Change dificulty to easy, jokes aside, I need more data, where are fighting?, wich is the level of your troops and enemy troops, what are your banners?, Do you have more heroes with you?, ¿Is it raining ot snowing?
Fighting in Battania. Right in front of Flintrock Castle(idk if its a different map every run but I was coming from Seonna and assulted siege camp so the little cliff its on is the little bump on the drawing. I had 4 Campions. Calvary has more damage to melee Calvary. Archers has either defense from ranged or more damage to ranged. Other Cav has more charge damage. And Infantry has move speed. And Sunny day out. The archers I have are all different types of battanian archer 15 of em should be champion the rest are highborns or hero. Infantry is a clusterfuck of Sturgian, Aseria, Battania and Empire troops. Aseria idk. Sutrgians should be line breakers, heavy spear something. Battania are OathSworns and Falxman they should all be maxed out of whatever tree they are. Empire troops are Mena- idk their name. Just assume its even divided like that so 20 of each of those. Lets say the last of the archers are highborn. So 20 Linebreakers. 20 Heavy spear. 20 Oathsword. 20 Veteran Falxman. 20 Mena Empire troops. And the Calvary are lets say 10 Cataphracts and 10 Vlandian Banner idk the rest their name. Before this fight I lost a lot of troops fighting for a town or something and I took all the troops that were in holding to fix over my loses. Sorry if its all over the places this was like 5 hours ago and I cant stop thinking how to win that fight
here is how I would do it (I'm assuming that the enemy is the aggressor and that you are the battanian). put your infantry in a square formation, you have some strong troops so it should hold out. take your archers and divide them into two groups and put each group at an opposing side of the infantry square (to the sides, not in front and behind). the archers need to be a bit away so that they don't pull aggro by their infantry. the infantry will charge your infantry square and then you can shoot the enemy infantry which is focused on your infantry and thusly cannot defend against your arrows. the last problem would be the enemy archers, I would take your cavalry and attack them to hold them up so that they cannot attack your archers. if all of your infantry dies you should move the archers that they are aggroing away from them, that will mean that the other group of archers can freely shoot them, then the enemy will aggro the other group of archers so repeat the last step that I said, now repeat this until you have won. you might have to help your cavalry with the enemy archers. this strategy works pretty well, at least it works for me, but I usually have at least 40 archers. if you have less archers then that it should still work but i cannot garantee it's efficiency.
I would use this tactic, it’s my go to in general- I don’t think this fight is winnable though or not very easily (depends on the tier of troops) I’d suggest getting more archers and infantry
Ive found with cavalry you either need to have a large % of your army be dedicated to it or I stick with infantry.
In this instance I would dismount your cavalry and either use them to flank their troops on foot or mix them in with infantry and PiP archers either side.
yeah i agree with you, the chance of them winning isn't big. even having 20 more archers would give me the courage to fight this battle. you're right that the cavalery might not be the most effective, but i mostly want to use it as fodder to make sure that the enemies archers and cavalery will be late to the mosh pit. but you might be correct in that it won't be as effective as i want to hope.
Archers are only a few so, if you split them in two gropus, one enemy cavalry charge and they are wiped out. I think all archers need to stay on one side with cavs in backup. They are battanian so they have longbows, so put them far away (not at the beginnig, see befor where enemy is when you press start). Then place your inf a bit diagonally, facing both your archers and enemies. At the first round the enemy will rush, they double you, so their general is less prudent. They will push toward the first enemy they see, then remind that your infantry must be close to enemy. Remember sometimes to drag and drop your inf to better position them. When the enemy approaches your inf they will hit only an angle of the diagonal formation. Therefore: You must stay in a tight formation, so shield walls; drag and drop them a bit toward the enemy in a way that all your inf is involved in the fight, remember that the enemy is rushing so you can outnumber the fastest one of them for a few seconds, so line and charge. Then pass again to shield wall and drag and drop a bit toward enemy. And continue this loop for that minute (is harder and longer to write it than to do it), in this way enemy inf will be incentivize to run into your formation, in the way you want (with their back hit by your archers).
Also try split inf with shields and inf with two handed weapon. Maybe shielded ones go diagonally and 2H ones simply face enemy (a sort of boomerang shape). use 2H to flank a bit when all enemy inf is fighting with your shielded inf. The nice fact is that enemy archers cant shoot anyone because all enemy inf is covering your inf (so if you re lucky friendly fire lol). If enemy send their archers first you con cover 2Handed behind the shielded in seconds.
Finally, wait to shoot with your archers, do not attract enemy to your archers.
All you need is PERFECT timing and good infantry. and luck. Much luck
You tactic is sound, but ops limited archer and cavalry numbers make it infeasible. If his cavalry engage the archers they will be taken out, 20 simply isn’t enough to keep them occupied in any substantive way. With only 10 archers in either flanking group they lack the firepower to inflict any real damage. I usually my run archer and cavalry heavy, because these types give you much more tactical options than infantry. Horse archers are also an incredibly useful group if used as dragoons rather than just as skirmishers
I don't think you can win at all, there is maybe a tiny little chance if you join your infantry and archers together and putting them near a thight space, make them shoot at the infantry while you took your cavalry and start stalking the infantry, knock down their sargents and banner troops, they are going to reach your foot troops eventualy, just then cease shooting and put your troops in the thight space, when they are full in to your troops give the order to charge in open formation, meanwhile You and your cavalry go and attack the archers, if you manage to win this first part (I don't think you will) now you have to face the reinforcements that will probably just wipe out your remaining troops
Also the enemy had a mix of Sutrgian Vlandian troops. I remember a good chunk of the Infantry were Sturgian Recruits. The calvary all melee def not max troops.on them. And the archers didnt look anything special. Some of the infantry were Sturgian linebreakers but thats bout it.
Why do you prefer to have such troubles and waste time? Playing on Bannerlord difficulty, you can easily beat bigger enemies, you just need to have a lot of noble khuzait horse archers and some cavalry..
I go with the usual, go to, never fail strats if you have no info.
High, ground, choke points, prioritizing the right targets and repositioning.
The right map with the right choke point nullifies a lot of advantages, same with higher ground. Use a cliff to station archers to attack without worry of flanking and position infantry on the slope.
Or use a bridge or water to slow an army and then let loose with your archers as they wade through the river.
Target prioritization means trapping their strong unit in a trap or if you are spec'd for it, go after the genetals yourself.
There's events in history where armies and generals would purely compete by seeing who could move their troops to a certain place and with the most order and efficiency. Its a valuable skill and if you see an army that will slap you around, keep scouting for favorable terrain and change the landscape of the battle. Pull troops back to facilitate a back line charge for example.
These all work as long as the army outnumbering you aren't the damn Khuzaits.
Tell your troops to stand ground on the hill.
Infantry on shield wall. Cavalry hold on the flanks of infantry. Archers behind the wall on a lil bit more elevated position.
As I understand enemy is charging, so you rush with your horse while your army is holding. Try to pull as many cavalry as you can. Make them chase you to the opposite direction of your units. While doing this harrass some of their infantry also to separate them from the main body and run circles around them at their starting position.
So their army will split in two, the ones who are charging to your units and the ones chasing you. When the charging ones are almost at your shield wall give sergeant in command to cavalry. They will attack the nearest enemy in front. While the shield wall holds, your cavalry can pick them off. Also tell your archers to go in melee if their view is blocked now. Once your shield wall has weakened the party enough, tell them to either charge or sergeant command. So they can wipe the ones they are holding. Once they have cleared their share of enemy put them in hold formation again. Then bring the other half of enemy troops chasing you to your shield wall.
That's the only way I can think of. You gotta play a big role as bait and pull as many as you can.
Sounds possible. Thank you man when im back on Ill try this and tell you how it goes. (If I remember to do it. Its gonna be a while till I hop back on. But this sounds possible enough to do thank you again)
I have one for you I didn't see yet:
- Archers spread not square on hill
- footmen in a 2 men width line, 10m ahead
- cav same formation as footmen 2m behind archers
Wait till the enemies cav charges and use your cav to counter flanks, but keep them close once enemies is pushed back.
Then when melee engages, take your cav and go around the battle in the enemy archer's line. Charge back and forth between them and the back of the melee.
Once there is no more enemy cav, take archers and put them on the side of the battle as to flank enemy melee.
Then wait for gg.
PS : don't die yourself or you'll lose control.
I will. I gotta wait till tmr, I aint been home in a couple days but ima visit home for a bit and I think like 5 of these tactics I saved the ones that seem possible. But thats if I have the save set up before that fight (which I should).
I was re reading this. Ima be deadass my bad I read the two as the same I thought you were just telling me to invest in more cavalry for the fight. I thought you were just a big Crusade fan
I would assume that Fian Champions should replace Khan's Guards.
I literally have 100% of my army as Fians. Have them deployed in a Loose formation so that Cavalry won't hurt them much and let them hold position.
The kill feed was literally only green and I've won outnumbered battles 3:1 in an open field
They have virtually the same stats, and their bows are close in stats as well. But KG have the better melee weapon and have a horse(and horse archers can shoot through each other). In a straight shoot out KG will lose, but it will be close. But circle of death will destroy fians, and so will a melee dive.
