Rohan Impossible even on M/M

[Kitbuqa]

My Rohan campaign has gone on for many turns fighting both Dunland and Adunabar. Gondor isn't helping at all. Despite starting with many settlements the economy is barely sufficient to maintain just over 1 stack. Both Dunland and Adunabar demand vassalage and then attack the same turn I accept. I cannot expand, and at the current rate, I will eventually lose a province, and then I will lose the campaign because there isn't enough cash for the upkeep.

[StealthEvo]

Dunland isn't excatly the hardest of factions to Crush.

[Klepto19]

My only thought is to play defensive for a while, and then counter attack (Ex. let them siege a fort/city and let them assault and beat them down, and when they rout, and you win send a unit out to attack a city or something.) Just don't forget to set your cities up to make money and build up armies.

[Elphir of Dol Amroth]

In my gaming-experience Rohan is definately a playable faction, at least until the moment you've wiped out Dunland, after that it gets really hard. Money is indeed a problem with Rohan, but on the other hand, your starting army is pretty good already. It's not really necessary to recruit much in the first few turns. I would advice to spent your money from the start on economic buildings (or happiness buildings that ensure you can raise the taxes of the settlement). Don't spent to much on your military in the beginning, you just don't have the money. Your army from start should be able to repel the invasion stack of Dunland and if you gather one or two stacks with mostly cavalry, you can invade Dunland yourself. A bit of exterminating/enslaving settlements, destroying some buildings (especially the Orcish ones) in your newly conquered Dunlendish towns and you should be able to become wealthy pretty quick. Also the more units you lose, the less upkeep you have to pay.

Defeating Dunland should be doable, but after that it gets very difficult. Because you are facing the stronger units of Adunabar and the RK, and the more numerous ones of Rhun. Also, at this point I found it very difficult to occupy more settlements, which meant that money was slowly running out again.

let them siege a fort/city and let them assault and beat them down

That would work with most factions, but with Rohan it's better to gather a fullstack of cavalry and defeat them (the Dunlendings) on the open plains. If you play battles yourself with cavalry, you can really get deceisive victories because the Dunlendings rout quickly.

[Thangaror]

Rohan is easy, if you don't fool yourself (as I did recently). And I'm playing on M/VH and have played many a campaign on H/VH and even with WoM on H/VH which increases difficulty massively.

Elphir said it, Dunland's forces are crushed easily, especially if YOU are taking initiative and attack. You should recruit some units of levies in Entlof and together with this light cavalry and the Riddermark Scouts from Wold and East-Emnet you are able to attack that revel town in Rhovanion. You can invade Dunland and conquer Dunchrioch without any difficulties. Send a spy in before, so you know the population of the city, and can judge whether to occupy, enslave or exterminate the population. Conquering this town and destroying most of Dunland's army will usually cause them to ask for a ceasefire.

You should have recruited more levies, axemen and bowmen to serve as garrison in Dunchrioch. A turn or two later (when unrest is gone) you should be able to withdraw most of you cavalry forces to repel a possible attack of Adûnabâr.

Built a muster field and palisade in Entlof (that town where people are not that happy). Actually you can crank up taxes to very high in every town, except Aglarond, so there's not really a need of happiness increasing buildings. Helm's Deep is a problem as soon as that FM in there dies. Due to the huge culture penalty in HD, you'll have to decrease taxes then. This is actually the most urgent problem Rohan has, the lack of family members. Therefore you should built the city development in HD asap.

After I had conquered Dunchrioch I conquered Calenhad from Adûn, which was a stupid idea because I was then immediately backstabbed by RK (Dunno why, but RK, Adûn and Harad always behave weird, they almost immediately agree on a ceasefire. RK or/and Adûn then attack Rohan. This happens even when the player is, say, Dunland or Rhûn quite often). It became tough for me, because I had just conquered Dunfreca and was unable to withdraw my troops, without it going rebel. Also RK is way tougher than Adûnabâr. Soon RK was standing with two nearly full-stacks at Altdorf.

