Historical Battles Video Guide

Much of the available information on how to beat the historical battles is woefully out of date on the latest patch. I aim to do something about that.

Introduction:

To the best of my knowledge the historical battles have never been given a balance pass since the game's release even though major changes have been made to the rest of the game that affect them. Between major unit stat rebalances, the removal of spaghetti lines, and changes to AI behavior the majority of other sources of information on how to beat the historical battles are obsolete. So I decided to fix that. Here is a video series on all eight historical battles, with all played in the vanilla game on legendary difficulty. The exception to this is The Battle of Alesia, which I can barely manage on hard...

I would never suggest that my methods for beating these battles are the only way to go about it, or even the best way. I'm merely attempting to help anyone struggling with them by providing up to date methods that work.

All of the historical battles with the almost certain exception of Alesia are beatable on legendary with the latest patch, which means any player should be able beat them all on normal and get the achievements. Teutoburg is crazy bugged though, at least for me. Not only does it not show my record of beating it on the map, but most of the cut scenes are broken. I will go into this in more detail in its own section.

I am also going to order the sections by my own subjective view of the challenge rating of the battles themselves, using the game's own difficulty designations. Starts out easy and works up to wtf is wrong with this ♥♥♥♥! (So easy to legendary.)

What I am not going to do is alot of voice commentary in the videos. Why? Because my microphone sucks, there is alot of backround noise, and in some of these I am just a little busy to be holding down push to talk.

Some of these battles have room for improvement on my part. That is because some of these were actually my first attempt in awhile and I genuinely was not sure what would happen. Others were my very first attempt at a particular method, as my own old methods of doing some of these no longer work so I had to find new ones. Still, a success is a success and since I was recording it anyway I just went with it.

Battle of The Nile:

Challenge Rating: Easy

The player has a vastly superior army, the enemy has a big hill with some fireballs and ballistae on it. However, the enemy formation has some major flaws that can be exploited just by bum rushing them.

Battle of Raphia:

Challenge Rating: Easy

This is a straightforward field battle with no terrain features to deal with. Just two armies going at it in the desert. And the player's army is the stronger of the two, with many different tools to overpower the AI's pike wall and multiple counters to the enemy lynchpin units.

Only thing that is truly important is that the player's elephants will enter a shattered state if they stay too close to the enemy elephants. Though, the battle is so skewed in favor of the player even that event is not a disaster.

And yes, I am aware that I forgot to deploy my pikes. Too many balls in the air.

Battle of Teutoburg Forest:

Challenge Rating: Normal

This battle has many bugs. The first of which is that on the map the battle selection icon does not update to reflect the difficulty it was beaten on. This has been the case for years across two different computers and at least four clean installs so I can safely assume this is not just for me.

The other bugs are newer. I don't know wtf they did in the last round of patches but now every cutscene but the first is broken. If I let the second cutscene load the camera went crazy and everything went black. It was as if the gods were angered and turned off the sun and stars. The battle can still be completed in this state but the player has to know exactly where to go from previous playthroughs because the whole screen is black except for the unit cards and the extraction marker is invisible from most angles. However... the battle is actually easier like this. It was hard to tell in the darkness but I don't think most of the things that were supposed to kill me on the last stretch even spawned. I hope this is all just my game being weird but if it happens to anyone else don't freak out too much.

In the recording when I spammed the esc key when the second cutscene appeared I succeeded in skipping it. After that the battle proceeded as normal, though the ending cutscene had problems as well.

Anyway, this battle has a side objective as well as achievements of getting all three Eagle Cohorts out of the forest. The proximity of all the surviving Eagle Cohorts is also what triggers the objective markers.

With that in mind the "battle" consists of a fighting retreat in which the player flees across the map to the waypoints and eventually escape. A whole horde of angry Germanics is coming along behind and must be slowed down by last stands from expendable units while those ahead of them break through the chaff units blocking the path. On top of that if the first marker is not reached in a certain time limit Publius Quinctilius Varus suffers a sudden heart attack and the battle is lost. Note that this is the same waypoint that prompts him to abandon his army and flee for his own life, so...

Again, if you have problems with the cutscenes skip them as soon as they come up before they break everything. If you are having a hard time with the battle skip the first one as well and try to dodge the fireballs to save some of your men at the start. Do not be like me and accidentally lose half your Legionnaire to said fireballs instead of saving it.

Success here mostly comes from memorization of what is going to happen and thus the battle will probably take several attempts for someone doing it for the first time.

Battle of Carthage:

Challenge Rating: Normal

This is probably the battle that has aged the best. It is difficult enough to pose a challenge, but not so difficult that every exploit in the book needs to be thrown at it just to win.

The player has the advantage of extra ammunition on all their land ranged units. Use this to good effect, and keep a fresh reserve force to deal with the final enemy wave, and the battle is won.

Battle of Pydna:

Challenge Rating: Hard

So, speaking of exploits... Historical precedent aside there is no way in game that the player's army is taking that Macedonian pike wall head on and surviving. Not with all their mounted reinforcements coming in from the flanks.

