I have. They are not my go to troops, but they have their uses. I have had my cities under siege with only a general and some peasants inside. So I would sally with the general going out the gate facing the enemy, and send all the peasants out at the other side of the city. My general would then ride around the besiegers, maybe clip a unit or two of them, then gallop off. Once I got someone to follow, the general lead them around the city wills. That gives the towers a chance to soften them up. Then I would get the pursuers back to where I had the peasants waiting. I would mob them with the peasants, and the general would turn to attack as well. In this case the sheer numbers of peasants cause a penalty to the enemy's morale. With the general added in, that would usually quickly rout the attackers.

Some people will also use them for arrow sponges. When going up against an army they know has a lot of archers, they will put a line of peasants before their regular troops. The peasants then just soak up the enemy's arrows, with the hope of using them all up. I never did that though.

This was just the application Khajiit had in mind. In this one's Briton campaign, he basically has no soldier units in his cities on the British Isles. Yet these tiny little rebel armies pop up and need to be smacked every now and then. With generals and peasant units.

What I do for rebels behind the lines is I create small 3 unit low-tier cavalry units that I put in every two or three cities, along with a general. When Rebels crop up the general rides out with the 3 cavalry units and takes them out. If the rebel army is big, then I will bring in two or three of these rebel-hunter groups in from all around.

Given that you are playing the Britons, instead of using cavalry use chariots. They have a high value in auto-resolve, so you can just auto-resolve the battles and then repair them afterward. You just need to build blacksmiths in your cities to recruit them.

Aww but then Khajiit doesn't get to watch them try to flee after he crushes them!

Khajiit and his Britons are taking over cities like crazy! Most of northern Europe has fallen under the blue and white Stag Banner. We are still working on taking out the Gauls and Germans but each of them only have a few provinces left. The Julii have been surprisingly quiet, even when one of our small war parties was forced to retreat from a Gaulish territory onto their land down in the Iberian Peninsula. One big problem Khajiit is running into is the lack of generals/governors. This one is thinking about taking his governors out of his lands on the Isles and distributing them among the cities on the front lines that are in need of Governors.

The Britons are fun to play. But they get more difficult as the game goes on. At first you have to choose between going south against the Gauls, or east against the Germans, or weaken your focus by trying to do both at once. Defeat Gaul and you once again have to choose between continuing south into Spain, or south east into Italy. While likewise defeating Germany just opens up wider spaces in the east. So the more you expand, the bigger your issues become.

Exactly. Khajiit is thinking about leaving two German provinces in the east as a buffer against the factions farther east. If he doesn't meet his short campaign victory conditions (Destroy or outlast Gaul, and hold 15 provinces) after wiping out the Gauls, then he will focus on the Iberian Peninsula, which will mean betraying the Julii at some point (if they haven't already attacked by then).

Another day, another 2 hordes of Huns wiped out. Fortunately these might be the last I need to deal with, as the Huns offered me a peace treaty - which I accepted. I'd love to wipe them all out, but I don't have the manpower to keep playing cat & mouse all over Germano-Sarmatia.

With the Hun menace pacified, I can now move some of my forces southwards towards new lands. I might have found some isolated factions that I could conquer, but sooner or later I'll need to attack the Sarmatians or one of their puppet states. Not looking forward to that.

Also having trouble with the Franks. I need to make a military alliance with them, but there's no option to do so. I'll take a deeper look into their other allies/enemies to see if there's a conflict of interest that's blocking my progress. If that fails, I'll have to declare war on the Franks (who are the most powerful faction in the world right now).

Congrats on dealing with the Huns. Hopefully you figure out the issue with the Franks. Going to war against them sounds like a scary proposition!

Welp, had to quit for bedtime. The Julii, after all this time, finally declared war on us. Our first action against them was getting rid of an army that had gotten too close to one of our cities. We trounced them and sent them scurrying back across the boarder to their land in the Iberian Peninsula. Those guys are kind of scary. They fielded two ballista units (which Khajiit made a priority target for his chariot archers when they revealed them), and the light infantry actually did some damage to my chariot archers with their ranged attack.

Javelin troops like Velites and Peltasts are most effective against chariots and elephants. They have a bonus to their damage them.

These were the little sword guys Ha-something.

Hastati. They also have javelins. Same with the Principes. Roman javelins are very dangerous. They are practically a super weapon. Once you get in range of them, you want to either immediately close into melee so they cannot throw their pila, or get away so you are back out of range.

Heh learned that lesson the hard way!

In the Sarmatian campaign I recently did, the ERE did more damage to me with their javelins than anything else.