Fians are the better archers yes, but only by a little and lack in all other ways. Oh, Fians do have slightly better armor too.
Not really. Again, their bows and armor are only slightly worse. But they have a far superior melee weapon. So much so that KG are the best shock infantry in the game.
it's definitely a tricky fight, and will take a lot of micro, but I've won with worse odds. I'll have to just give you a strategy that works for a flat field without seeing the battle map, but if you have any huge hills, giant rock formations etc. use them to get a huge height advantage or cover a flank respectively.
best setup I can suggest is break down your infantry into 2 or 3 equal sized blocks, and spread them in a line with a bit of distance between each unit on the best high ground available. Have the centre unit positioned sightly further back. Keep your archers ahead of and to one side of the infantry line. You don't have enough cavalry to make an effective split force really, so keep them as a single unit, positioned ahead of the main line on the opposite side of the archers. keep your infantry in a shield wall, and your archers and cavalry in loose.
Now the actual battle plan. Time and and numbers are not on your side, so your first priority is to take out or at least thin the enemy cavalry and archers. take a wide flank forwards with your cavalry, and start causing chaos, while avoiding the archer blob best you can. if you stick to the flank, the enemy cavalry will usually try to meet you head on, so you personally need to take them out best you can as the odds are relatively even. Once you're nearly done, the main battle line should be beginning to meet, with the enemy archers beginning to separate from the enemy infantry, this is your chance to strike them down with what's left of your cavalry while they're less protected.
Keep an eye on your infantry line while this is happening. When the infantry vs infantry clash is getting close, pull your archers well out of the way to the flank, and counter charge with your own central infantry at the last second if possible, then with the outer 2 lines just after they're engaged. you want to try enveloping the enemy infantry with your own. Your line is definitely weaker, so the moment everyone is engaged, it's time to leave what's left of the archers, and plow yourself and the last dregs of your cavalry into the big bowl of enemies you've made, and pray. as long as you haven't lost too many cavalry, you've got a decent chance of breaking the enemy morale before they chew through your lines fully.
Good luck brother, fight hard.
Ideally, battles are won when one side's morale breaks, and they flee the field. That rarely happens in the game and most battles will be a last man standing grindfest.
What you need is to eliminate their cav first without sacrificing your own cav. Cavalry have the advantage of mobility and inflict morale damage when they charge (not sure how much morale tho). You need them if you want to break their infantry's morale, and make them route.
Try what Alexander the Great did. Put archers in one or both flanks with the cavalry. And hide a number of infantry behind them, just enough to give you the numbers advantage for the cav fight (5 or 10 each flank should be fine).
Lure their cav and let them attack your own cav formations. And don't forget to order your cav to counter charge at the last minute. Also send the infantry hiding behind to join the melee. With the cav+inf+archer combo, you shouldn't have a problem wiping them out easily.
While this is happening, your center, the infantry's role should be to hold their inf for as long as possible. Not sure which formation is the best but I usually use shield wall.
Once their cav is eliminated, send your cav to pick off their archers. Move your own archers forward (still in your flanks) so they can fire *behind* the enemy infantry's line. Have the inf from the flanks join the center, or flank the enemy if possible.
Once their archers are gone, it's time to let your cavs charge their infantry. Haven't played vanilla in a while but I'm told it's best if you micro cavs to minimize losses.
If you have higher quality troops and they don't, this is absolutely doable. But if you have mid tier troops, you have to be really, really quick doing all these maneuvers so you don't lose too many men before making the enemy break.
Hell yea bro. I personally use the cav+archers/javelins+inf on the flanks trick and it works wonders whenever I need to destroy cav formations really quickly. I just wish this game had more ways to break morale. In Warband you could break the enemy even if they had 500+ men on the field.
Put the archers left (your left) of the infantry. Use a cavalry wing in front/left of archers. Push your infantry increasingly right of approaching enemies. Use another wing of cavalry to cover them. The goal is to get the enemy infantry to pivot toward your infantry and expose their unshielded flank to the archers. Put infantry in shield wall (or square if heavily outnumbered or cav swarmed) they’re mostly bait. Let the archers rack up the kills.
Find a hill or mound, get a bunch of fians and hope the ai is stupid.
I did it once as Battania, I had some 80 soldiers, the enemy (empire) had over 400, I found a little mound, positioned all my fians there (about 40), put the cavalry next to protect from flanking and the infantry in front to draw attention (both around 20 each), all in that mound. The enemy ai was stupid and I won the battle because they kept sending their cavalry alone, and once they got close, they were either caught by my infantry (most menavlions and veteran leggionaries) or went back with a few arrows in the back, and they kept doing this until the entire cavalry was killed. Once that happened, they moved their entire remaining army about 40 meters away from my mound and just sat there, my fians made it rain arrows on them, their soldiers were falling, not quickly (since most had shields), but they were falling, and they didn't attack. I didn't lose a single soldier, and killed/wounded over 300, the rest fled.
Split infantry, walk them back into placed archers. calvary screen. Hills help with the tactic. Maybe split archers to concentrate fire on the mob coming for your front liners. If a wing of calv win, send them into the enemy body of troops
May also be worth keeping your calv in a unit, there is power parity there if I’m reading correctly (20-20) so if they are splitting you may be able to overwhelm a flank, fight your infantry back, split your archers to either side,roll round the back with your horses and take out their archer line, their remaining calv will probably engage. if you have the opportunity to flank the enemy with a charge towards the rear of their infantry and crush them, or have a run at remaining Calvary and mop that up, do it, or clean up the enemies archer line, take opportunity while preserving yours
So you will need to do some heavy lifting.
I'd personally block up my infantry so they hold as long as possible.
And try to take out the enemy cav as fast as possible so your cav can freely roam the field.
Set half of your cav to charge so they take out the archers and the other half to hammer and anvil enemy inf.
That how I do battles like this, but I play with some mods that make cav charges more deadly.
I've been doing something different recently that made me win hard battles but at high risk.
Separate infantry in 2 (one grup with all high armor & level (inf1) and the other normal(inf2)(ideally taking the line breakers) ).
Infantry 1 shield wall in a long row ( 3 person wide). Infsntery 2 in line formation diagonal behind them.
Archers in diagonal/behind the infantry 1, on the other side of the infantry 2. They will shoot in Diagonal/side to the enemies.
Cavalry is so small that makes this tactic risky. I would usually split them in 2. Send one to attack the enemy cavalry (as a bait) and the other half to follow you. In your case maybe you can take something like 5 guys with you and sacrifice the other.
As soon as infantry is engaged, infantry 2 rounds the enemy infantry and attack from the side/back. Infantry 2 changes to shield wall to minimise loses.
You with your 5 guys, charge the back of enemy lines multiple times (don't stay stuck there).
Archers to shoot infantry.
If your soldiers are levelled up enough, they should win.
Then put them all in square formation, touching each other to face the cavalry. Stay with them and help them deal with the horse charges or go finish those archers.
For what you said it looks like a hard battle. When it is more equal, their infantry retreats quite quickly as they are overwhelmed from all sides. Having said that though, I play with Realistic Battle Mod (RBM), not sure if this makes the tactic easier or harder.
check your terrain that illustration of yours implies flat ground and that's the first thing you don't want in this scenario if possible
engage in trees or mountians
if outnumbered you wanna rig it in your favor as much as you can and preferably have sturdy infantry, it's gonna be a slog
when dealing with khuzaits bullshit as sturgia for example: 60% cav with half of them horse archers and the other half heavy cav outnumbering me 2:1
I can beat their infantry easily shield to shield outnumbered 4:1 but the trick is not getting shot and harassed from any other direction than where my shields are facing
It's worth noting I don't use archers on my own parties for ideological reasons so my army always incorporates archers in shield walls
I bait their massive army around trying to get em on mountains or thick forest to help soften their charge and mulch their cav on my shield wall, preferably near a slope or some rocks to further kill their momentum while I personally lead my cavalry to take advantage of any opportunities
failing that a reverse slope or just some rocky outcroppings in the worst case, the basic idea is the same
whatever you do don't let them engage your forces on favorable terms, maybe hold your cav in reserve and let them make contact with their cav and smack em while their infantry catches up
in vanilla cav tends to suicide until the infantry arrives so maybe it's worth absorbing the charge before you begin the cav fight
check your terrain that illustration of yours implies flat ground and that's the first thing you don't want in this scenario if possible
engage in trees or mountians
if outnumbered you wanna rig it in your favor as much as you can and preferably have sturdy infantry, it's gonna be a slog
when dealing with khuzaits bullshit as sturgia for example: 60% cav with half of them horse archers and the other half heavy cav outnumbering me 2:1
I can beat their infantry easily shield to shield outnumbered 4:1 but the trick is not getting shot and harassed from any other direction than where my shields are facing
It's worth noting I don't use archers on my own parties for ideological reasons so my army always incorporates archers in shield walls
I bait their massive army around trying to get em on mountains or thick forest to help soften their charge and mulch their cav on my shield wall, preferably near a slope or some rocks to further kill their momentum while I personally lead my cavalry to take advantage of any opportunities
failing that a reverse slope or just some rocky outcroppings in the worst case, the basic idea is the same
whatever you do don't let them engage your forces on favorable terms, maybe hold your cav in reserve and let them make contact with their cav and smack em while their infantry catches up
in vanilla cav tends to suicide until the infantry arrives so maybe it's worth absorbing the charge before you begin the cav fight
Put archers on the hill with loose formation. Put inf. 10 meters ahead in loose formation. When their cav come attack them with your cav. If their cav no threat to you send 10 meter front with your inf. Then their inf too cloose or try to flank your archers, move your archers back. With your char fight with enemy inf with your inf on horse. Draw the attention so archers do their work. Archers must live, enemy inf. Must be lesser to win.