I admit, I cheated, using the force diplomacy script, but I'd have done this anyway if RK had attacked me.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...orce+diplomacy

In my gaming-experience Rohan is definately a playable faction, at least until the moment you've wiped out Dunland, after that it gets really hard.

Even Dunland is playable. If you are aggressive and seize Helm's Deep asap. Key for most factions seemingly is to attack recklessly. Rohan needs to conquer Dunchrioch, Dunland Helm's Deep, RK Minas Ithil, Adûnabâr Minas Tirith. Then your primary foe will be so crippled it doesn't really rise again.

[CountMRVHS]

Consider yourself fortunate to be fighting Adunabar and Dunland rather than the RK!

I find that with Rohan, 1 all-cav army (eventually 2, one for the east and one for the west) is plenty to defeat most anything you come up against. You can get together that first army from turn 1, by consolidating all your cav units into one stack and sending them west to face Dunland, which will be attacking soon. An early mistake for newer players would be to leave those great cav units - like your Riddermark Spears - scattered throughout your kingdom. So if you happen to have any left, gather them into a stack and send them to attack. Even if the stack looks pitifully small, it *will* succeed against much larger forces, especially those of Dunland - provided you have mastered the art of the repeated cavalry charge.

You'll want to train some infantry, too, but I like to have 1 all-cav army for swift attacks (and rushing back to defend if necessary), and another army for sieging/occupying.

Couple of things about battles with your all-cav army: Avoid bridges, and avoid sieges. Your all-cav army can still take settlements, but it's better to wait until another enemy army comes along and attacks your besieging army - that way, it's an open field battle, where you have the advantage. Usually, bridge battles are great for defense, but not with your cav army. If you must defend a ford, set your army up one tile to either side of the crossing, where you'll have more open ground to maneuver.

What do you have for territories? If you still have roughly what you started with, great - Rohan is pretty easy to defend, with all the river crossings (but again, don't defend the bridges themselves). Forts are nice here, since the AI loves to attack them. You can use this to direct the flow of their invasion. Build a fort a bit back from the crossing you want to defend - say the crossing that separates your lands from the nearest Adunabar settlement. Put some leftover, cheap infantry in the fort, just to keep it there. When the AI sieges it, you've got a few turns to get a halfway decent army over there and counterattack.

Using this method, you should be able to hold off one attacker while conquering the other at the same time. My preferred route would be to kill Dunland first while holding back Adunabar - eventually Rhun or someone will start to attack Adunabar, and/or eventually you'll start seeing them training worse units. That should give you enough time to wipe out Dunland, and then you can turn your full attention east.

Just be sure that, as you wipe out Dunland, you avoid getting too close to the RK - if you gain a province that borders them, they'll attack you eventually.

[Thangaror]

Consider yourself fortunate to be fighting Adunabar and Dunland rather than the RK!

Why so?
Basically their armies look pretty much the same: Bowmen, swordsmen, spearmen, militia. But Adûnabâr does neither have heavy cavalry nor Men at Arms. And the Uruks are pretty bad. Their spearmen, halberds and champions are indeed somewhat dangerous, but due to their low morale, low armour and no shield you can annihilate them quite easily with Riddermark Bowmen.

[Nehcrum]

My Rohan campaign has gone on for many turns fighting both Dunland and Adunabar. Gondor isn't helping at all. Despite starting with many settlements the economy is barely sufficient to maintain just over 1 stack. Both Dunland and Adunabar demand vassalage and then attack the same turn I accept. I cannot expand, and at the current rate, I will eventually lose a province, and then I will lose the campaign because there isn't enough cash for the upkeep.

Here, I wrote a guide for Rohan, that should help you out a bit.
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=383850


But some basic tips about Rohan and then some basic tips on the game overall.
As Rohan, your strength lies in your cavalry. And in field battles, mounted archers rule supreme against everything except RK and Adunabar longbowmen (which is the best unit in the game, IMO, longest range of all archers, hardest hitting, and almost as good as gondor swordsmen in melee, which is better than everything but the most elite enemy infantry).
Dunland has a significant weakness in archers and cavalry. Their archers have short range, low damage and no defense. And their cavalry is just plain weak in comparison with yours.

