Slavic horde on my doorstep – Help!

[Augustus In Command]

So I’m playing a campaign as the Saxons and doing fairly well. It’s 418AD, I have 8 settlements under my control and I was poised to rampage across Europe and invade Britain. Just as I was about to hatch my plans I receive a scroll informing me that a Slavic horde has strolled onto my lands. First of all the horde laid siege to Campus Burgundi which is my Eastern-most settlement. I managed to broker a ceasefire in order to allow me to withdraw a faction member and several units from the town but then the Slavs broke the ceasefire and took Campus Burgundi the next go. I noticed that the settlement automatically changed its alignment to rebel faction which didn’t surprise me because this is exactly what happened to a Frankish settlement when it was taken by another horde earlier in the game.

Now that Campus Burgundi has been taken the Slavic horde has straight away begun to advance towards my capital, Vicus Saxones. I’m worried about this because the horde consists of 6 full stacks of 18 units each and will reach my capital in only 3 turns. I could muster an army of about 25 units but I would probably be overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers.

Thus I have a few questions pertaining to my current predicament:

1. What can I expect the horde to do? Will it take 1 or 2 more settlements and then disappear back to the East?
2. What’s the best strategy for dealing with hordes?
3. What happens in battles in which one or both sides have more units than they can fit on the battlefield at once?

[Turkeys!]

in answer to the third question: well if you have unlimited men on battlefield enabled they will all be able to appear at the same time

[Augustus In Command]

How do you enable unlimited men on the battlefield? How does the battle work if you don't enable that option?

[God]

If you have family members in your settlements, use them to surround the settlements with forts, then place one cheap unit in each fort. I have only tried this once so I don't know how reliable it is, but it worked perfectly for me. As they seige the forts you have more time to recruit more men in your settlements and when I tried it they took the fort and left the main settlement alone.

It's worth a try, but I'm not sure if it works all the time or just the time I tried it.

How do you enable unlimited men on the battlefield?

Options.

How does the battle work if you don't enable that option?

Dunno to be honest.

[joorik]

Get one full stack inside the city and run them down on the streets. Atleast that's how I've always done as WRE.

Won one battle with 4 generals on my side + 2 infantry units against about 60 units(they were split into 4 groups that attacked from 4 different sides) of sarmatians or goths or something like that.

[Cha0sMarin3]

I suppose you're having stone walls in your capital, do the basic things, archers on the wall, spray arrows on their units, place your best units on the walls to hold them off, enflame their battering rams and you should be fine, the AI is dumb anyway.

[Mr Tuna]

Or create bottlenecks In the streets.Archers and stuff to pepper,first with normal and then fire,when they are engaged.
Use strong infantry to infantry and spearman to cav ( as usuall) and always hold reservers incase anything goes wrong.
And charge family member and cav Into enemy wavering units.

Hope that helps

[Virridovix]

1. What can I expect the horde to do? Will it take 1 or 2 more settlements and then disappear back to the East?
They do vary their behavior, but its best to plan for them doing the most inconvienient thing.

2. What’s the best strategy for dealing with hordes?
Depends on your geography, but basically any well garrisoned city with stone walls can hold off the steppe type hordes. If you look at the army composition of the stacks you see wandering into your land if they are primarily horse - like Huns, you want to keep out of their way and welcome their assaults on your cities. You will quickly bleed away their foot troops and some of their less cautious horseman with each assault. Just make sure to have plenty of missile troops and some heavy infantry to hold the walls or spears to hold the streets.

If the Horde has lots of berserker/chosen warrior foot types, you will need to have a seriously strong garrison in your towns.

In any case make liberal use of assassins to target their leaders, and just slow them down. (see the fort tactics in posts above) You can replace your losses in your towns, the horde will start to whittle away to nothing.

3. What happens in battles in which one or both sides have more units than they can fit on the battlefield at once?
Depends on the preference you've set. In terms of being overwhelmed by the enemy you rarely find the computer controlling its troops very well and given the bottlenecks in terrain available on the battlemap you should be able to beat any number of AI stacks with a single full stack if you are on the defensive in the vast majority of cases.

[joorik]

Oh yeah forgot to mention one thing. Hordes usually have a lot of cavalary and less infantry troops. If you can kill off the infantry before they break/open the gates you have won. However if you want total annihilation of the enemy horde I suggest you draw back to your town square and watch as they lose up to 50% of their men at undefended walls. The rest will be so morally beaten that if you charge a few cavalary units down the streets to face then they'll run which further lowers the morale of other troops.

Anyway if it only one horde faction you have to deal with it should be easy pickings.

[Turkeys!]

go into prefances file in your rtw directory and scroll all the way down and at the end you should see unlimited men on battlefield->FALSE change that to TRUE

[Augustus In Command]

go into prefances file in your rtw directory and scroll all the way down and at the end you should see unlimited men on battlefield->FALSE change that to TRUE

But if 6 full stacks are on the battlefield then how can you can control them all at once? Does the bar at the bottom of the screen have a scroll option?

Thanks for the advice thusfar guys! As far as I can see I have one of two choices:

1. Build forts inbetween my capital and the horde in order to slow it down enough so that I can gather an army to defend my stone-walled capital.

2. Evacuate my capital and hope that the horde takes it and then goes back East. Then it simply remains to take the settlements back.

[Hannibal Barca]

I agree with building forts to delay them. During this time build archers and heavy infantry.

