Archer army problems!

[Kye]

I am having great success on my Tokugawa legendary campaign, but have lost a few key battles because the enemy fields so many archers.

Right now I have a stack of katana, bow samurai and katana cav going up against a full stack of archers and matchlock ashigaru. if I defend on a open plain, they pick one unit off, literally destorying it in 3 volly's and then moving onto the next. If I am defending a castle they do the same thing. I find it very hard to counter, as any melee units that I use to charge them are cut down in seconds, same goes with cav. Any advice would be great

Kye.

[Amaranthen]

Siege Weapons, you need them. I assume the AI will put them in a huge pile, one giant fire ball will knock out many samurai snipers.

Also...

Use Ashigaru bowman to "soak up" (3 stacks) the damage up front while your more expensive units charge. Let them attack your bowman while your melee rush forward.

[Adversity]

Ashigaru are important in an army to soak up volleys since we all can replace ashigaru in a turn. Try using yari ashigaru to charge the bow samurai and matchlocks and then send your main offensive line.

[Blee]

Make a big crescent around their army.
Put your units in loose formation.
Send in one unit of rallied ashigaru with your general close behind, inspire if you need to.
Once you melee it's pretty much over

Or just get 4-5 archers as well, and hit a few of the archers on the AIs flanks. The AI will only pull 2-3 units to engage rather than all of the missile units it has, and you can whittle those down.

Regardless..... full stacks of archers and matchlocks are a joke..... if you try flanking them, they reposition their army. Hit them then.

[themichaelx]

Invest in cavalry or go full archer yourself and shoot it out.

[Prophet0A]

Cavalry seems a cheap solution, in the long run. I guess keeping your archers, and melee as well, in a loose formation helps. Skirmishing with an enemy army with more archers than you is just plane stupid of course. Sally fourth and try to engage them in melee. Thats a simple and good tactic I should think.

[StormtrooperDan]

I've noticed some heavy archer armies stacks and it is very costly to battle against them. They seems to favor targeting the more expensive units, so my Katana Samurai are always the hardest hit by archers.

Forests are your best bet since they negate most archer damage, so forest position is more of a priority than hills.

[Beld]

Cavalry can work, but if they have ANY spear units protecting their archers the light cav will be in a lot of trouble, and I find it to be too much micromanaging to use them as counter to mass archers.

What I find is using ashigaru. If using bow-ashi, just send em up in loose formation as a screen and run your melee through them on a charge.

My personal favorite is to have 4 units of yari-ashi in my vanguard, I usually only use this against archer heavy armies:

y=yari-ashi
s=swords (katana, nodachi, loan(mp) etc)
c=cav
g=general
a=archer
_=blank space

If it's my offensive army, I'm light on the archers, or have none at all. Which of course is tricky. Here's the formation-

______YYYY______
__SSSS____SSSS__
CC____SSS_____CC
_______G_________

I'll put the yari in loose formation for the march, when it's time to charge, they close ranks. When they are about to make contact, they go into spear wall. If/when they rout (depending on difficulty and their exp), the back rank swordsmen charge. This usually makes the enemies momentum turn my convex formation into a concave, exposing their flanks for easy cav charges.

The key is having the ashigaru in front to soak them up as others have said, but I find that if I march them (and only them) in loose, then they stay around for a good while, without any of the heartbreaks of seeing your katana samurai melt cause the enemy got off a good charge before you completely closed ranks.

In this case, if the yari flee, it's actually a nice feint move, esp if I can rally them at the back of the army to act as reserves.

[Amur_Tiger]

I'd definitely back up the forest advice, while more difficult to use on the offensive I used this to great advantage against 2 full-stack armies, bow heavy that I'd had difficulty with otherwise. Basically hide your entire army in a decent ambush position, the deeper inside forest the better then position your cavalry in such a position that the enemy army is drawn past your hidden forces, exposing their flank to you. Make sure while doing this that your archers aren't set to fire at will as they will reveal themselves and your position well before your melee troops are close enough to charge in without taking too many arrows to the face. Most often I just keep drawing them in a close pass until one of my units is revealed then charge everything forward, including your luring cavalry & general units. Between being closer to melee troops then is ideal for an archer heavy army and their needing to reposition themselves you can often catch this army almost entirely off-guard and slaughter them before they have a chance to finish off any of your own units.

[nameless]

They react very fast though.