Thing is, in FATW, playing as any faction, you will start out with a much larger army than you can afford to have. So attacking early on is necessary, if nothing else then just to cut down on your upkeep.
Building units early as Rohan, you should focus on riddermark scouts, and preferably build them in your capital, where they get a bonus to experience (all your cavalry gets bonus experience being built or retrained in your capital). These scouts are accomplished horse archers, and can easily inflict heavy damages upon Dunlands forces which consists mainly of lightly armored infantry. And their archers and cavalry are too weak to chase down or shoot back against your horse archers.
You can wear down enemy forces by attacking them in the field (or having them attack you) and ride around them and shoot arrows into them and then flee off the map, which you can do manually. That will inflict heavy casualties on them, and without hardly any losses for you. None at all in fact, if they lack archers and you move your forces properly.
Doing this, you can beat a much larger army over several turns, taking chunks out of it.
For this reason, your main cavalry army should not be in a city, where it can get locked in, but instead roam around, looking for fights.


As for some more general tips on the game, which will make things much easier for you. The AI in the game is dumb. I don't understand why RK attacked you, I think they are hardcoded so that they cannot attack Rohan unless you declare war on them first (or has that changed in a later version?), same goes in reverse if you play RK.
But other than that, the game is called total war for a reason, namely that it is you against the computer. Everyone is gunning for you.
The AI will attack the provinces that they border, with seaborne attacks being an exception, and they will prefer to attack you over another AI. But if you do not share borders with them, they will not attack you (until you start sharing borders with them). The diplomatic AI is also, for some reason, not in any way connected with the rest of the game, but is totally independant. That means that treaties of various kinds are utterly worthless (with the exception of trade agreements, which will not be broken until someone attacks the other) and the AI won't stick to them and doesn't really seem to recognize that they even exist.
That's why they may offer one thing in diplomacy one turn and then act totally contradictory right afterwards.

The AI is also pretty dumb. He always (almost anyways, not totally sure) attacks the provinces that he borders. He will not bypass a city with lots of forces, and instead attack a city further into you territory that is almost defenseless. This can easily be exploited, since that means that non-border territories only need units to keep order, not to defend them.
And the AI also assumes that everyone thinks the same way he does, so all of his cities will be lightly defended, except the ones at the border. And when he attacks, he sends all the unit he has, which are not needed for keeping order, against you.
That means you can cause considerable damage to Dunland by moving infantry units into Helms deep as garrison to meet his initial attack, and then send your cavalry into his Dunland once he starts laying siege Helms deep.
Doing so means you will find his cities lightly defended, and you can attack these and hopefully take them, exterminate them and destroy all buildings that are unusable to you, such as barracks, stables, religious buldings and so on. This will give you some money, and it will also seriously hurt Dunlands economy and ability to recruit forces.
Usually, he will break his siege and try to return to chase you off. Don't get caught somewhere where you can't escape, and you'll be fine, and he'll be busy chasing your much faster cavalry units around.

The AI will also not attack blindly, but first try and scout out your cities. So blocking out Adunabar by placing an army at the bridge between your territories can actually keep him from attacking you at all, and will keep the war against RK going instead.


You can also effectively sally forth from a siege, doing the whole whittling down thing, if you got archers. Just attack him with your garrison when he is sieging, then go out with archers and fire away until you got no more arrows, then march back in, and quit the battle. As long as the doors are closed and no enemies inside, you will get the message that your sally has failed. But that only means you haven't broken the siege.
And I wouldn't really call a battle where I kill up to a third of the enemy forces with no losses of my own a defeat.

Why so?
Basically their armies look pretty much the same: Bowmen, swordsmen, spearmen, militia. But Adûnabâr does neither have heavy cavalry nor Men at Arms. And the Uruks are pretty bad. Their spearmen, halberds and champions are indeed somewhat dangerous, but due to their low morale, low armour and no shield you can annihilate them quite easily with Riddermark Bowmen.