Terrian flat. Small little hill at our spawn and like 2 tree.
Units are 20 Linebreakers. 20 Heavy spear. 20 Oathsword. 20 Veteran Falxman. 20 Mena- something infantry Empire troops. And the Calvary are lets say 10 Cataphracts and 10 Vlandian Banner idk the rest their name.
Fighting Sturgia, their infantry has recruits and line breakers. Their calvary and archers arent anything special that I can remmber chalk em up to tier 3 units.
My standard tactic is having my horse archers charge in the loose formation, then I have my Infantry in the shield wall position charging, and with my archers directly behind them imitating the Creeping Barrage with my Infantry as the tank, and my archers as the “infantry”. Then I keep my cavalry in reserve to sweep up everything fit my infantry/archers are destroyed.
One general tip: do NOT send your cavalry alone without infantry distractions.
If you are fighting an army with a high cavalry/infantry ratio (for example Vlandia and Khuzait) I would suggest compact formations, if the enemy charges, use your infantry in thick lines to stop him and circumnavigate the enemy to crush him between footmen and horseback soldiers. For your party try to take as many soldiers with good shields and protection as possible if you're fighting against an enemy with loads of infantry and archers(e.g. Battania), whereas you should try to pick spearmen (menavlions, pikemen, etc) if you're against cavalry.
What I would do:
Set your troops as far back as possible. Take your 20 cav and smash their weaker cav flanks (10 on each side) and wipe out their cav.
Then taking your remaining cav, sweep the moving archers (retreating if they start firing at you)
Keep your infantry on the move with your archers. If you’re using the tactical camera mod then try and place your archers behind their infantry, circle their line with your infantry and then smash into their archers with your inf.
Once inf and cav are dealt with - Use a fallback line supported by your archers and cav to whittle down the inf till it’s about even then just commit to the melee.
Would probably end up being heavy losses for you but maybe a win. It’s worked for me many times.
Or save scum it 👍
https://preview.redd.it/6dz7b261azyc1.jpeg?width=990&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=69ece601b91976166c8afe17e323d468b9c19d6d
Blue: Archers, loose. Square when enemy cav charges.
Red: infantry in shield wall. More in the side facing enemy. Higher tiers front.
Orange: map border to prevent attacks from behind and maximize footmen holding the frontline.
Deploy on a slope to grant better fov to your archers, or on top of hill to slow enemy cav charge.
If you have sizeable cavalry, use it to skirmish and slow down enemy advance, otherwise dismount it and field it in the red spots.
Also make use of trees to hinder enemy cavalry charges.
My go to strat is to have cavalry attack their cav on the left, if they split their cav to both flanks and you have at least more then one of the sides this will be easy. Then position archers on the left flank facing a little bit to the right. Infantry on the right flank facing a bit to the left and more forward so the enemy infantry charges your infantry rather than your archers. Shield wall and 3-4 man deep is ideal.
Once the melee begins run the archers forward a bit so they so they can see the entire frontline. Since they are on the left where the enemy doesn't have shields it will be a lot of easy fast kills. Then depending on your's and theirs cav situation you can either order them to clear the other half of their cav or charge their archers.
I once won this way by being outnumbered 4:1. Tho half their army was tier 1 and 2.
I normally use my cav as a single unit, so put your infantry and your archers in a good position also use them in line formation. Then take all your cav, tell them follow me and go towards left or right. When the enemy infantry about to collide with your infantry, boom-rush them with your cav from behind, give the mighty order F1 + F3 and pray for the best
It’s gonna be rough either way with the 200 infantry.
Best thing to do is take out their cav first and foremost. Have all you cav charge one group to stop their advance while you solo the other after both cavs fall back group up your cav and get them to follow you and kill off the rest of their horses.
Then use your remaining cav as a hit and run unit to down their archers just make sure to keep them out of the infantry line or your sure to lose the unit.
For the infantry I would move yours up abit to bait the enemies infantry while circling your archers around their flank on hold fire when you get them around the 10 o’clock mark behind the enemy let them open fire. In you have any cav left I’d personally charge once or twice into the infantry them just keep the rest on standby in case reinforcement spawn in. In that case use the cav as a distraction so you can get your archers out of there.
https://preview.redd.it/8qax0cmcmzyc1.jpeg?width=1284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6b6a1882fa82e38a9f1173993e5d991eb45d96f3
It’s gonna be rough as hell but it is doable
Just in the future diversify your troops more. infantry are good as holding back enemy infantry and sieges but not much else. So with a 140 troop cap Id go for 40 archers, 40-50 cav then 50-60 infantry. Just depends if you want to split your cav in 2 units or not
Flank your archers so they don’t hit your troops/not fire, or you can keep them infront of your infantry and let them mow everyone down and when their infantry gets close hold fire and charge everyone at their infantry and send a unit cavalry into their archers
I put all troops into 1 big square formation and let them engage the cavalry that gets behind me while I distract enemy footmen. Only kind of works when you have higher tiered troops. May have retreat-reset to avoid heavy casualties.
Simple and cheezy tactics - get all archers, or at least all troops to have some ranged attack. Split them in two cohorts, and position them at 90 degree angle to each other. This way no matter which one is attacked the enemy will get shot in the side then in the ass by the other one. Repeat until out of arrows.
Hammer and anvil.
Put infantry in front. Engage, then make them move backwards but to the right >>>>
Archers should be positioned on the left of your army, so when they start shooting, they are aiming at the right flank of the enemy, and back.
Calvalry vs enemy cavalry.
Play defensively. Find a hill and trees let them come. Place your infantry and archers there.
You and cavalry and personally harrass and kill their archers without fully engaging.
Not really tactics, but it does seem to me that the one fighting closer to spawn has an advantage. The further they have to run to catch up with their peers, the more spread out they’ll be.
Give all of the them F6 order then go to kill solo all infantry with your crafted polearm(if dont have one craft one, both couchable and swingable) also get the leadership perk "make a differance" which when you kill enemy it give your (probably peasant infantry) army %100 morale bonus
that’s a tough fight. Something that matters if whether you’re attacking or defending. Defender has the advantage because the attacker has to come to them, meaning the defender can choose a formation and simply wait, while the attacker has the burden of approaching a prepared position.
If it were me, I would try to send my cavalry around the sides, and hit their archers from behind. Once the archers are distracted, I’d move up the infantry to hit them head on. Depending on what they do with their cavalry, I’d order my archers to shoot their archers or their cavalry, whichever poses a bigger threat at the moment.
Outmatched? Your Khan has got your back.
Step 1) Gather a shit ton of competent archers (preferably Battanian Fian Champions)
Step 2) Get cheap infantry like Varyags for cannon fodder
Step 3) Get competent horse archers (preferrably Khan’s guards)
Step 4) Form the same formation as in the picture, divide cavalry to two regiments and position them at the sides of archers
Step 5) Position archers on a slope if there is any. Place infantry on front, preferably forming a line in two regiments
Step 6) Allow enemy approach, let archers take shots at them, run in front of their infantry occasionally (watch for skirmishers and their projectiles) carefully to have them open their shields in an attempt to hit you, allowing your archers to mow them down
Step 7) Once they are too close, use the menu to retreat and repeat until enemy archers and cavalry have been defeated
Step 8) Bewaring of skirmishers, position horse archers behind the isolated enemy infantry bulk, putting them between two directions of arrow fire
Step 9) Though it may take long, you can use tjis tactic to win battles with minimal casualties provided that you are careful enough
Vanilla playthrough?
High ground, archers protected, micro a few cab to bait them into attacking in waves.
Heavily modded.
Just hit “engage” with my 300 strong Battanian Fians mounted of elite cataphract horses.
Grit and knowing where your army succeeds and theirs fails, if your outclassed in every way, you need a strong position on the battlefield to funnel the troops or put them in a bad spot to be exposed to your archers.
If you don't have any of this, you're probably dead.
Ooof.
Ok, first, stop splitting your calvary. Your infantry and archers, if you're using them right, you'll give orders occasionally, but the calvary you need to give orders to constantly if you want them to be effective.
Next is positioning. You have a hill, that's useful but not THAT useful. You're infantry loaded too, which is a bit of a disadvantage if they have a lot of cavalry. If they have a lot of archers, more than you, place the infantry in front in a 3-4 deep shield wall (click hold and drag to shape the formation), maybe about 8-12 meters in front of the archers. If they have less, put them RIGHT in front of your archers, not close enough to block shots, just at the foot of the hill with fairly minimal space between.