If you have a cavalry that's flanking them, the AI will immediately realign them enough to start causing some heavy casualties to begin with.

Though I found rocket troops to be surprising effective. More tests needed though.

[MisterV]

An enormous crowd of katana/no-dachi samurai in loose formation will charge them down and cut them without problems (and in vanilla their morale is likely to break ~30 seconds after the first charge). That's how I've been doing it. Oh, don't forget a couple cavalry units to clean up the routing troops.

[nameless]

How in blazes did you deal with the enemy cavalry? The AI will not hesitate to throw cavalry into your front ranks and your katana units will go flying.

[Amur_Tiger]

They do react fairly quickly but the idea is to provide enough of a shock to them to get most of their melee and archers engaged with your infantry, once stuck in your cavalry can have relatively free reign on isolated archer units which remained far enough from your forest to escape being directly engaged or simply have your cav put pressure on their new rear. Either way I've managed to preserve my army more or less intact against larger numbers of Chos bow units, albeit my army had a fair amount of high grade samurai on foot and yari cav, given this was on Hard I considered this a fairly favorable result compared to the usual attrition you suffer against a bow-army.

[Daneboy]

Damnn...these archer armies are difficult.

Perhaps the effectiveness of arrow attacks should be toned down a bit.

[Xelathur]

Charge with 3-4 units of Yari Ashigaru ( pref with armor upgrade ) and use Rally/Inspire if you need to. Once the enemy battle line starts to pick them off, have your cavalry charge from both flanks ( should be easy to get them there ) and the battle will be over.

This is DarthMod however. Better balance overall

*Tip

Have cavalry, matchlocks, katana samurai etc close on the campaign map so that you may change your army composition if need be.
Cavalry is worthless in a siege, but rocks archers/matchlocks. Having the versatility to tailor your army to their task work wonders. And, you have a second army if everything goes down the drain

[Ecka65]

This is DarthMod however. Better balance overall

No disrespect Xelathur, but Darth has made so many changes within days of release that I'm not sure even he knows what vanilla is (was). As for balance, it must be the first time ever that I've experienced a major mod that seems to set about making the game easier! Since the hell when did TW ever need such a thing!? The OP is playing on Legendary = less than VH didn't really provide the challenge he was after = Darthmod will bore him within 25 minutes.

[Xelathur]

No disrespect Xelathur, but Darth has made so many changes within days of release that I'm not sure even he knows what vanilla is (was). As for balance, it must be the first time ever that I've experienced a major mod that seems to set about making the game easier! Since the hell when did TW ever need such a thing!? The OP is playing on Legendary = less than VH didn't really provide the challenge he was after = Darthmod will bore him within 25 minutes.

Darthmod is easier than vanilla? Yeah, if you play on easy, ofcourse. I feel you are going out of context here. If you do not like DarthMod that is fine, but don't be all itchy about it. The difficulty slider ain't modded out for sure..

[Ecka65]

Darthmod is easier than vanilla? Yeah, if you play on easy, ofcourse. I feel you are going out of context here. If you do not like DarthMod that is fine, but don't be all itchy about it. The difficulty slider ain't modded out for sure..

Hey, not getting itchy and I have nothing but respect for Darth's modding abilities. Darthmod makes the economy easier, which in turn makes the game a lot easier, and reduces negative diplo penalties for the player, which combined makes the game a dolly in comparison to vanilla. It doesn't matter what difficulty setting you use, the above applies = easy.

My point is actually, if you're playing with Darthmod (or indeed any overhaul mod) what applies in it may not be relevant to an OP based on vanilla.

[Kazang]

Either go all melee infantry and cav, yari/naginata infantry are the best due to high armour and rapid advance, or simply yari ashigaru as they are so cheap and numerous.
Once the archers are engaged with the infantry just flank with the cav and it's all over. The trick is to advance everything at once, sending in small groups of units doesn't work at all, and try to get every unit engaged in melee as soon as possible.
Beld's formation above is generally what I use, it's quite effective.

Or you can just get more archers yourself, ashigaru are better than all the other archers if you are massing them as the pure numbers make up for any accuracy advantage and are cheap and easy to replace, put them in loose formation and then use a few units of shock troops to finish the job.

[AlfonsoVIII]

If you cannot win an archer shootout, engage in melee ASAP. Run your whole army into theres and let them commit friendly fire. Have 4 cav units, 2 on each flank, run behind and attack all the archers so they cannot shoot arrows. Should be pretty easy.