Except that halberds and champions are way up the building tree and the AI ain't too good on developing his settlement into higher levels.

Uruk spearmen are worse than royal spearmen. And RK is so dangerous partly because minas tirith is fully developed and they can recruit the best units at their disposal right from the start.

[CountMRVHS]

All good points Nehcrum.

I would only add that *sometimes*, when playing on Medium campaign difficulty, you can get into some somewhat sensible diplomacy from the AI, where alliances or at least neutrality may hold out for longer than on higher settings.

And those Uruk Halberds are pretty good, if they're commanded by the player. I used them to good effect against Rohan, especially at fords and sieges. But you're right, the AI rarely develops that far.

[Thangaror]

and preferably build them in your capital, where they get a bonus to experience (all your cavalry gets bonus experience being built or retrained in your capital).

Oh, that's another point!
Be careful with retraining! If you retrain an unexperienced unit in Edoras you'll have to extra pay for the exp upgrade. Thus, if you have to retrain take up the unit card in your army by holding the left mouse button and use drag and drop to fill up numbers. That saves some money.

As for some more general tips on the game, which will make things much easier for you. The AI in the game is dumb. I don't understand why RK attacked you, I think they are hardcoded so that they cannot attack Rohan unless you declare war on them first (or has that changed in a later version?), same goes in reverse if you play RK.

Nah, they somehow mananged to this for the next release.

Except that halberds and champions are way up the building tree and the AI ain't too good on developing his settlement into higher levels.

Champions are not that high up, but you're right. Adûnabârs building tree is somewhat screwed up atm. IIRC you'll need a great library for the CD-building, then you need a foundry first to build the High Temple, and *then* you can build the Uruk breeder or Troll caves.

[Bull3pr00f de Bodemloze]

^Aren't you confirming what Count said? He should be lucky to fight Adunabar (as you said it, a dumbed-down version of the RK, mostly).

[Thangaror]

Yeah, you're right. A misunderstanding, I mixed things up.

[CountMRVHS]

Yeah, the RK is definitely tougher than Adun. - but also, it's nice for the Rohan player to be fighting the Uruks and rebel Dunedain rather than their longtime allies the RK. I'd prefer to fight Adun. as Rohan even if they were consistently tougher - just for roleplay purposes.

[Kitbuqa]

Okay well I've followed y'alls advice, and I've been successful at defeated armies on the field. However, I haven't been able to capture and hold any Dunland provinces. i barely captured the province closest to Hornburg but there was nothing I could do to make the public order go higher than 20 percent. and by then I was being counter attacked by much larger forces. the troops I have left are not enough.

[CountMRVHS]

Have you been converting the populace to Men of the West? Or indiscriminately tearing down Dunlendish conversion buildings?

[Prince of Judah]

I tried the same thing and It didn't work well. i think some of the settlements impossible to conquer once. You have to conquer it, exterminate the populace, and conquer it again, and exterminate it again until it is too low to revolt.

[Blatta Optima Maxima]

LOL, I thought you said you hated fantasy.

[Thangaror]

Yeah, FATW has given the is_peasant trait to all units, this might be a reason. But actually when the remaining populace is about 10,000 you can usually maintain order with a full-stack and a somewhat competent family member. It's harder with RK since her units are so small. Anyway you'll have to conquer important settlements like Dunchrioch or Dunfreca in time, before it becomes a large city. For then you'll indeed have problems when the population grows.

[Spike]

1) eventually, the population boost will be capped, and keep in mind, disbanding orcs to do as settlers is basically you can do this kind of things in game, but unless you can convert orcs into good humans again ... . And orc buildings reduce health I remember, your high population can drop to mere hundreds if plaque struck. And your general who stationed there can die so sudden.

2) well, and disable armour/weapon upgrade? err... just no then... I prefer having slower to train mannish troops with silver weapon or armour rather than orcs who die like flies against haradrim missile spam

3) Actually, Trolls are the most cost effective when you also comparing their battle performance, as long as they're supported and enemy line enggage yours, tell them to run and attack, then you can see them play golf with the enemy troops as balls. 1 unit of Olog Hai should usually rack arround 400-700 kills per battle if they're properly used. Just watch out for their rather fragile morale. And... actually, the best support for them comes from mannish troops who's more reliable to hold the line while your trolls smashing them to the sky.

