Lapallanch Family/Guide + Thoughts + Etc on the Military Aspect of the Game

Basics for Marshal

Know your army

• Simply checking on everyone should teach you a lot. Send each member a letter or two to get to know them. Order your nobles to move to a certain location to see how active they are. You need to know who you can count on.

• Check to make sure everyone has what they need to have. Any campaign requires people to stay on the field for a certain period of time. Make sure everyone is carrying enough gold to pay their men for the duration of the campaign. You don't want your troopleaders(TL for short) to lose their men even before they fight their enemies. - wasted gold/time/opportunities

• Make sure to have your active nobles well equipped for anything. They should be the ones most well funded.

• Make sure to make everyone carry 1 scout per 15 men, 1 healer per 15 men (max of 6~8), and 1 banner per 20 men. If you need to besiege a fort, then make sure to order your men to carry 1 siege engine per every 20 men (only for infantry, mixed infantry, and melee special force units)

Learn Unit Settings and Unit behaviours

• Read through other guides offered by Wiki to learn more about unit behaviours of each unit type. Melee special force units act like infantry while ranged special force units act like archers. Once you learn how they work, you can either use custom settings to create your own unit settings or you can just use marshal settings offered by the game. Marshal settings offered by the game are generally good so if you are not familiar with all the settings, just remembering a few basic settings can help you organize your army better.

Basics for General

Defensive

• Know how much resource your realm has. Gold/Combat Strength/Recruitment Centers/Food
• Know what regions you can and you can't hold. Don't just chase after your enemies whenever they show up to loot your border regions.
• Know the geography of your realm. If your realm has choke points, use them - put militia units to defend the region easily.
• If you can hit your enemies harder than they can, you should go offensive.
• Try to think ahead of your enemies. Where do they want to strike/what is their goal for their current campaign.
• Prioritize vital regions. Try to keep them defended. If you can't then try to either make your enemies pay or focus on defending what you can.

Offensive

• Similar to the above. Know your resource, capability, etc...
• Know where you need to attack and your goal should have a purpose.
  • 1) Important RCs in the region
  • 2) Highly productive (gold or foodwise)
  • 3) Geographically important
  • 4) Good for boosting morale - region symbolizes something
• Try to force your enemies to attack where you are. Attacking is almost always more disadvantageous than defending.
• Use takeover to your advantage. If you've arrived in a fortified enemy region first, then start a take over to deny your enemy of the fortification.
• When you are attacking a fortified region, MAKE SURE to bring enough siege engines. If you don't have enough, don't bother attacking. You will only get slaughtered unless you outnumber your enemy's infantry 3 to 1.

Opinions on Unit Types

Infantry

• Infantry units are most reliable as they are not affected by any weather (archer) nor are they affected by more complicated unit behaviours (Mixed infantry). Also they are relatively cheap compare to other unit types.
• The simplest and easiest way to form an army would be just massing infantry units. They are reliable and you won't have to worry much about coming up with a good formation when you are leading the army.
• When you are recruiting an infantry unit, make sure to go for more armor. Infantry hits harder than mixed infantry but they do not hit harder than archers on a good day or any other unit types. The main purpose of having a lot of infantry is to swarm your enemies until they break as infantry units can soak up a lot of damage before they scatter and retreat.
• When setting the casualty rate for infantry, try to maximize their casualty rate so they stay on the field longer. (Basic maximum casualty is 75%)
• Use either box or line for infantry.

Archer

• Archer units are least reliable due to this unit type being heavily influenced by the random weather pattern of the game. There is no way of predicting what weather is going to be like on the battlefield and depending on what weather you encounter, your archers will either be deadliest or most worthless unit on the field. With no wind to reduce your hits, your archers will decimate even heavily armored infantry units.
• Archers are the most fragile of all unit types. They panic more easily than any other types when they enter a melee combat so it is VERY IMPORTANT to keep them away from your enemy's infantry line as long as possible.
• Due to their fragile nature, most of the time these units won't lose much, resulting in their high survivability. This means archers will usually end us as most well trained, most cohesive, and most consistent damaging units on the field - unless you are fighting in a horrible weather condition in which case they will be as good as peasants.
• Set your casualty rate to minimum so your units ditch the field fastest as you do not want to risk losing all of your well trained archers in one failed battle. If you think the battle is going to be close and you want to absolutely win the coming battle, then set it to maximum.
• Despite some people's beliefs, skirmish settings should never be archer's standard setting. If your enemies ever reach your archers, they will slaughter your archers even before they get a chance to retreat. However, when besieging a city, use skirmish and put them in the front line to soak up enemy's archer fires.

Cavalry

• Cavalry units are one of the most expensive unit types, second only to special force units. They are also one of the hardest hitting units. With enough cavalry units, you can even tear through strong infantry walls.
• Cavalry units are also the most worthless unit type when it comes down a siege battle. They are ABSOLUTELY USELESS so don't even bother bringing them to a siege battle unless you want them to soak up damage.
• As for the defenders, you still want them around since as soon as the attackers breach your walls, your cavalries will start to charge toward them to push them out of the walls.

Mixed Infantry

• Jack of all trades, master of none. They are not as good as infantry in melee battles but can't shoot as far as archers. But at the same time, they don't die as easily and can be used in any formation.
• Generally, people just put them beside infantry units. I personally, however, prefer putting them before archers but after infantry as they can buy more room for archers while able to still hit.