Infantry tactics

[tony]

I'm playing a game as MA Ulm right now, and I'm wondering about infantry tactics. Specifically, what are the virtues of light, medium, and heavy infantry vs. pikes or cavalry. When should I choose shields vs. two-handed weapons. Are Pikes particularly good against charging cavalry, like you'd think? Or does it even matter that much what kind of troops I recruit.

[Mormacil]

Everything depends on what you fight and where you fight. Piercing weapons are superior underwater. Slashing is generally poor against armor so there you want piercing but against those with little to no armor their damage outperforms piercing weapons.

Axes etc are great against giants because they deal high damage and giants are usually not as heavily armored as some human units. You want to cause a lot of damage against high HP enemies but against small enemies with low HP it's wasted.

Pikes and spears have no bonus against cavalry, but longer weapons can repel shorter ones. So from a defensive perspective longer weapons are great. Shields are primarily against ranged attacks. Ignoring ranged attacks and magical gear on commanders two handed weapons are fine. But again, high damage weapons are wasted on small weak enemies.

Cavalry and lighter infantry move faster and further on the campaign map, great for raiding.

[Nrak555]

For the Light, Medium, Heavy and Super Heavy Infantry its mostly about the abiltiy to mass them. More prot is generally better assuming everything else is the same. There might be some edge cases with encumbrince but nothing to really worry about.

For the other part about Pikes it is the repel mechanics that make them good. If the Defender has a longer weapon then the Attacker a Repel check is made. A Repel check is the Defender's Attack +DRN vs the Attacker's Defence +DRN. If the defender beats the attacker a repel is made. On a successful repel the attacker makes a morale check if it passes the defender hits the attacker and the attacker continues his attack if he lived. If he fails the morale check he aborts his attack. After each repel attempt the defender weapon is teated as if it had less length. (Length -2/repel to be exact )

So in your example Pikeneers vs Heavy Cavalry. Pikes can repel the heavy cavalry but they will usually get there inital Lance charge off no matter what. Then your pikes repel there swords as lances are one use weapons. so as long as you have enough depth in your pike lines you will wreak cavalry.

Shields parry is added to the defence skill and is great at stopping arrows. When a attack roll is higher then the units defence but lower then the defence +parry it is considered a shield hit. The shield protection is added to your units protection.

Overall two different ways to protect your units though different means. Pikes are generally better when not being shot by arrows because they can negate attacks and have a chance to do damage twice per round. MA Ulms Pikeneers are the better because they wear super heavy armor and just ignore anything but a crossbow. Test LA Ulms Pikeneers vs MA Ulm aginst acher fire and you will see what I mean(19 and 23 Prot vs 14). The shield guys are better at absorbing blows but deal less damage per round only one attack.

Overall out of ulm units The Pikeneer and the infantry with the morning star are the best with the two handed guys being used in specifc situations where you need high damage of a specific type. Like Mauls vs Statues

[wilson.max]

Originally posted by tony:

I'm playing a game as MA Ulm right now, and I'm wondering about infantry tactics. Specifically, what are the virtues of light, medium, and heavy infantry vs. pikes or cavalry. When should I choose shields vs. two-handed weapons. Are Pikes particularly good against charging cavalry, like you'd think? Or does it even matter that much what kind of troops I recruit.

Just to clarify where you're starting from, so nobody wastes time repeating information that you already know: have you already read the manual and all the unit stats? (E.g. Do you already know that piercing weapons reduce effective enemy Protection by 20%, and that flails have a bonus against shields?)

If you haven't done that yet, you should--there's a lot of useful information there that you'll need to understand a discussion of whens and where.

Two-handed weapons are great for killing heavily-armored foes, especially if you are using buffs like Strength of Giants and have a decent attack skill. But sometimes you are using troops to do something other than attack, e.g. you may be using your troops to buy time while your Master Smiths cast Magma Eruption, so you would want guys with shields instead.