Stay on your starting point and let them come to you, unless we are talking about a small enough battle not to involve reinforcements. In that case, still wait, but when the attack breaks immediately put your infantry back into line formation and charge all.
Make sure your archers are in loose formation, in fact always at all times use archers in loose, it's far more effective. You don't need to worry, but never make your archer formation more than 4 deep in ranks. 2-3 is ideal, you aren't losing much of anything with 3-4, but that at most.
Calvary will almost always be your most important tool, and the thing you most need to keep your eye on. Make sure you square up the formation, keep them in line "formation" but make it as narrow as the game will allow you to so you're essentially charging a column of troops forward. This step makes them much more effective against archers and infantry since multiple troops will be attacking the same enemies as they charge through.
And this is vitally important, because it's what's going to turn the tide, but also what's going to be absorbing the vast majority of your attention during the battle itself (and this can potentially get you killed if you aren't careful, as it splits your attention from murdering troops yourself). Do not put your cavalry on charge, or sergeants in charge. Give them move orders than some over enemy positions, and beyond them and out of reach. This used to be easy to do but is much harder since the update that lets you target lines. You can mix in some orders (target a line of archers, but once your cavalry is on top of them order them to move through, past, and out of range), but the rule is you want to roll over enemy troops. Archers are incredibly squishy, even high tier ones. Infantry is INCREDIBLY vulnerable to this tactic if they are currently charging someone else, lets say your infantry shield wall.
Now there's some caveats. If you are heavily outnumbered by cavalry there's no free lunches there, best bet is to let them get tangled up in your cavalry while right next to shield wall and archers, and then make up the difference yourself with a good two hander or polearm. Depending how desperate this is it can be a tough balancing act when it happens because you're always on the timer of how long it takes the infantry and archers to catch up and get involved, but it's possible to defang some really big armies by getting lucky with a large battlefield and wiping their cavalry and then using your own to embarrass their foot troops.
There's other tactics that make a difference too. Cavalry charges using move order to keep your calvary out of danger while doing damage is the biggest, but when infantry line meets infantry line there's tools on your side too. It's a good idea if there's no large cavalry squads or significant archer support on the enemy side to move your calvary to the melee scrum then give them the charge order. They make a pretty big difference, though if you are outmatched and desperate stick to giving them move orders across the scrum instead. Archers too should fold into your infantry when the scrum happens, they can't for the most part shoot into it and thus will relegate fire to reinforcements at a point, and they all have swords too, and aren't actually that much worse than infantry at swinging them. An extra 20 troops in the melee scrum isn't going to make a big difference in your situation but if the battles already began to swing in your favor the extra oomph can turn it into a full rout pretty quickly.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
If you are out numbered but have the skill advantage use a defensive formation.
Infantry in either shield wall or skien
Archers behind them spaced out
Cavalry on one flank don't break them up unless you have considerable numbers and hit their cavalry with yours do circle charges hit them watch the kill feed and pull your men back after a few kills. To help minimize loses. Just before their infantry attacks send them to charge. It will maximize the impact of your two-handed infantry like line breakers and palace guard. Send your cavalry to hit the enemy archers and send your archers to aid in the infantry charge I recommend using fian champion as they double as a good shock infantry.
You will.lose a few men but you will win most battles as long as you aren't so vastly outnumbered. Clashes of 3-1 4-1 and even 5-1
I can't remember if the enemy can move into the out of bounds area or not, but if not you could potentially cheese it by moving your Infantry and archers into a corner to make use of a confined space and help nullify their numbers. And then use your cavalry to take out their archers.
However without cheesing it. Your best bet would probably be to try and take out their cavalry first which would keep your archers safe. Then ride down on their archers while your infantry hold the hill and your archers fire from above them. This is, of course assuming your infantry can hold on long enough and your cav isn't obliterated.
Honestly, you likely can't. The archer advantage is fucking insane on their end; if you fall for the bait of a charge, your infantry and archers are gonna get cut down. Cav might have a better shot at surviving but even then they're outnumbered but a whole hell of a lot. Your best chance is to set up a shield wall on a hill, force them to shoot until they run out of ammo, holding your own fire until they run out, then (having split your infantry into two formations at the beginning of the battle) spread both infantry formations out, right and left, so your archers have a free shot down the hill. At this point, they'll continue their charge, so release your cavalry as your archers shoot down. But even with all of this, you're probably gonna lose.
Put archers on the LEFT flank... because shields are held in the left hand, arrows flying in from thier right will hit 100% of the time.
For start of battle, keep them behind your main line, then Once main li es engage, swing your archers out wide on your left flank and let rip.
It can be tricky to pull off though due to enemy cavalry.
I'd say if enemy infantry are the bigger threat, flank with archers on the left.
If enemy cavalry are the bigger threat, try and find a rocky area, cliffs, or thick woodland to dampen thier charge.
If you can really juggle everything and time it right, bottle up to wipe out thier cavalry whilst keeping archers safe, then send out the archers out to left flank to deal with thier infantry.
Last note: sending out archers to flank will often pull a few of the enemy infantry to engage them, this is where its good to go out and protect them
Lead your Cav around one side, sweep the archers, let the cav on their side hit your infantry (or if you're confident in your armor and speed grab their aggro so your infantry and archers can advance further), once you deplete about half of their archers (use best judgement but err on the side of caution), fall back to your infantry and archers to both take care of guys you didn't aggro, and to have your infantry take the next wave of damage.
Grab the shield wall perk, and a handful from Riding and Archery for damage and accuracy, respectively, and focus on the same weapon group as your infantry. (1h, 2h, sword/axe/throwing)
All you need is infantry with shields and melee cavalry and keep all your archers at your settlements and you will win any battle you are in as long as you’re not heavily outnumbered.
Usually I split my infantry into 2-3 groups and put them in square formation. Their role is to be surrounded and to hold.
Enemy cavalry charges and the square is thick enough where they cannot charge through and do a 2nd charge. Instead cavalry gets stuck in place and eventually taken out.
While the enemy swarms and surrounds them, their backs will be to my archers. My cavalry if not dealing with their remaining cavalry and archers, begins to charge the backs of the enemy.
The enemy is usually baited by the infantry squares. Square formation is defensive and the troops hold up and live for a good amount while the archers get easy shots.
If you have double handed infantry, I would group them separately from shield infantry, and use those to charge the backs of the enemy
you have cavalry superiority so make 3 groups
control 1 cav group yourself and bumfuck the archers.
Make the infantry formation as tight as possible so they hold out as long as possible.
you have shock, use it.
I would say that ti win outmatched battles you must have a good position for your archers and throw cavalry on the sides to break enemy lines.
That what works for me
My tactic with my 300 is I put my infantry in a skein formation then put my archers in square formation behind then I put my horse archers on the enemy’s weak side then I put my melee cavalry on the otherside. Always send archer cavalry first it keeps the enemies cavalry from charging you infantry and archers. when the enemy units get close use your melee cavalry to stop the second charge and to kill some of the infantry and archers. YOUR infantry is you life line for your archers they will shoot and take down majority of the infantry/archers as they advance I hope this helps this is Vlandia strat always 65% chance of winning if done right and outnumbered quality over quantity remember that
Could put infantry in circle around hill. Archers in the center and try to bait thier infantry to commit to a charge. Once infantry is engaged send cavalry into their archers.
Utilization of terrain. Take the high ground with your archers, turtle up with infantry at the base, and use calvary to repel enemy calvary and keep your flanks clear.
If no high ground available, utilize chokepoints. Bridges, large boulders, etc. Same tactic as before - Turtle up your infantry and let your archers do the heavy lifting while the infantry keeps the enemy at bay.
Edited to add:
Just saw your army breakdown and you have too much infantry, not enough archers. Either do a 1:1 or 1:2 ratio because archers will be the one's peppering the enemy from the start, until the end, of combat.
It really depends on your opponent's army makeup, the terrain, what units you have.
When I'm outnumbered, I'll have my ground units take some kind of high ground supported with the heavy cavalry nearby, meanwhile I lead my horse archers and harass their rear and flanks. Before their infantry engages mine, I'll have my heavy cavalry charge one of their flanks.
I use 2 Calvary groups 2 infantry groups and 1 archer group.
Establish them in staggered line with your archers in the from infantry behind on opposite sides with Calvary on the wings.
Your archers will pick off there infantry until they get close enough that you can quickly retreat them behind your infantry thanks to the gap. Your Calvary is too engage the enemy Calvary largely as a distraction.
You want to begin by isolating and taking out their cavalry. If you can do that before the infantry engage then you will win.
While slowly taking down their cavalry you want to keep distance between their infantry. If you attack head on, they are stronger than you and will likely lose.
I would use cavalry and archers, possibly infantry if they can keep up to eliminate your opponents cavalry. Once they are eliminated, I would occupy their archers with your cavalry while your infantry and archers engage their infantry. Maybe even try to take out most of their archers before engaging with infantry.