I will let hordes attack my cities where I man the walls only with heavy infantry and archers. The infantry will do the fighting and the archers (when they have flaming arrows) can take out any batterring rams. This way you do not need any units on the ground.

Also, if you have a general with night fighting ability then you could always try to take them out one by one as their stacks have pretty useless units with low morale.

Another alternative would be to get more cavalry and plant every man at the town square. When the enemy is finally in range, charge them. They will easily route.

[13ig_VV]

1. What can I expect the horde to do? Will it take 1 or 2 more settlements and then disappear back to the East?

Althogh I wish that were true that hasn't happened to me when they invade my land. They always linger no matter what their numbers and always rampage your lands.

2. What’s the best strategy for dealing with hordes?

Besides using the forts, PLAN AHEAD! They always appear at some point, and nothing helps beter than to be ready for them. Large stacks of spearmen is always the best option since the armor in BI can usually withstand arrows pretty well. Use cavalry to herd them like sheep into a corner of the map and kill them off with spearmen (attacking with stacks from multiple sides helps this. Another strategy i use against the hordes is assasins. Build assasins early as well as those spearmen and cavalry and build their skills up on easy targets. Then when the hordes come murder all their leaders to eliminate the strongest units.

3. What happens in battles in which one or both sides have more units than they can fit on the battlefield at once?

They will:
(1) if you have AI control on will still come on but not be under your control (HORRIBLE IDEA WITHOUT MODS). This has never worked for me due to the lack of strategy and smarts the ai has (mods will make this better but i haven't gotten any) and usually you're general under ai control will be killed).
(2) They will wait till a couple of your units have died completely/routed then enter the battlefield (not horrible but you can't choose who enters and the limited entry can leave the units vulnerable).
So i really recommending changing the settings to allow you to put all your units on the field at once.

The biggest thing needed to beat them is constant pressure. Assasinate, attack with multiple stacks, attack again, and again, and again till you can't anymore that turn, then repeat. Bribe if you can (usually very expensive) but always keep up the pressure.

[joorik]

Oh yeah... bridges and other bottlenecks

If you have a bridge between you and the enemy on battle map then put your army on it... or build a fort right behind it. Usually hordes dont even bother attacking armies unless you're already at war with them. As ERE I kept all hordes off my land by just moving an army between different bridges as needed - they went on to rampage western romans

[Augustus In Command]

Problem solved. The very next go the horde turned sharply South and began harrassing another faction. My capital is safe. For now.

Boy, this game is fun. MTW2 is going to be even better!

[CanadianNooB]

25 units? You will most likely crush them if your capital has good defences.

[Aether]

my city was crushed when the slaves entered the battle, but I did make them pay for attacking me, with my 732 men I killed 4322 of theirs and there where still 57 left of mine hahahaha, still lost the city

[StickShift]

when playing as the alemanni, i used 6 or 7 units of barbarian noble cavary, some merc horse archers and a general to crush the entire slavic horde--a total of 5 stacks. basically, i camped my men in the very eastern part of the frankish starting territory (at least until i snatched it from them) and waited for the stacks to roll on by. each stack attacked and was ambushed in a series of battles over three turns. with the enemy in line ahead formation, it was easy to catch and crush the horse archers with simultaneous attacks from both sides. with no HAs, the infantry was easy to isolate and kill.

while the saxons lack the kick ass cav the alemanni are blessed with, the strategy would probably still work with sea raiders, just bring lots of em. i've done these ambushes with infantry too, so any infantry you have handy might work. its amazing how easily whole armies disentigrate when hit from all sides with infantry charges and arrows...

[vavaboom]

I tend to retreat to city centers, when battling horde armies.

During my WRE campaign Salona was attacked by the huns, and its garrison only consisted of 2 peasents, 2-3 limitanei, 2 foedrati and 1 comititanses unit. Positioning them in the city center and waiting for the barbarians, I felt I had no chance being hugely outnumbered 'an all. The foolish huns were only attacking one side of te city, so i knew which entrances to the city square they would be using. I positioned 2 foedrati to cover the secondary entrance to the Square, making a box shape pretty much so that when the first unit of foedrati was enganged the other one would charge into the flanks of the enemy. They were also backed up by the peasents, on the main entrance i placed the rest of the units in the same box formation around the entrance to the square, with the comititanses positioned to take most of the fight. After quite a few huns had been shot by wall towers, the first wave made it to the square, and the fight was going extremlely well. I lost in the end though =( But i'm pretty sure it was down to a fatal error by me, i thought the fight had pretty much been won, and none of the huns were trying to get into the square via the secondary entrance anymore, so i charged all of my units at the hun warlords which were really hurting my worn down infantry gaurding the main entrance. Big mistake, i didn't see the horde chosen warriors coming in the second entrance, they charged into the rear of my army and it was destroyed quickly after that. Still, killed 3500 of the vile huns.

I'm not familiar with saxon units never having played them. My advice is fight any troublesome horde in a city with stone walls or better, with you're best heavy infantry and losts of generals. General's bodygaurds are just simply incredible, one of the best cavalry units in the whole game i'd say. You can put archers in there as well if you plan on holding the walls, other wise i wouldn't use them. You're choice really though. Really though - i think you've got it easy fending off the slavic horde, I had a hell of a time beating up huns, saxons, sarmations and goths in WRE campaign. And in those battles not a single soldier on my side was expendable due to the high cost of retraining, and recruiting more. Plus i didn't have any money to recruit anymore anyway.