Those mounted reinforcements are scripted though, and are always hidden away at the same locations. If the player were to choose to attack the cavalry instead of the main body as their opening move they might just wipe out almost half the total enemy cavalry in detail. They might also break the script so that the other set of cavalry never moves, allowing the Romans to deal with the pike lines in peace. Just a thought.

The AI and scripting on this one is weird though, causing weird things to happen. Sometimes the script from the last attempt at the battle is still going and the enemy cavalry trigger as soon as the battle starts. Sometimes the AI does something completely unexpected or plays defensively and forces the player to come right into their teeth. For this reason I made two recordings of this battle because I was unsure of its consistency, though both of my battles came out similar. However, it is still entirely possible that you will be fighting a completely different battle than either of these even if you follow my initial movements. Play it by ear if it does. Pay no heed to the cavalry wave that appears out of thin air in the first video...

Also, the location of the hidden second cavalry contingent is shown at the end of the second video at about the 13:45 mark. If your army is badly damaged they will probably try to fight you instead of routing. The battle does have a timer and I can tell you from personal experience that it might just run out looking for these bastards if you don't know where they are.

Battle of Cannae:

Challenge Rating: Very Hard

Regardless of what happened in actual history and what the game itself says, the Romans REALLY DO have overwhelming force, and the player DOES NOT have superior cavalry, or a meaningful advantage in mobility. Attempting to play this one the way it i supposed to will result in the player's army being smashed and their cavalry getting swept away by the enemy cav.

None of the Carthaginian units on the field can safely take a Triarii 1v1, there are alot of Triarii, and good luck getting them to fight 1v1 when they have superior numbers. On top of that most of the Carthaginian infantry will even struggle against a Principes and there are an awful lot of those too.

The player has some advantages. The Noble horse is the strongest unit in their army, well suited to smashing non spear armed enemies from the rear. The player also gets some powerful ranged units, though without any advantage to ammo capacity.

The biggest advantage however is the fact that the AI is predictably stupid. Take advantage of this and defeat the enemy in detail.

Battle of Zama:

Challenge Rating: Very Hard

Welcome to Cannae 2.0. Imagine having to do all that again with most of the same disadvantages, but this time with no advantages of your own whatsoever other than the fact that the opponent is a dumb AI.

This is case in point why I hate playing as the Romans. With their low charge bonuses they reward good micromanagement less than any other faction. Even isolating enemy units and double cycle charging them from two directions at once was barely enough to get me through this one.

Battle of Alesia:

Challenge Rating: Legendary

I hate this battle so much. If you had any idea how many hours I've put into this one over the years in a futile attempt to beat it on Legendary... Other equally frustrated people eventually managed it at the time, as I'm sure someone can now... but not me. Never mind that, only crazy people try to beat Alesia on Legendary, and the achievement only says it has to be beaten on normal difficulty. In theory the average player should still be able to get it. So while I realize this is supposed to be a legendary video guide the truth is that at my absolute best I can just barely scrape a win on hard difficulty and most of you just want to beat the battle on normal and be done with it. So lets make sure we know the keybinding of the pause button and get to work.

Success here will likely require multiple attempts just to memorize when and where all the smelly barbarians are coming from. Then the player has to figure out what to do about it. Letting the Legionaries get tied down for long periods just gives the enemy more time to inflict losses while their buddies show up from another direction.

The player is vastly outnumbered and for some reason two specific capture zones that are out of support distance of each other must be defended or else the battle is lost. The third capture zone is already held by the AI in the hill fort, so if even one of the two zones controlled by the player is lost the timer starts counting down. If both the player controlled zones go to neutral during the fighting the timer also starts counting down. If the timer ever hits zero, gg regardless of how well the actual battle is going.

The player has two advantages. They get two Celtic Skirmisher units and two Cretan Archers with unlimited ammunition. Any chance of success in the battle has to come from keeping these four alive and providing them with flanking or rear firing angles on the enemy. The player additionally has two ballistae which also have insane ammo pools. There are some really, really nasty things a clever player can do with ballistae and if my methods are followed they are the MVPs of this battle.

[Foeman-77]

I'm glad people are still getting good use of it! Be careful of the script heavy battles, you will likely encounter bugs but they should all still be playable.

[Scipio]

Thank you for the guide! Haven't tried the historical battles even after 600+ hours and I want to.

[Foeman-77]

Bug, been like that for years. I highly doubt they are ever going to fix it at this point.

[BAŞPEHLİVAN]

Why doesn't it give stars even though it is completed on legendary difficulty for forest?

[Foeman-77]

I'm also making a massive multiplayer battle guide but that will take awhile yet.

[sylamy1]

I am new, and so bad too. this helps thank you!

[GhostLight]

I had to say, Alesia was the best strategy experience I've had all year. Very exciting and intense. My head's still swimming from it!

[Foeman-77]

Glad I could help.

[GhostLight]

tyvm, your vid and advice on Alesia, espeicially, were a big help. Took me about 8-9 tries, but that made victory all the sweeter! Also, to paraphrase what someone said in the forum, now you know why Gauis Julius has enjoyed such a great reputation all this time.

[robindumbleton]

Learnt something .Thanks .