Yeah, if it wasn't for the pila, we would've taken far fewer casualties. The Julii were starting to retreat by the time Khajiit brought his infantry and heavy chariots forward.

Picked up Khajiit's Briton campaign for the first time in a couple of weeks. Things are degrading fast. We've got one last Gaulish stronghold standing between us and our victory conditions, which is a very good thing because we are bleeding funds like crazy. Tried assaulting the town with a force at about 80% strength and all of our infantry was destroyed in our haste to finish the game, forcing us to withdraw our chariots. With our chariot forces (numbering about 6 chariot archer units and a warlord melee chariot unit), 12 chosen swordsmen, and about 20 head hurlers parked a little ways away from their town, the enemy decided to throw a general's bodyguard unit at us. Either they have generals to spare or they are very desperate. We destroyed that unit to the man (no other outcome was possible), and now we have another full army on the way down to take the town. They should arrive in a couple of turns.

In Spain we took a Julii town and then moved south to threaten another. They sent a full stack army to meet us but when our forces attacked them, they mysteriously immediately withdrew. Sensing that these Roman dogs weren't much of a threat, we parked our army just east of their town hoping they will batter themselves against our chariot archers or leave us alone while we focus on Gaul. They left us alone. When Khajiit plays again he will finish his campaign. Growing a bit weary of it, to be honest.

Ugh, finally finished it. We wiped out the last Gaulish stronghold, but had we continued playing the Julii would have caused us serious trouble. Things were so chaotic there at the end, Khajiit is really glad to move on from that campaign. Next we may try Egypt again.

Attila Total War is now on sale on Steam. I am downloading it now.

Oooh! How much they want for it?

It was about $11 and change. I bought all the culture pack dlcs with it, which bumped it up to $21. I did not bother with the Charlemagne or Last Roman dlcs though. I don't know that I would ever play them.

One of the big downsides to the Britons and chariot-heavy factions in general is that chariots are awful in cities. It is not so bad on the smaller unit sizes. But if you play on Huge one unit winds up spreading out over the entire city. That makes sieges a headache. Especially when your general is a chariot unit.

You don't mean 20 Head Hurler units do you! That is a full stack of them. One or two is about all you really need of them. Those Chosen Swords are really good infantry though. An excellent backbone for any army.

Yeah most of the time during sieges Khajiit's chariots would sit unused except for some covering fire for infantry as they make their way through breaches or the gate (of course this only applies to chariot archers). When our infantry forces reached the plaza and victory was assured, Khajiit then brought a chariot archer unit into the city that targeted the mass of enemy troops to make things go a little quicker. In our previous comment about head hurlers, it was only one unit that had about 20 hurlers in it. In that battle, we didn't even use the infantry or foot missile units. It was all chariots.

I thought you might have meant one unit of 20. Way back when I played the Brits I would try to have two head hurlers in my armies. I would keep them behind my main line of infantry to throw their heads, and act as a reserve. Mostly I relied on Chosen Swords and Naked Fanatics, with some light chariots to chase down routers.

Britons don't have access to naked fanatics, did you mean woad warriors?

Ah that's right. The Woads. It has been a while since I played the Brits.

Lol, pretty much amounts to the same thing, they just paint themselves blue!

I installed Attila, and gave a quick try with the Danes to get a feel for the game. I wasn't thrilled. First off, the Danes have ugly colors. I mean, who picked that fugly mule piss yellow? But worse, I had trouble telling which unit I had selected. I think the yellow unit color made it hard to see the yellow triangles under the feet of the units I selected. I think the banner of the selected unit gets a yellow rim around it. But it was hard to notice during the one battle I fought. Back in RTW 1 when you selected a unit its banner would bob up and down and throb, so it was really easy to tell which unit you had selected. The banners also looked a lot better back then too. Now they are just square and plain, and rather lame-looking.

Hmmm, that's disappointing. Did you check and see if you could change interface settings?

iirc the yellow colour is just to indicate that it's your faction - you can change it in the settings.

I'd also recommend this mod: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/file...s/?id=526513366 which reskins all of the playable factions.

Khajiit figured Haz would have some more encouraging information about this!

Okay, I just had to turn off the Alliance colors option to get rid of the diseased deathclaw urine color everyone was wearing.

So Subbie, other than that visual unpleasantness, what are your thoughts about it so far?

TBH, so far it just puts me in the mood to go back and play RTW instead.