Heavy vs. light infantry is mostly a matter of logistics: if you're playing a nation like MA Agartha that has good medium-light infantry and good heavy infantry, it's a question of whether you'd rather have 20 medium-light guys or 12 heavy guys. Because military power in a fight scales roughly as the square of the number of units (Lanchester's Square Law--although in large melee fights, Lanchester's Linear Law takes over since not all units can engage in melee at once, and a common analytical technique is to split the difference and say that military power scales roughly as the 3/2 power of the number of units), even though the heavy guys are individually somewhat stronger, the more numerous medium-light guys wind up being very attractive, especially during the expansion phase, when you're more resource-limited than gold-limited. Also, light infantry tends to be more mobile, and therefore easiest to get to the right province "the fastest with the mostest."

But in a general sense (and ignoring encumbrance issues), if you somehow had the opportunity to transform all of your light infantry into heavier infantry without increasing their gold or resource cost or hurting their speed, you'd always pick the heavier infantry. There are no tactical advantages to light infantry, only logistic advantages.

[tony]

Wow, great info! Thanks for the replies! I've played several games and read the manual, but sometimes it's hard to understand how that all applies in practice. I can see how my black knights are just wrecking everybody, but it was hard to gauage how effective the pikeners are. Now that I understand the repel, they make a lot more sense.

[Oinkbane]

I'll give a quick rundown of all the available MA Ulm infantry, and their most common uses. Note that my knowledge on the subject is far from expansive, and the value of units is determined equally by your scales and game position and what you're facing off against, so no answer here will be comprehensive. I'll give it a go though!

War Dogs: Armoured undisciplined chaff. Their stats are largely umimpressive, which is not surprising given they are dogs. They have high protection of 15 for their only 7 resource cost, and a morale of 11 is good for an animal, but they have a number of weaknesses that let them down. A length 0 weapon means they get repelled to death, undisciplined means you can't hold a line with them or set them to flank, and an abysmal 5 magic resist means they do poorly against many spells. They provide cheap 15 prot bodies, and basically nothing else. In a nation with such great infantry, these are skippable.

Before I start in on the infantry, I'll summarize the difference between regular infantry and their blackplate counterparts. You're paying 11 resources for an additional 4 protection and 1 extra encumbrance. If you have the extra resources, I'd almost always advise spending it on the bonus protection, as it increases the soldier's survivability against mundane weapons, such that pd weapons will only get through the armour with very high strength or a high roll on their damage.

Battleaxe: Excellent damage with 2handed slash dmg, length 2 lets you repel shortsword infantry. Will get picked apart by arrows, deploy with a shieldscreen. Problem is that it competes with the flail, which I'll get to, but it makes this option less attractrive against a number of targets. Consider against high health units like giants. Also deals more consistant damage against high protection units than a flail, but you have other units that can fill that niche.

Flail: Much lower damage than the battleaxe at first glance, and 2 less defence. Why would you ever use these? Well first off, they get a second attack, doubling your atks per square from 3 to 6, meaning a lot more will be getting through to the enemy. The lower defence is a negligable effect, given your infantry are designed to soak damage with their thick armour anyways. Where these troops really start to outshine their counterparts though, is against shields. They get +2atk against shield units, allowing them to get around shield parry more often than their battleaxe counterparts. excellent against lightly armoured, shielded units. Scelerian legionairies cry when matched against these. Their blunt damage tends to be worse against size 5 or 6 units, consider swapping to battleaxes for the big lads. Again, no shield is begging to get peppered with ranged fire. Provide a shield screen for maximum effectiveness.

Maul: Battleaxe, but with blunt damage type instead of slashing, and one less defence. You will basically never need these, as the battleaxe will outperform on average. Skippable imo

Hammer/Morningstar: Your shielded units! Suddenly, defence becomes relevant, as you want to catch as many weapon swings as possible. It should be noted they have the same defence as the morningstar variants against ranged attacks, so both serve equally well as arrowbait.
The comparison in melee is that hammer gets a comparative +1def, +1damage, while the morningstar gets +1atk, with an additional +2 against shields. Difference between the two gives a very slight advantage to the hammer... until you give the enemy a shield, in which case the morningstar slips ahead. This tends to have a pretty straightforwards answer: when you're up against shields, the morningstar outperforms. Otherwise, leave it to the hammer. Worth noting that both these units will lose out in sheer killing power to their great weapon counterparts, which is bad because your units are fighting with the looming threat of mounting encumbrance. For that reason, unless you can get a Relief spell down on the battlefield, I'd advise using these primarily as the scariest tarpit blockers in the game, short of sacreds. make sure to back them up with two handed lads.

