Sounds good, I'll have to try. But wouldn't it work better if you had at least one missile cav/archer unit to harass the enemy?

Works perfectly against AI. Worthless against any human opponent.

Humans would keep reserves to deal with any threat that might remain - they should at least have two groups of spearmen in any army, and when you keep some cavalry behind, expect those to catch them up. Your phalanx will be up for quite a fight, but enemy infantry won't simply engage their backs and never look around - your crap cav will get slaughtered.

Never played against the AI, worked against human opponents with Macedon, Greek Cities, Carthage, Seleucids, and Egypt, narrowly defeated as Pontus and Armenia.

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They will. If they turn while engaging the phalanxes, they get a huge morale penalty for turning their backs on, say, Spartans or 3-exp Pharoah's Guards. If they don't turn, they get a huge morale penalty for turning their backs to 300 horses charging into them.

Hmm. But chances are, your opponent will have a couple NON-crap units of cav fielded. If those manage to hit the inferior cav, them round shields are toast.

Still, sounds fun against pure infantry armies. And just hearing your opponent going "WTF?!" when he sees that many Round Shields or Greek cav should be worth it. heh.

I've done that against armies with 4+ Praetorian cavalry. Granted, I played at around 8am - 10am GMT, so the skill level is a little lower, but it worked.

On cavalry, I actually avoid confrontation with them, or swarm them with superior numbers (as in 4-6 times the numbers). It's amazing how they prefer to use cavalry to flank my phalanxes instead of attacking the crap cavalry.

I guess the saving grace of this tactic is that the cavalry are "throw-aways".
The pride of this army are the phalanx units.
By the time the human player reacted to the charging cavalry (light), one flank of the encircling army would have routed.
The phalanxes would carry the day (hopefully).

[This message has been edited by jwqh (edited 04-13-2005 @ 08:34 AM).]

They won't have time to react to the charging cavalry, or don't have any options, since they are already engaged by phalanxes.

Try sandwiching a Spartan between a unit of vanilla Hoplites and Greek cavalry. The Spartan will rout.

Imagine the look on someone's face if you manage to hide the cav in a forest. Or at least part of it so it looks like not worth bothering with. I am definitely giving this a try. Personally, when I see cavalry even slightly inferrior to mine, I like to do the cav duel and then come back to flank the inf.

I still think you should have at least one ranged unit. But that's just me.

On an average, how many of your units are left?

Interesting Firefox. Very interesting. Is there a possbility of combining different Phalanxes? Something like this -

Egypt 10k:

4 Pharaoh's gaurd (1 EXP each), 6 Nile Spears (1 armour each), 8 Desert Cavalry (1 armour for you general's unit)

A formation like this, you must admit, is certain to silence the dissidence of people detracting from the cavalry element. I mean so the enemy comes after your cavalry? Wow, they die anyway.

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Again, this will not work with human players. I mean, if you were playing a game, and you see that your opponent has got 6 hoplite units. Only six. Only hoplites. And a huge forest behind or at the sides of those. Get the picture?

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If the opponent falls for the bait, and I don't make any stupid mistakes, no routers. If my opponent uses Parthia and goes for Persians covered by catas, zero kills.

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1. I never play on single player.
2. I only host Grassy Flatland games.

That's exactly why it wouldn't work.

The problem with having clearly upgraded cavalry is that your opponent would be less likely to commit fully to wiping out the infantry. With firefox's strategy as it is, he's using a group of very strong, but limited mobility infantry.

You can't just walk a few other infantry up to meet spartans or sacred band, they're gonna require a significant number of units to engage. And i expect the strategy lies in the fact that people think 'if i wipe out the spartans/sacred band, he's done! and i can wipe them out now because i can outflank them with my full army!'.

Then they lose.

If you wanted to buff up the cav a bit, I wonder about sticking with crap cav but upgrading it.

This strat might work, because of its audacity.

ignore this

[This message has been edited by Sleeper2 (edited 04-14-2005 @ 08:07 PM).]

Really this tactic is against the human psychi, which will often work, because minds think alike.

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Did you bother reading the topic post? If you had, you would have noticed the references to this being actually effective.

Yes, well, I don't know who you're playing against , but I'm making statements on why it *shouldn't* work. At least not if someone presented this to me... I hope.

Multiplayer is a bit like Chess. Against a really good player, you can't see what's coming until it's far too late to do anything about it. As a general, if you see a lineup that you haven't seen before, you need to analyse it if you want to fight it effectively. There's a lot of analysis goed into these formations, and the other guy gets perhaps two minutes if he's lucky until you engage. If he's analysing your formation then he's getting his army wiped out, and if he's managing his army he reacts to your moves because he either doesn't know what is coming, or he has only one sensible option to preserve his troops. Thus, you can win by being unusual and or audacious.

This wouldn't work all of the time. The enemy would catch about half your generals once you're in the vulnerable state

talk about backfire

^No tactic works all the time. What he is aiming is that it works more than its backfires.

Sounds very interesting...

wouldnt a set up of archers and cav finish this very easily? You may say that you wouldn't normally get an army just composing of that, but a faction like egypt of germans and especially gaul arcehrs are a muist have agianst phalanxs. you only have eight phalnxs, so what if i decided to rush you cav and rush your phalanxs. Even if your cav beats mine i ahve already dealt with the infantry and even if the cav can get to the aid of your infnantry they would have suffered heavy losses and so wouldnt be as effective.

WOuldnt a better option be to use crap infantry and awseome cav, like use milita hoplites and catas. The person wouldnt take your infantry seriously and so would take on you cav ignoring your infantry, then you take infantry out of phalanx and charge the cav thas in combat agaisnt the cav. The enemy cav will rout and they will be left with archers and infantry. Run yur infantry to them like you said and do it that way.

The other option would be to use a faction like gypt or scythia and have desert axmen and charitos or flax men( or whatever they are called) and HHs?

I havnt tested any of this so it might not work. This all jsut came off the top of my head.

Also most people wouldnt attack uber pikemen head on. They would go for the flanks, so might this put you at a sever disadvantasge co the enemy are concentrated on a small flnak not a wall, so when your crap cav engage there are eneough enemy not doing anything to be able to fight on two fronts?

Parthia does cause a massacre of this strat.

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Because infantry doesn't move nearly as quickly as cavalry, can be taken out easily, and cav aren't good at holding?

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Do you know how quickly falxmen and axemen rout?

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I WANT them to flank me. That's why I have backup phalanxes to counter flanking.