4) you obviously never facing another terror units (berserkers, far harad men, king's horsemen, etc), they'll merely run on contact, while most of your mannish troops still keep fighting. Well, of course, if properly used, Orc Champs are killing machine, but when they're not on the mood...

5) true, and at least they have arrows, and you won't need much of them, that's why minas ithil alone is sufficient (they're 0 turn production!)

6) and warg is on Rhovanion land, yeah, they're useful, but warg archers only, the plain warg are pretty much no use

[Nehcrum]

1) eventually, the population boost will be capped, and keep in mind, disbanding orcs to do as settlers is basically you can do this kind of things in game, but unless you can convert orcs into good humans again ... . And orc buildings reduce health I remember, your high population can drop to mere hundreds if plaque struck. And your general who stationed there can die so sudden.

2) well, and disable armour/weapon upgrade? err... just no then... I prefer having slower to train mannish troops with silver weapon or armour rather than orcs who die like flies against haradrim missile spam

3) Actually, Trolls are the most cost effective when you also comparing their battle performance, as long as they're supported and enemy line enggage yours, tell them to run and attack, then you can see them play golf with the enemy troops as balls. 1 unit of Olog Hai should usually rack arround 400-700 kills per battle if they're properly used. Just watch out for their rather fragile morale. And... actually, the best support for them comes from mannish troops who's more reliable to hold the line while your trolls smashing them to the sky.

4) you obviously never facing another terror units (berserkers, far harad men, king's horsemen, etc), they'll merely run on contact, while most of your mannish troops still keep fighting. Well, of course, if properly used, Orc Champs are killing machine, but when they're not on the mood...

5) true, and at least they have arrows, and you won't need much of them, that's why minas ithil alone is sufficient (they're 0 turn production!)

6) and warg is on Rhovanion land, yeah, they're useful, but warg archers only, the plain warg are pretty much no use

1. Population gets capped when population growth gets balanced out by other factors. And health alleviate one of these factors which give a bonus to population growth (and order), so +5% health gives the same population as +0.5% population growth. But for orc buildings, the population growth is so big it easily beats out the negative to health it gives (Uruk hold gives -4 to health and +20 to growth, which in the end +8% population growth, and it also gives 20% cheaper buildings which builds 35% faster). All you get from it is is a little less order (20% less to be exact).
So it will not only help your population grow fast, it will also make it grow much larger, meaning larger income (even though it looks like it gets lower since upkeep for troops is spread across your cities based on their size, so a larger city gives more tax income but also gets to pay a larger share of the total upkeep).

2. But you need money to train mannish troops. And the orc cities earn you that money. You can build them up quick, with high population and faster build-times, giving you more tax and faster economic buildings. Income from trade is also based on city size, so you will get even more cash from there. turning the cities that can build the basic orc buildings into orc dwellings is very beneficial for your economy, and allows you to spend cash on other cities, to build them up so you can recruit your mannish units there.

3. Depends on what you consider cost-effective. I think archers are the most cost-effective since if they are used right, you don't lose any men in those units. Trolls have their uses, no doubt, but are far too expensive to use in anything but a very limited number of units in your main army (or main armies, for late in the game, but by then, cash is no longer a problem).

4. Orc Champions does not have discipline problems like other orc units, they got 11 base morale, compared to adunabar swordsmens 12.

5. Snagas are not for fighting, they are for populating cities and keeping order, being very cheap in upkeep. And thereby easily neutralizing the decrease in order you get from the orc buildings, since you can have a few snaga units as garrison there and still make a profit from it.
And having them as garrison units in other cities, far from the front where the enemy will not attack, means less overall upkeep.

6. Wargs scare both foot and mounted and have bonuses against most units (except archers, where they are weaker for some reason). And yeah, no point in building normal wargs or warg riders, since they got almost the same stats as warg archers, but without the bows.