Pikeneer: Remember when I said that battleaxes weren't your primary source of anti-armour? Say hello to the Pikeneer, the guy with the longest, pointiest stick in the room. While they don't kill things dead as fast as flails, and they're not walking tanks like your shield infantry, they serve a few... specialist roles in the an ulmish combined arms force. First off, 18 piercing damage is the best anti armour melee atk you've got, and I think the best of any unmounted human in the middle age. If ever Ulm got in a civil war, I can only imagine these would see extensive use.

Their other highly notable use is the length of their weapon. A length of, drumroll please... 5. These guys laugh at longswords, spears, and even lance charges! If your opponent has low morale, they'll never hit a pikeneer in melee. If a strike manages to slip past their bristling wall of pointy death, it usually slides off their shell of glorious nippo- blackplate steel. side perks include being able to repel giants, dealing well with fire shield, and being able to headshot anything in the game. Downside of the repel is that high morale units can often attack through a repel... with includes most lancers you're likely to come up against. Against most elite cavalry, they're not signnificantly better at catching the charge than shields. That said, cav won't repel them, and they can poke holes in a heavily armoured knight effectively. As such they're often good left on the flanks or rear, as well as against specific high armour enemy frontlines. as with your other twohanded units, stick a shield in front of em. stick em on the flanks, script to hold and attack cav, and watch them go.

Crossbowmen: A nasty little trick in the Ulmish arsenal, the name is a bit of a misnomer. They actually wield arbalests, dealing 15 armour piercing damage from 50 units away. If that was the end of my description, they'd be good enough to build entire strategies around. Unfortunately, the arbalest comes with a drawback: 1 atk every 3 rounds. In addition, their precision of 12, while respectable, means that any shot at max range has the chance to vere off wildly. These are only going to put out one good volley before the front lines meet, maybe two if the enemy is scripted to hold and attack. In addition, the armour piercing quality means that friendly fire from these guys actually hurts your troops, unlike the average archer fire. Unless the enemy is deploying their forces in box or skirmish formation, I'd either put the arbalest on counter-archery duty, or outright leave them at home for all but the biggest battles. Good news is that, with 10 ammo, they'll keep firing for a long time before switching to melee. A short sword and ulmish halfplate means that they hold their own surprisingly well against attack rear fliers. Caelum pls go

Sapper: Siege units, not much to say about their combat effectiveness. If you've brought them along to take a fort, I'd either bodyguard them on a mage, or throw them in formation with the arbalests.

Black Knight: These are really cool in theory as a flanking force, wrecking an enemy backline when placed on the flank and scripted to attack rear. I'd be very interested in using these for expansion, and their commander variant probably makes for a neat flanking thug with the infamous Ulm forging. However, their Recruitment point cost is prohibitively high, and I'd struggle to justify building one of these guys for the price of 4 black plate infantry. That said, if you've got an early fort thats lacking resources but has plenty of recruitment, and you haven't recruited a pile of smiths yet to fix that deficit, consider recruiting these guys. Otherwise, they're just a little too expensive.

Guardians: Your cap only elite infantry, which is unfortunately not a sacred, so no memebless for you. These things suffer the same problem as Black Knights, in that they cost more recruitment points than you probably have. They do serve a purpose, albeit a niche one, as they come standard with magic weapons and a neat little fatigue causing effect against enemy sacreds. If you're trying to deal with ethereal or mistform units, these will come in handy. They also prove effective against sacred thugs, or small elite groups of sacreds. They will eventually be rendered obsolete by getting your construction factory up and running, and fielding dedicated anti-thugs.