Hunh. Well, perhaps Khajiit will catch it when it's even cheaper

I am not really being fair to Attila. Some things leave me scratching my head, because I don't understand them. I just need to take the time to get used to the changes in how the game works. If I could find a manual for it, I would read it. It did not copy one to my hard drive with the install. There might be one on Steam. I should do the prologue and really learn the game.

I am disappointed that the only playable Sarmatian faction is the Alani. I thought the Roxolani and Iazyges would be playable as well. Apparently not. But I think I can do some mod work to make them playable.

How many Celtic factions are playable?

I just fired up the game and looked, and there are three - Caledonians, Picts, and Ebdanians. But I have the Celts Culture Pack. I don't think any Celtic factions are playable in the vanilla game.

Three are fine with Khajiit, and they are all from the British Isles! Ma peoples!

I don't think any Celtic factions are playable in the vanilla game though.

Oh well this one wouldn't buy the game without getting the Celtic pack too. Curse you DLC paywall!

So Subbie, will the AI in Rome: Total War ever launch seaborne invasions?

Almost never. You can edit descr_sm_factions.txt and change "prefers_naval_invasions" to yes for every faction. But they still rarely get on ships and invade.

The only exceptions are that the Brutii are likely to invade Greece by sea, and then Asia Minor by sea. Likewise the Scipii are likely to invade Africa by sea.

So started a new Egyptian campaign and spent a couple of turns making an alliance with Numidia, building barracks for training Nile spearmen in Memphis, and trained a couple of Nile Spearmen units. Then we loaded them and a General with 3 bowmen units, 3 Nubian Spearmen units, 2 chariot archer units and a skirmisher unit on a boat and shipped them off. Khajiit thought it would be a good idea to not waste time and wait for the Seleucids to come around and attack us, so, we landed our army on the beach just south of Antioch and moved to take the city. They had practically no one defending it! We took the town and then sent a force from Jerusalem to take Damascus, which was also only lightly defended.

After spending some time stabilizing our territories, Khajiit noticed that our city Salamis had been producing Nubian Spearmen units like crazy, so we loaded 12 units up in the fleet and dropped them off on the coast south of Tarsus. We then moved them up to assault the city which we discovered had decent sized mixed unit army of light cavalry and strong infantry. Once battle was joined, we divided our pure infantry army into 3 groups of 4 units and sent them through the gate (which our spy left open ) in 3 waves. The first wave trounced the defenders at the gate and then pushed up a side street while the second wave came in and moved up the main avenue to assault a large group of hoplites marching down to try and stop us. The third wave moved up behind the 2nd wave that had just routed the hoplites and moved into a street adjacent to plaza to the right and turned around. Then with all the units in place, we assaulted the plaza with the fresh third wave and then hit them in the side with the rested first wave that had moved up the side street to the left of the plaza. Horses died quickly and the infantry followed suit in short order. After that battle, Khajiit saved the game and will pick it up again maybe tomorrow.

Good going. Those Nubians are excellent early-game infantry.

The trick to taking cities in RTW is to understand how the town square works. All units within the town square are immune to routing. So if you can, it is best to avoid fighting within the square. Instead try to bait the defenders out of the square with archers, and fight them in the streets. Note that only the area within the flags technically counts as the square. A really tricky move is to to bait all of the defenders out of the square, then rush in a unit behind them and block their re-entry to the square.

The other thing is as soon as one of your units enters the square, all the enemy units on the map will immediately converge upon them. So they will abandon the walls, etc... to get to the square. If you can get between enemy units and the square, you can effectively block them off, and they seem to be quicker to rout that way.

In our earlier abandoned Egyptian campaign, we were attacking Antioch when they had built stone walls and they had a bunch of hoplite units stationed on the wall. Now, Khajiit doesn't know if it was a bug or maybe the easy difficulty he was playing on, but he took the square then and the hoplites remained on the walls and we won when the timer hit zero.

Usually they don't stay stuck in place like that. Unless they are in a state of Fighting To The Death

Lol, well they certainly weren't doing any fighting! More like watching nonchalantly as their city fell!

Ugh, the flippin' game locked up right in the middle of our taking of Seleucia and it had been awhile since Khajiit manually saved. Hopefully the Autosave is fairly recent, otherwise this one is abandoning this campaign.

The logic for auto-saves in all games seems to be:



I used to think it was just Bethesda games, but I find they all work that way. Bethesda just adds the subtle variation of a useless auto-save overwriting a critical one wherever possible. Such as auto-reloading the player death so it can be re-experienced and re-saved, until the last "live" auto-save is overlaid.

Lol, yeah it certainly seems like that sometimes