Advice Needed on Battles/Sauron

[Gimli2]

Playing as Arnor/Eriador at the moment and had just taken Moria, when Sauron with the called an invasion against it and besieged it himself and took it. Now i'm afraid he will turn to my industrial hinterland ie. Bree, Staddle and Annuminias(?).

So my question is how do i kill him and his serious army? Given he can just walk through my defensive line and just cause havoc.

And my second question is how can i stop enemy pushing through my lines? When fighting Saurons army in Moria I set up behind the bridge so i could bottleneck his forces but they just pushed through my forces and broke into my archer lines and into the centre of Moria. So how do i stop this in the future?

[knight of meh]

Ballistas ... and pray ...

[Gimli2]

haha I'll give that a try so

[Jmonstra]

Pretty much what he said. You can kill him in one shot if you manage to smack him with a flaming ballista bolt

[Ulfgard the Unmaker]

Pretty much what he said. You can kill him in one shot if you manage to smack him with a flaming ballista bolt

Bugger the flaming bolts. You'll do just as much damage with the standard bolts, and your accuracy will be better. The only real benefit, afaik, of flaming ammunition is increased morale damage, which will do you no good against Sauron himself.

[Wolfeson]

What they said.

The good news, however, is that after invading a target like Moria, the AI normally won't try to push farther into your territory from there. Whatever portion of their army consisted of invasion mercenaries will disband, and the AI will usually just go back to focusing on whoever they were fighting prior to the invasion. So for Mordor, they'll go back to focusing on Gondor and Rohan and probably won't push farther against you.

As far as preventing enemies from just pushing through your lines, the best thing is to guard the choke(s) with units that can do a shield/spear wall. This packs them in more tightly, and overall makes them more resistant to being pushed around. If you've become Arnor already, you should have several units available that can do shield wall, including their militia. If not, you'll just have to surround the pushing units on 3 sides with as thick an infantry line as you can and see how it goes.

[Loki_999]

Not quite. Flaming bolts have a better change of actually hurting, especially against armoured opponents, and Sauron is armoured to the gills.

Watch close up flaming arrows vs regular arrows... with regular ones they often hit, but not always kill. Sure, regular ballista bolts will kill most things without the fire, but Sauron is bloody tough.

I'd take the reduced hit change for the more sure kill chance (or at least in Sauron's case, reducing his HP).

[ThorHa]

To the second question:

I had the problem myself often enough a few years ago. There are 2 working solutions:

1) Push 2 units a good bit into the bridge. As soon as the enemy is about to make contact let these guys attack themselves. Seems to prevent the push by sheer enemy mass.
2) Have 3 to 4 units (this is the minimum) in dense formation at the exit. They will be pushed back but usually (provided enough Archers/Ballistas/Catapults) are enough to contain the enemy in a half circle until they break.

Note that solution 1 is preferable. 2 reduces your archers efficiency very much after the mass of enemy troops crossed the bridge

Regards,
Thorsten