Secondary attacks question

[Aguscanzani]

Hi guys, I've been lurking and (rarely) posting on the forum for a couple years now, and I have have solved most of my doubts regarding the game mechanics through different posts around here. I need yer help once again

I just keep on reading about different units (missile cavalry, heavy archers and auxiliaries) having different attack modes. Now, I know from the descriptions that some, if not most, units carried a couple different types of weapons on them. Long swords and short knives, etc; but i thought this was just illustratory. If it's not, how do you make use of this? Is there any key I never learnt to press? I'm not talking about Cantabrian Circles or Testudos, it's the switching of weapons I want to know about

Thanks in advance, the mod is gorgeous and the community is wonderful!

[Shmanky]

Right click is regular attack, ALT + Right Click is attack with secondary weapon.

[Alavaria]

Units which have missiles (so horse archers, javelin units, and indeed legionaries who have pila) have as their secondary a melee weapon.

Units without missiles (eg: Taxies Hoplites, Lance-using horsemen) can have two melee weapons. In this case, their secondary melee attack can't really be seen from their statistics screen, it's a bit troublesome. The hoplites use a spear primarily, and a sword (which does not have the bonuses of the spear) as their secondary.

[Aguscanzani]

Awesome! So, is there any unit that makes this option relevant? Elephants? Cataphracts?

[Ovidius Empiricus]

I'm not sure what you're asking about, since it's relevant for all units in one way or another, but I'll try to explain a bit.

Against cavalry, spears and pikes get a bonus (basically added to the attack value you see on the unit card) but they also suffer a penalty against units on foot (infantry or missiles). So, that makes swords better against infantry, assuming the melee attack values for the swords/spears are equal or nearly equal.

There are also skirmishers with the "thrown" attribute for their javelins, which give the javelins a bonus versus elephants. Now, consider two different skirmisher units with that attribute: one might have swords as their secondary (melee) weapon while the other has spears. In that case, they're both good against elephants, but one can also handle infantry better than cavalry or the other way around.

Slingers are known for their "effective against armor" attribute, which ignores half the armor rating (not defense skill or shield) in the calculation. So, these units are most effective against heavily-armored enemies of all kinds, no matter if they're infantry, cavalry, etc. Against units with only an armor rating of 1, for example, they'll just hit them as usual like anybody else would. If it's any armor rating higher than that, the unit they're attacking basically suffers a (bigger and bigger) penalty on their armor. It might be helpful to know that either projectiles or melee weapons can be armor-piercing, but the automatically-generated listings on the unit card don't display it often, apparently because displaying that conflicts with other things it wants to tell you. (The more detailed description below that sometimes alludes to it, but not always.) The most notable cases of that are the Roman infantry cohorts (legions, polybian/allied cohorts and so on -- but not auxilia): it doesn't say their javelins or pila are armor-piercing, but they are a lot more effective than those used by similar units. It's not just that the ranged attack you see is higher by a couple of points, since they also have that (sort of hidden) armor-piercing attribute.

Some other infantry, often those which also have a high charge bonus, have armor-piercing melee weapons, which can be very devastating. This is really what makes Dacian falxmen (either the elites Dacia can use or the merc ones for other factions) some of the best infantry in the game, aside from Romans maybe, along with their heavy armor which most other units can't penetrate. Only a couple of other javelin-throwing infantry do that: I think it's just Agrianians and Thracian pezoi (notice those are all in roughly the same area in the center of the map). But when you add in infantry which are purely melee (with either one or two melee weapons), there are several others like Belgae Champions, Dismounted Nakharar, Volcae Axemen, and so on.

There are only a handful of missile cav with armor-piercing missiles or melee, but maybe a dozen or so heavy cavalry have that as their secondary weapon (with spears as primary). I think the Nakharar cavalry are the only ones with a single weapon (which happens to be armor-piercing anyway), so a good thing to remember is that against infantry all heavy cavalry should use their secondary weapons (swords, axes, maces, whatever it may be). That's because their primary is a spear, which as I said is bad versus infantry, and the secondary may be armor piercing as well. So, if you don't know about a unit or don't check, you're always better off using that instead of their spears. But if they're fighting lightly-armored cavalry, let's say, then the primary attack with spears is better. There might be a few cases where they're fighting other heavy cataphracts (with lots of armor) so that the armor-piercing outweighs the spear bonus, but you'd really have to check their weapons and do the math on that to know.

[Aguscanzani]

That's extremely helpful. Seemed to me that a couple cavalry units only having short spears was sketchy, now I know they have another weapon. Thanks a lot for the explanation, this adds a whole new world of tactics to me hahah