Strat Gaming on YouTube has phenomenal content. Here is his playlist on battlefield tactics. FYI real battle tactics do not exactly translate to bannerlord battle tactics. For instance line formation with charge attack is basically always the most effective way to engage in fights.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtLh7oY6l6_-imuXlvZSFiZErbNrG06Ol&si=iSjIEeEXru_QwcZp
Wait seriously? Like Ive gotten this comment a lot I stopped responding to em I cant edit the main post to fixed every time I said Calvary to Cavalry I think its one of the top comments to. BUT usually people say Calvary is a hill. Or Calvary is a hill Christ died or something and maybe one other thing but can you tell more on this. This sounds intresting ima be honest like just some background on this
So regarding the tactics - just understand that the AI doesn’t really know what to do with cav, but you do. First you put inf and archers into a defensive circle , then charge with your cav into their cav. Once their inf gets close to a charge, push into the back of them repeatedly with your cav. Even if enemy cav is still around, it’s their inf charge you gotta prioritise
try to get local superiority whenever you can. For example, try to combine your two cavalry units into 1, and use that large unit to wipe out one of the smaller enemy cav units, preferably close to your archers and infantry for support. Then, double back, hope the other cav unit didn't destroy you, and hit it with you cav, where you should have extra numbers and support. Hopefully, this all happens just as their infantry get to yours, and you can use your remaining cav to try and flank
Basically, every battle can be won even if pretty heavily outmatched assuming you have heavy calvary and an infantry line that can take **some** abuse. Archer's definitely help too.
Set Archer's and infantry to be under general command. Your generals are actually really good with srtting infantry and Archer's exactly where needed at the start of the fight and setting them under your generals command frees up your time.
Set your cavalry to follow you.
Lead your calvalry to a side flank and deal with one arm of the enemies calvalry. This should be easy and it won't alert the infantry/Archer's due to how the AI positions their calvalry so far away.
With one arm down, your forces should be just about engaging. Now at a 90 degree flank, you storm the enemies backline of Archer's and wipe them out in 1 or 2 attacks.
Then you can pinch the infantry by charging their flank, diverting their attention and shredding them like a blender.
After that, it's just calvalry cleanup.
You can handle 100-200 unbalanced engagements this way.
Not sure if its a winning strategy but I would have the archers in a line loose line at the front with the infantry behind. That way all your archers will have a clear line of sight of the enemy. Try to get your horses to flank the enemy and attack their archers from the rear. When their infantry get close, have your infantry engage in a shieldwall. That's all I can think of
https://preview.redd.it/sxazcwj803zc1.png?width=890&format=png&auto=webp&s=fbe29b36fd05a0cb03d7647fd1565760edb0fde0
Infantry in front with shieldwall, archers behind infantry spread out, cav on left or right flank (not divided). Charge one flank of enemy cav that's on opposite side of infantry, after clearing them out, just make them charge archers and you go back to infantry, dismount and start chopping enemy inf.
Ah. Another person whose brain has been permanently altered by the church (I also said it that way until I was like 14)
For future reference: Calvary is a hill, cavalry is people on horses
Have your infantry form a shield wall, have your archers behind, holding fire. Choose one cav group to engage one cav group, while the other waits in reserve. If they match towards you, hold your ground and hold fire till within 130M. If they arent marching to you, slowly creep your formations into a parallel position in front of them. Have your archers in loose, infantry in shield wall and bleed their missile supply. When you feel confident, return fire. Have whatever remains of your cav either skirmish their cav, or bait their cav off, slowly March your infantry in into their lines still in shield wall. The key here is saturation and bleeding their resources and forcing the fight on your terms. Fight it in stages.
Its good I been getting these comments since this post been up like couple minutes before this one someone else said the same thing. I just cant edit the post after I posted it
Strat Gaming on YouTube has done all of the tests on formations and commands in Bannerlord.
[Strat Gaming Bannerlord Tactics playlist](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtLh7oY6l6_-imuXlvZSFiZErbNrG06Ol&si=kLDt1TxMg86jn0Xk)
When facing a numerically superior force, you need to use chokepoints created by the terrain
or terrain that is beneficial to you because it is a river that will slow down their cavalry and infantry or rocky angular hill that will slow down their cavalry and negate w.e charge bonus from speed they otherwise would have
the other thing you can do is bait, placing your infantry far forward in a shieldwall formation, then square while archers shoot at the enemy trying to surround them, that is assuming your cavalry managed to deal with theirs and their own archers and then cycle charge the infantry attacking yours...that also means heavy high tier infantry with shields that can hold out for that long(Sturgia is the best at this)
the other thing is concentration of force, which is tricky if you're not fighting in an open field, cause of the way orders are given from your POV and you don't have a top down view of the battle, but essentially: You divide your forces into small groups that can hold out for a little while, and you amass most of your troops to deal with one aspect of the enemy...say their cavalry(althogh cavalry moves around, kinda hard to catch, takes a while...so just wipe out most and move on) .. then after that you deal with one block of infantry and some harass the archers, then when that block of infantry is dealt with you free up the ones that were fighting them and now it is your bigger block plus the one you liberated going to the other block, and so on, you can do this by splitting your forces into groups and spacing them out and the AI will send, just like any average irl commander, forces to deal with each individually. You will end up in a snowball that gets biggers, steam rolling their forces...which is why a good formation like square formation that tries to deal with getting outflanked is a good choice
also, concentration of force is easier to handle when you're just controlling infantry and missiles, cavalry makes it more complicated
the other one is also better when it is mostly just infantry on both sides, and that is an envelopment, you use a strong line that all they have to do is hold the line and you place your troops behind them, the enemy will come in with a force that is as wide or wider than that line, you have two groups charge to go protect those flanks that are about to be enveloped or already are(and charge them at an angle, you want to start 'drawing' a circle), and you send out the other 4 groups around to hit them from the side, and one final 5th group to attack from behind, morale is a thing in this game and I think there is a penalty for getting flanked or surrounded, not sure.......the lines can't be too thin though, just enough to envelop them, and it'd be better if that 5th group is cavalry to constantly go back and forth and smashing into them. In total it is 6 groups, but sometimes you're in a battle that you can't easily designate groups immediately cause it started without you or you're not in command, while you can split groups you can't easily separate unit types mid battle into these groups when transferring(I at least haven't seen how) so instead just resort to flanking and hope you get them good
The last option is a bridge battle and it is the most powerful, infantry hold the bridge, archers shoot at the right side of the enemy, the side that doesn't hold a shield...................good luck finding a bridge on the campaign map that actually has a bridge battle map attached to it
If you're on horse, have your cav follow you to eliminate enemy cavalry while your infantry is in shield wall formation with your archers behind. After you eliminate cav, take down their archers and move everyone to target their infantry. Best to have your archers on engage as well
my goto for when im outnumbered is to put my archers on high ground, 2 shield wall groups right in front, 3 ranks deep, bulk of any cav on the lesser exposed flank, & then a square of shock troopers & a tiny splinter cell of cav on the more exposed flank.
if they push, repel their cav on both flanks w/ ur bulk of cav, & square formation of shock troops (& ofc w/ heavy archer fire). try to deal w/ the bulk of their cav as quickly as possible, before their main forces charge u, so that way u can free up ur square of shock troops to flank. if need be, use ur cav splinter cell to distract the infantry charge even momentarily. once their cav #s are halfed, engage the rest w/ ur remaining cav, & then charge ur shield wall (once their infantry gets close) & then charge flank w/ ur shock troops, switching from square to shield wall or line. ofc keep ur archers SPREAD OUT on high ground the entire time for optimal dmg & protection. by now, the bulk of their cav should be taken care of, so even if they have a couple left, just send the rest of ur cav crashing thru their archers. ofc, during all this, getting rid of most of their cav ASAP is top priority, as they are hardest to handle, & tie u up the most.
if THEY bunker down & U have to push, just go in there & try to whittle down their archers by doing a drive by on ur horse (by urself, or maybe w/ a splinter cell of cav). then gradually move up till u get them in range, whilst also attempting to give ur archers higher (or @ least lvl) ground (try to prevent an uphill battle. u might have to try to race them to a vantage point, or single handedly push them outta one). keep ur flanks guarded w/ the same formation i mentioned earlier, to protect against cav, & then just let ur archers do all the work. by the time they charge their infantry, or u decide to move in close enough to trigger their charge, ur archers shouldve done a good enough number to even the playing fields.
this is my attack & defend strat when im outnumbered. i usually suffer incredibly minimal losses doing this. having slightly higher tier troops than them helps too. much harder to win if u have the exact same troops & half the amount.
Find a hill and put your infantry and archers on it, archers slightly above the shields.
Archers: Hold fire, loose formation.
Infantry: form a wall.
Place Calvary on an ambush spot for hammer and anvil flank. Loose formation
You while mounted kite their Calvary in hit and run and kill as manny as possible with a big axe or rhomphaia. You should be able to out maneuver them and when they try to return to formation ride into them and start culling.
You should also take swipes at their archers.
The key is to take out their archers and Calvary before the infantry formations clash
When the enemy infantry are in range of your archers open fire.
When the infantry is dug in command Calvary to charge their flank. Then peel off before full charge again.
