The YouTube School of Strategy & Tactics

[Alwyn]

YouTube has a great collection of Rome II battles, I particularly enjoy commentaries by Heir of Carthage and Maximus Decimus Meridius. Maybe, like me, you watch videos of battles looking for strategies and tactics to try.

YouTubers often comment on multi-player battles and I do single-player campaigns, so not all of their advice applies - but some of it does.

Some players may wonder 'why do we need strategies and tactics to beat the AI?' That's a fair point! I'm not saying we need these ideas to win. I'm simply suggesting that knowing more about what's possible can help us to enjoy campaigns more. Maybe players tend to avoid some factions because they have limited rosters or weak starting positions (factions like Roxolani, Colchis and Getae)? Knowing more about how to use their units more effectively could help us to enjoy campaigns we wouldn't play otherwise.

Everyone is invited to post a video (or a link to one) with your thoughts comments on what we can learn from it - or comment on someone else's video and their commentary. This isn't a place for only posting a video - there's a Picture & Videos thread for that.

You can post a YouTube video like this: [youtube]-zvCUmeoHpw[/youtube] (we just need the last part of the URL, not the whole thing).

Here's an example: Heir of Carthage in two battles, as the Massagetae and Colchis. I'll comment on the Colchis v Rome battle which starts at 7:53.



Heir's opening move, commanding Colchis against Rome, is to use his horse archers to distract the enemy slingers. This seems to be a good use of horse archers, to disrupt enemy formations.

One of the things I like about Heir of Carthage's videos is that he's open about his own mistakes. He puts his slingers on his left flank (so they can shoot the unshielded side of enemy infantry) and protects them with cavalry. He recognises that this is an error and discusses the reasons why. This includes the fact that the enemy infantry were closer to this part of the engagement than his own, so the enemy infantry could intervene faster in the cavalry fight which followed. This also includes the fact that his general was nearby, allowing the enemy to inflict an early blow against his army's morale. This makes this battle especially interesting for me - we see Heir of Carthage trying to recover in a battle he expects to lose.

As well as spotting his own mistakes, Heir notices the mistakes of his opponent. When the cavalry fight begins, the Rome player seems to send all of his sword infantry to the left flank of Colchis, leaving his spear infantry in the centre vulnerable to charges by Heir's axemen. The Rome player also leaves his slingers open to charges by the cavalry of Colchis (to be fair, it's difficult to protect slingers from fast-moving cavalry).

Heir uses horse archers to charge Rome's slingers. This works but it costs him a lot of horse archers. I wonder if this would have been more effective if Heir had sent in a mix of Citizen Cavalry and horse archers? The obvious objection to this is that Citizen Cavalry tend to lose against other horsemen. Some YouTubers seem to think that they're useless. It's true that Citizen Cavalry do badly against most other horsemen. However, as I see it, Citizen Cavalry are ideal for attacking infantry skirmishers. Their armour means that they can survive if the skirmishers fire before they reach melee range. Their medium weight means that they're fast enough to easily catch the skirmishers, but heavy enough to knock them down.