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When you cross a swamp, try to do it fast
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this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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chapotraphouse
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Hey mate, I'm old as shit and I have never had any idea of what am I doing when playing TW battles
Well if you're defending a city you can plop 1 or 2 heavy infantry in one of those little streets and hold off like 10 units of anything besides phalanxes or heavier infantry, while your archers get to stand behind and dump their whole quivers into the mess of enemy heads
OK maybe I remember the basics, but I sure was avery slow learner
Like, I remember being genuinely puzzled about why lancers infantry was immune to a cavalry charge
I remember the Mongols getting out of control after conquering a city I holded just because I opened the gates to fight them outside my walls instead of just fucking waiting.
I ain't kidding, my 16 yo self should have read Soon Zoo
Horses are really good at climbing walls. The mongols really forced your hand.
"Just a few hundreds horses, I can chase them out easily with my lancers since they are immune to horses"
Roach, staring down at you from above.
God any campaign where you were situated in the Levant turned in to a death slog in 1266 when the Mongols showed up.
I remember exploiting that with a horribly outnumbered army being sieged in a castle by horse archers: I'd repeatedly sally forth and then just wiggle a unit in and out of the gate to draw the AI into range of the towers and a unit of archers on the wall before closing it again, repeating this until the attacking army had obliterated itself.
From what I understand of history, the Mongols IRL struggled badly with sieges until they were able to kidnap enough skilled siege engineers so the Mongol commanders could delegate. Apparently throughout most of history the surest way to survive a war was to yell "I'M A SIEGE ENGINEER AND I KNOW HOW TO BUILD SIEGE WEAPONS" in as many languages as you could - Your engineering expertise was so valuable you'd always be captured instead of killed and treated pretty well. I mean, shit, that's out Verner von Braun ended up in the US working for NASA.
The only problem there is that AFAIK the point where the mongols were unified and motivated to carry out full fledged warfare instead of small raids is immediately followed by them conquering a large swath of China and incorporating their engineers and technology, and the kinds of fortifications they'd be dealing with there (heavy sloped wall earthworks) were both intrinsically resistant to siege weapons and vulnerable to large scale infantry assaults. So by the time they were waging war in eastern europe or the middle east they were both an experienced, professional military machine with excellent logistics and in possession of enough engineering knowledge to build siege weapons.
And of course it has to be said that they didn't pursue that advantage for further conquests because basically their whole motivation was conquering and unifying the various nomadic steppe peoples and their goals for waging war against sedentary kingdoms was either pursuing and subjugating other steppe peoples or responding to attacks/affronts. They weren't some conquering force of nature out to paint the map like a grand strategy game player, they had clear and concrete goals and conquering and holding sedentary kingdoms' land wasn't one of them.
So in TW:M2 they'd be at the point where they'd both have engineers, but also probably wouldn't bother with a castle unless they needed to. They also, obviously, could have dismounted and stormed a castle defended only by a skeleton crew without any trouble. IRL horse archers aren't glued to their mounts any more than knights were, and so horses could just as easily be used for infantry mobility as they could a weapons platform.
Me sieging a city TW:WH2 with Skaven: alright, so first we launch a FULL SCALE FRONTAL ASSAULT UP THE WALLS, as a distraction which we will exploit to tear down the walls and launch ANOTHER FULL SCALE FRONTAL ASSAULT through the breach, as a distraction while we summon more troops behind the enemy lines, as a distraction. We use these distractions to carry out our real plan: raining down poison gas artillery and gatling gun fire indiscriminately on both the defenders and our own troops.
FOOL-FOOL, fire the WARPSTONE DOOMROCKETS yes-yes!
I can't remember if I had one in that battle or not. I know I used one when sieging some insane mountain pass fort, wiping out a huge chunk of the enemies most elite forces before I even got in range of the walls. I think I was rushing the vampire coast as skavenblight and just spammed a stack and a half of the thrall rats on top of the handful of elites I'd gotten, and so I was horribly short on actually good resources and just leaned into the drown-them-in-rats strategy backed up with the ranged firepower to make it work.
It wasn't a great plan, but it was a plan and it did work.
Yup, that's the winning move! Just keep sending hordes of skavenslaves at the front line, and fire those ratling gunners, jezzails, and poisonwind mortars indiscriminately. When I play Skaven I always try to have a second army of cannon fodder sticking close to "regular" armies.
Word. Exploiting chokepoints in cities during TW2 in to easy mode.
Fun fact; Washington, DC, was deliberately designed in such a way that cannons could be emplaced to control every major route through the city, while anyone trying to revolt would have no meaningful cover. Apparently when they laid it out they looked at revolts in Europe as an example of what not to do.