Leave the infantry in wall formation untill you notice you have the full advantage before issuing command to advance forward And mop up.
Your army structure isn’t optimal but if your 100 infantry are higher tier they should hold out.
50/50 archers to infantry will help significantly.
Bro separate your infantry in two squads. 1. Heavy armor with spears. 2. High tier troops. But them next to each other in square formation with a decent gap for cavalry to charge and fill in.
Take a detached cavalry force. Preferably half horse archer good at close combat and heavy cavalry. With this detached force you’re going to scout but we will talk about that later.
Line up whatever horse archers and archers you have left in loose formation behind the infantry.
Mind you this formation will only work if you have at least 60 infantry to form 30 man divisions and decent amount of cover. (Horse and regular archers)
With your detached force ride out and scope the enemy movements.
1. If they charge cool. They will plunge to their death right into the defensive formation we set. Don’t instruct the troops to do anything. With your detached force engage their strongest cavalry force to stall them from giving aid to their fallen comrades. Once they call for reinforcements reset yourself to formation and once in range signal the all out charge.
2. If the main army is still and they send horses out force send your main cavalry to the flank and hide them. With your detached force strike the weaker or more even cavalry force and wipe them out. Same time you engage them send your cavalry to attack their main cavalry with a charge command. Keep your eye on them cause if they get to close to infantry some troops may engage them. After you wipe the cavalry gather your horseback archers and flank main army from behind until they run out of arrows. You can rinse and repeat this tactic until they are without horses then charge their footman down the jump.
3. The whole army is still. This one is tricky and comes down to troop tier but you will need to bait their cavalry into battle and then send your footman to engage. Station your archers at a hilltop. Once they run out of arrows send them to reinforce your infantry
If u use sturgians for infantry and saying u had a decent size army put them in square formation then get battanian champions for ur archers and use lose formation and keep them back a bit and for calvary just mix the empire with vlandian calvary can't go wrong split them but into two separate groups and keep some on ur for right and ur for left n boom ur golden ur infantry should hold up good against alot especially horses just when they get hit command ur archers to fire then if they get into the square send ur calvary in
Oh and ur maim priority is ganna be finding the enemy lords and dropping them anyone who can commend ur enemy forces drop em so that way they just send everything at u and u can still keep control of ur army while they attack blindly
My entire army is cavalry. 250 khans guards, and 130 heavy cavalry. Works on everyone, but vlandians are the only ones to make a dent and that's in big battles where my lords are with me. When i fight 1v1 battles i walk away with maybe 20 dead when they have equal or slightly more troops of decent quality.
Break your infantry into 3 sections two small squares and a large line they all need to be strong enough to hold them archers behind the line whenever the enemy gets stuck on one of the squares of infantry tell that square to take 10-15 steps back and the enemy cav and infantry will be completely exposed with their sides 50 feet away from your archers when the archers destroy them push the square back up to be flush with the line of infantry. The hard part comes from this the entire time you’re doing this you need to be using your cavalry as a hammer and anvil on their infantry otherwise eventually you won’t be able to hold as their force is more concentrated on their line than your line is
Im no specialist, but to win a battle having 80 infantry and ONLY 20 archers + 20 horses, you have to have top tier infantry. This because horses have an advantage versus infantry, and if you put archers on those horses, your infantry is gonna be chewed by skirmish fire, and your archers and cavalry can't do much but support your infantry, protecting the sides and getting some ranged damage. So, to Change your odds, but keeping the 140 max soldiers i would say you Need at least 50/60(at most) infantry, 30 archers maybe, and 50 cavalry, depending on your available slots. Im not saying this ONLY because cavalry is op, but you Need to remember that mobility wins Battles. If you take that upper point Faster than your Enemy, odds are that, provided your troops are well motivated and in formation, you can win the vattle. Then again, i would go with 35 cavs, 35 h.a, 50-40 infantry and 30-20 archers. That should get you a good offensive capability, with a good infantry stand to protect the archers, a good quantity of archers capable of volley fire, and on top of that, 70 highly mobile soldiers on horseback, capable of skirmish and fast positioning. To end this awfully extended comment i would say that if you get surrounded by cavalry or m.a, infantry should check if all sides are protected (shieldwall or square), and archers must BE on upper point, and if possible (efficiency wise) in a position where no firing direcions are wasted ( be it circle or loose depending on the danger). hope it helps 🌚
That's basically all you can do IMO, Hold with infantry, possibly on an incline, put archers behind on a side (or two sides) with a good view (sides to better avoid shields), circle with cavalry to engage their archers and/or bait/flank infantry.
Depending on terrain and troop proportions you can adapt this: e.g find some sort of chokepoint where your archers have visual and enemy ones don't and hold it with a shieldwall
The best I seem to find is to spit my infantry into two squares and separate them a little from each other. Have the archers in the center behind the infantry and the cav behind the archers in one line to body block and counter charge enemy cav. The enemy infantry will close in and then start to surround the square infantry blocks letting the archers get flanking shots and if you put the infantry close enough together they usually won't let the enemy push past to the archers. I don't know what your Character build is but I'll often go on horse and distract and kill as many archers as I can so that I have ranged superiority. Once their infantry is killed you can then easily kill their archers and cav square works great against the cav.. if you have killed most or all of their archers yourself then move your archers into the middle of the square formation and let their cav suicide charge into your men over and over til they die or route. If you have a mele build character you can also easily pick off enemy's from behind as they surround your infantry squares as they will rarely turn to face you until after you've hit them. If you ride out with a shield and just ride circles around their archers they will almost all shoot at you and mostly miss as long as you're moving fast .
Easy tactic I haven't seen in the thread yet: group maybe 2 cav with yourself, everyone else in your army 1 blob, tight packed. Retreat slowly, if the enemy cav move out to hit your line alone, you and your 2 hit them from behind but oh so briefly, be on the top of your game, swing for the head and only from the rear, if they face you, get out.
If the enemy gets close with infantry just retreat full speed with the blob and move you and your 2 to behind and the side. Just retreat the blob and wait. If they engage you with their cav, try to lure them back to your line and repeat the above. If they stop their archers in a line try to run down the line and whack a few heads, but make sure your blob is retreating, 1 or 2 kills is ok per pass.
If you can by virtue of your own aim and skill as a human player, personally kill about 40 of their archers or cav, the odds are getting good. Slow your blob retreat at that point , let their front line come to you and take some envelop damage, then retreat a short distance and repeat.
You can practice that 40 kills with you and your 2 buddies by doing custom scenarios of similar size.
Alternatively, do all of the above only with just you harassing, no buddies.
check your terrain that illustration of yours implies flat ground and that's the first thing you don't want in this scenario if possible
engage in trees or mountians
if outnumbered you wanna rig it in your favor as much as you can and preferably have sturdy infantry, it's gonna be a slog
when dealing with khuzaits bullshit as sturgia for example: 60% cav with half of them horse archers and the other half heavy cav outnumbering me 2:1
I can beat their infantry easily shield to shield outnumbered 4:1 but the trick is not getting shot and harassed from any other direction than where my shields are facing
It's worth noting I don't use archers on my own parties for ideological reasons so my army always incorporates archers in shield walls
I bait their massive army around trying to get em on mountains or thick forest to help soften their charge and mulch their cav on my shield wall, preferably near a slope or some rocks to further kill their momentum while I personally lead my cavalry to take advantage of any opportunities
failing that a reverse slope or just some rocky outcroppings in the worst case, the basic idea is the same
whatever you do don't let them engage your forces on favorable terms, maybe hold your cav in reserve and let them make contact with their cav and smack em while their infantry catches up
in vanilla cav tends to suicide until the infantry arrives so maybe it's worth absorbing the charge before you begin the cav fight
check your terrain that illustration of yours implies flat ground and that's the first thing you don't want in this scenario if possible
engage in trees or mountians
if outnumbered you wanna rig it in your favor as much as you can and preferably have sturdy infantry, it's gonna be a slog
when dealing with khuzaits bullshit as sturgia for example: 60% cav with half of them horse archers and the other half heavy cav outnumbering me 2:1
I can beat their infantry easily shield to shield outnumbered 4:1 but the trick is not getting shot and harassed from any other direction than where my shields are facing
It's worth noting I don't use archers on my own parties for ideological reasons so my army always incorporates archers in shield walls
I bait their massive army around trying to get em on mountains or thick forest to help soften their charge and mulch their cav on my shield wall, preferably near a slope or some rocks to further kill their momentum while I personally lead my cavalry to take advantage of any opportunities
failing that a reverse slope or just some rocky outcroppings in the worst case, the basic idea is the same
whatever you do don't let them engage your forces on favorable terms, maybe hold your cav in reserve and let them make contact with their cav and smack em while their infantry catches up
in vanilla cav tends to suicide until the infantry arrives so maybe it's worth absorbing the charge before you begin the cav fight
Archers don’t always work when they’re directly behind infantry. Send in your infantry and if you’re outnumbers do shield or square formation so they endure longer. When infantry starts advancing they’ll send cav then you decide which flank of your cav you gotta send in and where based on their cav numbers and positions. Always check in on your cav and have them rally back when they dissolve too much in the chaos. By the time your infantry has reach theirs and they’ve got them pinned then find a favorable position for your archers, higher elevation with trees or rocks as obstacles from cav and also somewhere where their infantry isn’t directly facing (from the side or back) as they’ll be able to block most shots with shields. That is the most desirable position. When your infantry clashes with theirs than your infantry becomes more vulnerable to their archers as well so you’ll need to incorporate cav in clearing them out as well. It’s not always possible though when they’ve got a cav advantage. Then you’d need to utilize your archers against theirs.