And thats it for the Ulmish infantry overview! Before I wrap this up, I'll add one important mage strategy using two Ulmish national spells, found in evo 3 and 6 respectively, castable by any priest earth mage. I include this simply because in the early and mid game, you can effectively use your priest smiths in lieu of an actual ranged force, and thus commonly apply to "infantry tactics", despite being far from ordinary infantry. Iron Darts and the dreaded Iron Blizzard provide Ulm with the ability to say down a punishing barrage of magical ranged fire. Iron blizzard provides a baseline 30 shots with respectable precision, 10 magic armor piercing damage a shot, with a x2 effect against magic beings. These are your archer stand ins. Feel free to blast the enemy with a hail of magical metal darts, an artillery barrage before you crush them under the weight of your heavily armoured shock troops.

[jojeck]

One thing to bear in mind with using different Ulm troops with different armour and equipment is that they have different combat speeds. The slowest with Black Plate heavy armour and shields only move 6 while Pikeneers with less armour move 9. So troops need to be carefully deployed and given orders to take account of these differences to avoid the troops becoming separated

[Norwegian Singbird]

Originally posted by nrak555:

After each repel attempt the defender weapon is teated as if it had less length. (Length -2/repel to be exact )

This is what happened in Dom4 (though it was -1 length). In Dom5, according to the manual, you get -2 to the repel roll.

[Nrak555]

Alright that would be nerf to the pikes then lol

[pkk]

Originally posted by Oinkbane:

...

That was quite an impressive writeup for MA Ulm. Do you know if something similar exists for MA Pythium?

Philipp

[tony]

Awesome writeup Oinbane!

[ÆtherNomad]

Yes, thanks Oinkbane, very useful indeed! :D

[1337Dude]

When I play MA Ulm, I just do 2 of the flailmen for every 1 of the pike men, and repeat. Once I have more funds, I throw as many Guardians I can afford into the mix (primarily as bodyguards)

[LDiCesare]

I'll chime in to say that Oinkbane's writeup is great.
I think there is one use for the knights that was not outlined: Rapid reinforcement. The only place you're likely to be able to build a lot of them is your capital. Everywhere else, you won't have a lot of recruitment points and are better off buying flails. But in Ulm, you can buy some knights and actually move them 2 provinces per turn to reinforce troops in the front.
Because, let's face it, attrition is a problem and you have to stop and reinforce from time to time. Considering how slowly Ulm's tinboxes move, being reinforced from afar by a large force of 10 or 20 knights can be rather usefuk. The only other troops you have who can move fast aren't really worth recruiting (dogs and, in the best terrain, sappers).

[Bou]

So what is the best MA Ulm infantry unit to tackle shielded enemies? Oinkbane did not take the bonus damage from weapon types against shields into account. I'm confused here. The manual states:

''Blunt weapons do 50% more damage when scoring head hits after the Protection value is deducted. They score 25% more damage toward shield destruction.

Slashing weapons do 25% more damage after Protection is deducted. They do 50% more damage toward shield destruction.''

1) So if you take these stats into account combined with Oinkbane's story, what MA Ulm infantry unit is ultimately the best for taking out shielded units?

2) In general (non-nation specific), what stats are important for taking out units with shields?

[DasaKamov]

Originally posted by Bou:

2) In general (non-nation specific), what stats are important for taking out units with shields?

As Oinkbane pointed out, any weapon with the "flail" quality (Flails, Morningstars, etc) receives a bonus to attacking a shielded unit. Shields effectively improve a unit's Defense stat, so an attacker with high Attack value would be able to "get around" a defender's shield. But, as you pointed out, certain weapons have a bonus to destroying shields, and it may be better for you to look to boost the Strength of an attacker to brute-force your way through a defender with a shield.

In the larger picture, "units with shields" is too broad of a category to give specific advice on. Militia have shields, for example, but I don't think anyone is going to ask for "tactics on how to defeat independent militia with shields". ;) On top of that, "shields" have a whole set of statistics on their own -- hardness, Parry bonus, encumberance, and etc. A unit with a hoplon will have a differnce set of shield bonii than a unit with a buckler, and so on, and a unit that works well against one may not work as well against another..