Sparta war-deced me, playing as Athens

[packychan2002]

how to cope with them. Persia is pushing from east, a 3 city Sparta built a 300 Combat power stack wiper and war-deced me : (

That stack has a bunch of 20 CP Sparta Hoplite. the best i have is just some 9 CP armored Hoplite : (

[fluidwill]

In extremis you can accept client state status which actually involves only paying 10% of your income....and then bide your time, nudge nudge, wink wink

[packychan2002]

Originally posted by fluidwill:

In extremis you can accept client state status which actually involves only paying 10% of your income....and then bide your time, nudge nudge, wink wink

Thats a shame of human beings accepting such terms and beingvassalized by AI : (

[fluidwill]

What's a shame is that you didn't invest enough in defences and now you have some difficult decisions to make.

[packychan2002]

The problem of Sparta is that you cannot starve them, once you land on their capital, their garrison will rush out of the walled city instead of staying inside.....completely different from other factions' mechanics.

[packychan2002]

I have a bigger army than their garrison, separated the garrison and their stack wiper, still lost a single battle since the mainline broken and then forced to retreat. just lose a few unit, most of my army was still in good shape....cannot play attrition either

[packychan2002]

I managed to win almost every siege, land and navy battles outside Laconia, just couldnt take their capital to end the war: (

[Patrus]

I've played Ahtens recently and managed to conquer Sparta (on a "difficult" level). They are pretty tough, but beatable.

First, to end the war, you don't really need to capture their capital. If you capture all the other regions and beat their armies a few times, eventually you will be able to get peace through diplomacy, so that you can keep all their regions, with the exception of Laconia.

Spartans have good units (Spartan Hoplites) that are assigned high combat values, which, from my expericence, makes Spartans overconfident - they often attacked me with small stacks of their Hoplites, which on paper were stronger than my army (if we count by numerical power value), but got crushed by flaking attacks, because they didn't have enough units to fill the entire front.

Laconia is certainly possible to capture.
It's defended mostly by Spartan Hoplites, which have 5 defense. They get +1 terrain bonus and +1 support bonus from their skirmishers, giving them 7 total power.
If you fill your entire line with Armored Hoplites (5 attack) and Cretan Archers (+3 support bonus), your army is actually stronger (8 power) and should be able to defeat them with good leader and some luck.
If you can't afford Armored Hoplites, Mercenary Hoplites are slightly weaker (4 attack, giving 7 total power), combined with Cretan Archers they are as strong as the defenders. With "Motivate Troops" decision they should be able to beat them.

You can get Cretan Archers by capturing majority of regions in Crete province or by capturing at least one region from that province and then using "Recruit local troops" regional decision on that region (every use gives you 2 Cretan Archers for 100 gold).

[packychan2002]

Originally posted by Patrus:

I've played Ahtens recently and managed to conquer Sparta (on a "difficult" level). They are pretty tough, but beatable.

First, to end the war, you don't really need to capture their capital. If you capture all the other regions and beat their armies a few times, eventually you will be able to get peace through diplomacy, so that you can keep all their regions, with the exception of Laconia.

Spartans have good units (Spartan Hoplites) that are assigned high combat values, which, from my expericence, makes Spartans overconfident - they often attacked me with small stacks of their Hoplites, which on paper were stronger than my army (if we count by numerical power value), but got crushed by flaking attacks, because they didn't have enough units to fill the entire front.

Laconia is certainly possible to capture.
It's defended mostly by Spartan Hoplites, which have 5 defense. They get +1 terrain bonus and +1 support bonus from their skirmishers, giving them 7 total power.
If you fill your entire line with Armored Hoplites (5 attack) and Cretan Archers (+3 support bonus), your army is actually stronger (8 power) and should be able to defeat them with good leader and some luck.
If you can't afford Armored Hoplites, Mercenary Hoplites are slightly weaker (4 attack, giving 7 total power), combined with Cretan Archers they are as strong as the defenders. With "Motivate Troops" decision they should be able to beat them.

You can get Cretan Archers by capturing majority of regions in Crete province or by capturing at least one region from that province and then using "Recruit local troops" regional decision on that region (every use gives you 2 Cretan Archers for 100 gold).

every time Sparta came out of peace treaty they war-deced me and Argos, and I am warring with Persia too, dont want to stay my main forces in Greece for long. I assigned small detachments of citizen Hoplite standing in cities near Laconia .

I will leave this final boss after i have entire Asia Minor