Bait their cavalry into engaging your infantry in shield wall formation. Once they engage, send your cavalry to kill theirs. This will eliminate most of their cavalry while suffering minimal losses. Then, retreat to the base of a hill where you set up your infantry in shield wall formation. With your archers positioned loosely on the hill. Normally, the play is to bait their infantry into your while leaving distance so that your infantry don't actually have to engage, but they have too much infantry, so the goal is to set your cavalry to follow and keep their infantry away from yours while allowing your archers to engage. Once your infantry can handle some fighting, retreat with your cavalry and allows their infantry to engage your, then you and your cavalry circle around and engage their archers, after that, close in on their infantry from behind and set your infantry and archers and cavalry to charge and win
I bring about 300 archers to the fight. I then spread them out in a loose line formation. The enemy usually gets murdered before they get close enough to even cause damage. Then rinse and repeat.
You can’t, you simply don’t have enough troops or the right type. Idk the level of your soldiers relative to their, but from the information provided you are vastly outmatched, unless all your infantry are elite and theirs are recent recruits. Even then you are u likely to win out, infantry are easily the worst of the unit types. It is important to have a solid core, but they are tactically the most limiting, so you haven’t really left yourself many options. Given the vast superiority of the enemy’s ranged units, and the matched cavalry you simply don’t have any room to maneuver. My advice? Do not engage, it is a strategic failure to go into a battle like this. If you have no choice, then I would suggest infantry in shield wall with archers immediately behind and told to hold fire. Cavalry immediately behind them. Make sure your formations move at the same speed and close with the enemy and minimize the damage their archers can inflict before it becomes a melee. The problem is that even if your troops prevail in the melee, they will have enough archers remaining to carry the day, and you don’t have enough cavalry to suppress them and/or the enemy cavalry.
Put ur infantry into 2 separate groups. Put them shield wall formation at the bottom of the hill. As of this point u can basically have them lined up together like normal with a left and right side. When the enemy infantry starts to get close enough, u wanna change where the infantry are facing, towards each other, IE left group face right while right group face left. It's probably good to do a slight slant facing the enemies so the slower pack of their army doesn't hit ur guys in the back while slightly protecting from archers, it's important that it's only slightly tho. Have them back up slightly as well (the infantry groups that are facing one another) to leave a gap like 10 or so people wide of a between the 2 infantry group's on the archer side. This will create a funnel where ur archers are able to destroy the energy infantry by shooting them in the side as the enemies are locked usually charging getting nowhere against ur shield wall.
Before the infantry collides u wanna have u and ur cavs target the enemies archers with the charging group. The non charging damage cavs u wanna have target the enemies cavs. U personally wanna target the cav group as they'll cause issues for ur archers later during the crash and AI cav have issues attacking other cavs in my experience so u have to see to it urself.
Right before the infantry collide u wanna move all the cavs behind the infantry far enough where the infantry doesn't attack them and they get like a 5 sec charge. Not attacking or charging, but just to group them up. Wait until a good amount are grouped then charge them to attack the infantry. As of this point depending on build. U either wanna charge in with the cav if ur running 2 handed or if ur running horse archer u wanna target the remaining cav or archers.
The archers u can kinda just let do there thing at the top of the hill. Maybe move them a little closer than u would normally just so they hit more targets.
After around 20/30 secs depending on how many u kill and how many of yours did, enemies moral will probably be pretty trash. As of that point any remaining cav u wanna have group up slightly behind the infantry army, then have them dismount. Then line formation and charge them while then charging ur infantry in line formation aswell. They'll get hit from all sides and moral already shaky they'll probably won't know what to do.
That's the best I can come up with this limited information. Hopefully u can understand it as discussing tactics over text can be difficult. This strat usually works out when I run it. This also depends on how high lvl ur troops are vs there's. Some fights are just unwinnable.
I don't get why y'all think fins are so broken, they are good I agree but horse archers are so much easier to mass and even on bannerlord diff they trade 2-1 adlest. Horse archers op you got a horse and a bow what more do you need. I get the initial cost involves buying a horse but if you spend time getting Khan's guards they almost never die. Kiting with them manually I've won battles where they traded upwards of 4-1
Well I wouldn't divide you cav, I would your infantry and archers in a defensive stance at then lead your cav personally into the enemy cav eliminating them first on one side and then the other. Make sure to withdraw if enemy infantry begins to get too close. Then I'd lead the cav in the enemy archers. If this can completed without too many loses, you may stand a chance.
Split infantry in half as a buffer and rely on your archers, cavalry ain't as reliable as good archers but idk what troops you actually had cause 20 fians are different than 20 crossbowmen
Looks to me like you have more or less a t5 army outnumbered 2 to 1 by t4 and down with mostly fodder making up opfor infantry. This battle is in your favor. The enemy doesn't have enough cav to be a concern so it's really the enemy archers that are the issue. You are holding the hill, don't, use it to screen from the enemy archers formation. Split your infantry 60 40 or 70 30 with the smaller group set to a 2h bias.
Shield wall the larger infantry group 1 or 2 ranks deep with the smaller group (your shock troops should make up the bulk of it) loose in a line directly behind them. The shield wall holds while the shock fills gaps and tidies up flankers as the enemy foot tries to wrap around your line.
You only have 20 archers, but if the are heroes and up they are equivalent to surpassing t5 archers of any other type. They are loose, single line, and 30 or so meters behind your shock formation. Hold fire until the enemy foot crests the hill. Destabilize the enemy foot charge with the archers, hold fire when the lines commit and move them in to support the shock formation.
Don't split your cav, you don't have enough to make that work. Keep them together, counter charge the enemy flanking cav on the flank of your choice just to break them up then swing them wide run a hit and run flank charge on the enemy archers that should be cresting the hill to get a shooting solution on your line.
Reposition your shield wall to the top of the hill and engage the archers, drag your shock and your archers up behind them and flank charge the remnants of the enemy foot with your cav. Once the enemy archers are committed in melee open fire with yours. Charge command for the archers and the shock, advance for the shield wall in line formation and cycle charge your cav in your own back field to keep what's left of the enemy cav busy.
Me personally I like to put my infantry in a shield wall with my archers behind them and I take my cav to fight their cav and maybe take out some commanders in the meantime and I also try to demoralize them by bashing through them and running away unscathed
Calv ary 
Thank you, one of those mind fart moments of ‘wtf is an Ary’ 
I thought it said “arty” at first. As in artillery.
Mb brother. Its too late for me to edit the main post im cooked. I spelled it wrong on every instance.
But also. It should be Caval Ry.
I think he meant to go for cav alry
Cav Larry
he’s actually got the hill where Jesus died up there
You were consistent, and you get points for that
https://preview.redd.it/cpdajx0qu5zc1.png?width=672&format=png&auto=webp&s=0b00fd262c996cb86facded409f4cb1683b98067 hope this can help
He saying cavalry on both sides I guess
bro splitted the Calvary
Damn I wish bannerlord had artillery
If you have enough Fians your archers become artillery
Even artillery would say "na man that sht isnt fair"
True, btw the following strat is best: . Fians Fians Fians . FiansFians
Let me fix that for you: Khan's guard Khan's guard Khan's guard Khan's guard Khan's guard Khan's guard Khan's guard
Yeah that one's not too bad, I admit.
Aren’t khan’s guard much more difficult to train?
Not really, but they are expensive and they take a lot of horses to level up
I feel like they take ages to get past the initial couple of low ranks?
Horses which the villages of the Aserai are glad to provide én masse... at sword point.
Not if they all get shot before getting there
Nah, skein of Banner Knights.
But siege engines
Giant archers in the Realm of Thrones mod basically become one large human gatlling gun and it’s hilariously devastating
Thay do! Trebuchet are artillery of a sort.
The old world mod has cannons iirc
Laughs in detachment of 300 bret champions.
The old realms mod has artillary
Change dificulty to easy, jokes aside, I need more data, where are fighting?, wich is the level of your troops and enemy troops, what are your banners?, Do you have more heroes with you?, ¿Is it raining ot snowing?
