs that are out of the trees and slightly to the side.
His army consists of two units of cavalry, two archers, one thing of slingers, and the rest are all Spartan hoplites. Oh joy of joys, this will be very interesting. I wonder how berserkers do against a phalanx...
Anyways, he knows what I'm doing now. He stays put, so after about five minutes of waiting I get bored and charge my dogs at his archers, as they're a big threat and dogs can whoop archers easily, whereas Spartans are a tad more difficult. They hit the archers, rout them, and sadly they charge off after them, off the field and they're damn useless. Oh well. More waiting, so again I get bored and Ctrl+A and hit the "F" key. Boom, whole army goes berserk and charges an a big clump of screaming men. Awesome. Too bad I couldn't control the units though, because as they hit two units of spartans, threee more moved around to box them in. Luckily, it didn't exactly work like that. Nobody really died early on, as the pikes stopped my berserkers from reaching the enemy. Their archers only got a few kills before I got to their men and my dad didn't want to risk hitting his own guys. But one berserker got around at the edge of a phalanx, started spinning and tossing people in the air and soon I had that whole phalanx routing. Good, I had some leeway now. Now my clump could spill over the sides of their attempt to boxme in and pretty soon I had those other four units on the run as well.
Two more phalanxes fell that way, but my army was thinning out. The archers and slingers were giving me a hard time, but luckily two units became un-berserk and I was able to tell them to charge the archers. They went nuts again before they got there and destroyed them all. The slingers, on the other hand, were untouched. All his cavalry hit me from behind and knocked over a bunch of my men. But they got up, started swinging and killed nearly all their cavalry. Sweet. Now there were only two phalanxes of Spartans and some slingers left, but shockingly soon I had only about forty guys fighting those spartans. Eventually most of my units were down to 1, my general unit included, before my guys really started dying off. Then my general died (I forgot to mention I got his general a while ago) and soon all my men were gone.
Close defeat, but I did better than him on all accounts. I had a little under 1000 men, a bunch of those from the dogs, while he had about 2200. They killed me to the last man (minus the dogs of course) to get a total of 800 kills. My army, on the other hand, got 1800-odd kills. No matter, reslut:
Round Two: Close defeat. Winner: My dad.
Anyways, round 4 is about to start, so I'll upadate this later to include 3 and four. I win sometimes too, don't you worry, and don't get me wrong, my dad's old, but he's really good. He's spent every bit of spare time he had playing RTW, M2TW and Call of Duty.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by emotion_name
... so that's why no one plays monopoly with me anymore