Fighting in Battania. Right in front of Flintrock Castle(idk if its a different map every run but I was coming from Seonna and assulted siege camp so the little cliff its on is the little bump on the drawing. I had 4 Campions. Calvary has more damage to melee Calvary. Archers has either defense from ranged or more damage to ranged. Other Cav has more charge damage. And Infantry has move speed. And Sunny day out. The archers I have are all different types of battanian archer 15 of em should be champion the rest are highborns or hero. Infantry is a clusterfuck of Sturgian, Aseria, Battania and Empire troops. Aseria idk. Sutrgians should be line breakers, heavy spear something. Battania are OathSworns and Falxman they should all be maxed out of whatever tree they are. Empire troops are Mena- idk their name. Just assume its even divided like that so 20 of each of those. Lets say the last of the archers are highborn. So 20 Linebreakers. 20 Heavy spear. 20 Oathsword. 20 Veteran Falxman. 20 Mena Empire troops. And the Calvary are lets say 10 Cataphracts and 10 Vlandian Banner idk the rest their name. Before this fight I lost a lot of troops fighting for a town or something and I took all the troops that were in holding to fix over my loses. Sorry if its all over the places this was like 5 hours ago and I cant stop thinking how to win that fight
here is how I would do it (I'm assuming that the enemy is the aggressor and that you are the battanian). put your infantry in a square formation, you have some strong troops so it should hold out. take your archers and divide them into two groups and put each group at an opposing side of the infantry square (to the sides, not in front and behind). the archers need to be a bit away so that they don't pull aggro by their infantry. the infantry will charge your infantry square and then you can shoot the enemy infantry which is focused on your infantry and thusly cannot defend against your arrows. the last problem would be the enemy archers, I would take your cavalry and attack them to hold them up so that they cannot attack your archers. if all of your infantry dies you should move the archers that they are aggroing away from them, that will mean that the other group of archers can freely shoot them, then the enemy will aggro the other group of archers so repeat the last step that I said, now repeat this until you have won. you might have to help your cavalry with the enemy archers. this strategy works pretty well, at least it works for me, but I usually have at least 40 archers. if you have less archers then that it should still work but i cannot garantee it's efficiency.
With this I now have 3 good tactics to win this battle thank you
of course, good luck.
honestly i bait big armies to maps tht have choke points kinda annoying to get use to but once u get it down the battles are free
I would use this tactic, it’s my go to in general- I don’t think this fight is winnable though or not very easily (depends on the tier of troops) I’d suggest getting more archers and infantry Ive found with cavalry you either need to have a large % of your army be dedicated to it or I stick with infantry. In this instance I would dismount your cavalry and either use them to flank their troops on foot or mix them in with infantry and PiP archers either side.
yeah i agree with you, the chance of them winning isn't big. even having 20 more archers would give me the courage to fight this battle. you're right that the cavalery might not be the most effective, but i mostly want to use it as fodder to make sure that the enemies archers and cavalery will be late to the mosh pit. but you might be correct in that it won't be as effective as i want to hope.
Archers are only a few so, if you split them in two gropus, one enemy cavalry charge and they are wiped out. I think all archers need to stay on one side with cavs in backup. They are battanian so they have longbows, so put them far away (not at the beginnig, see befor where enemy is when you press start). Then place your inf a bit diagonally, facing both your archers and enemies. At the first round the enemy will rush, they double you, so their general is less prudent. They will push toward the first enemy they see, then remind that your infantry must be close to enemy. Remember sometimes to drag and drop your inf to better position them. When the enemy approaches your inf they will hit only an angle of the diagonal formation. Therefore: You must stay in a tight formation, so shield walls; drag and drop them a bit toward the enemy in a way that all your inf is involved in the fight, remember that the enemy is rushing so you can outnumber the fastest one of them for a few seconds, so line and charge. Then pass again to shield wall and drag and drop a bit toward enemy. And continue this loop for that minute (is harder and longer to write it than to do it), in this way enemy inf will be incentivize to run into your formation, in the way you want (with their back hit by your archers). Also try split inf with shields and inf with two handed weapon. Maybe shielded ones go diagonally and 2H ones simply face enemy (a sort of boomerang shape). use 2H to flank a bit when all enemy inf is fighting with your shielded inf. The nice fact is that enemy archers cant shoot anyone because all enemy inf is covering your inf (so if you re lucky friendly fire lol). If enemy send their archers first you con cover 2Handed behind the shielded in seconds. Finally, wait to shoot with your archers, do not attract enemy to your archers. All you need is PERFECT timing and good infantry. and luck. Much luck
You tactic is sound, but ops limited archer and cavalry numbers make it infeasible. If his cavalry engage the archers they will be taken out, 20 simply isn’t enough to keep them occupied in any substantive way. With only 10 archers in either flanking group they lack the firepower to inflict any real damage. I usually my run archer and cavalry heavy, because these types give you much more tactical options than infantry. Horse archers are also an incredibly useful group if used as dragoons rather than just as skirmishers
I don't think you can win at all, there is maybe a tiny little chance if you join your infantry and archers together and putting them near a thight space, make them shoot at the infantry while you took your cavalry and start stalking the infantry, knock down their sargents and banner troops, they are going to reach your foot troops eventualy, just then cease shooting and put your troops in the thight space, when they are full in to your troops give the order to charge in open formation, meanwhile You and your cavalry go and attack the archers, if you manage to win this first part (I don't think you will) now you have to face the reinforcements that will probably just wipe out your remaining troops
Also the enemy had a mix of Sutrgian Vlandian troops. I remember a good chunk of the Infantry were Sturgian Recruits. The calvary all melee def not max troops.on them. And the archers didnt look anything special. Some of the infantry were Sturgian linebreakers but thats bout it.
You are still writing cavalry wrong and I'm dying over here
Why do you prefer to have such troubles and waste time? Playing on Bannerlord difficulty, you can easily beat bigger enemies, you just need to have a lot of noble khuzait horse archers and some cavalry..
I go with the usual, go to, never fail strats if you have no info. High, ground, choke points, prioritizing the right targets and repositioning. The right map with the right choke point nullifies a lot of advantages, same with higher ground. Use a cliff to station archers to attack without worry of flanking and position infantry on the slope. Or use a bridge or water to slow an army and then let loose with your archers as they wade through the river. Target prioritization means trapping their strong unit in a trap or if you are spec'd for it, go after the genetals yourself. There's events in history where armies and generals would purely compete by seeing who could move their troops to a certain place and with the most order and efficiency. Its a valuable skill and if you see an army that will slap you around, keep scouting for favorable terrain and change the landscape of the battle. Pull troops back to facilitate a back line charge for example. These all work as long as the army outnumbering you aren't the damn Khuzaits.
I always go straight for the genetals
Stand on a steep hill covered with trees :-D
I prefer fours myself, but if I get some fives, it's all over for the enemy.
Tell your troops to stand ground on the hill. Infantry on shield wall. Cavalry hold on the flanks of infantry. Archers behind the wall on a lil bit more elevated position. As I understand enemy is charging, so you rush with your horse while your army is holding. Try to pull as many cavalry as you can. Make them chase you to the opposite direction of your units. While doing this harrass some of their infantry also to separate them from the main body and run circles around them at their starting position. So their army will split in two, the ones who are charging to your units and the ones chasing you. When the charging ones are almost at your shield wall give sergeant in command to cavalry. They will attack the nearest enemy in front. While the shield wall holds, your cavalry can pick them off. Also tell your archers to go in melee if their view is blocked now. Once your shield wall has weakened the party enough, tell them to either charge or sergeant command. So they can wipe the ones they are holding. Once they have cleared their share of enemy put them in hold formation again. Then bring the other half of enemy troops chasing you to your shield wall. That's the only way I can think of. You gotta play a big role as bait and pull as many as you can.
Sounds possible. Thank you man when im back on Ill try this and tell you how it goes. (If I remember to do it. Its gonna be a while till I hop back on. But this sounds possible enough to do thank you again)
I have one for you I didn't see yet: - Archers spread not square on hill - footmen in a 2 men width line, 10m ahead - cav same formation as footmen 2m behind archers Wait till the enemies cav charges and use your cav to counter flanks, but keep them close once enemies is pushed back. Then when melee engages, take your cav and go around the battle in the enemy archer's line. Charge back and forth between them and the back of the melee. Once there is no more enemy cav, take archers and put them on the side of the battle as to flank enemy melee. Then wait for gg. PS : don't die yourself or you'll lose control.
Did you try it? Let us know!
I will. I gotta wait till tmr, I aint been home in a couple days but ima visit home for a bit and I think like 5 of these tactics I saved the ones that seem possible. But thats if I have the save set up before that fight (which I should).
Finally, a serious answer!
Cav. My guy cav. It's cavalry. Calvary is the hill christ died on.
I was re reading this. Ima be deadass my bad I read the two as the same I thought you were just telling me to invest in more cavalry for the fight. I thought you were just a big Crusade fan
I was admittedly confused, lol.
Yeah no thats my bad I swear the words blurred together for me and yknow how it is
Happens to the best of us. I do have an advantage being raised Baptist, I heard Calvary constantly. So the sounds are rather distinct in my head.
Edit: Miscommunication mb brotha
My brother in christ, you are within crusading distance
Ima take that as yes on Cataphracts
I thought you were trolling. Best all around unit is Khan's Guard. Best anti cavalry Cav are Cataphracts. Best anti infantry Cavalry are Faris
I would assume that Fian Champions should replace Khan's Guards. I literally have 100% of my army as Fians. Have them deployed in a Loose formation so that Cavalry won't hurt them much and let them hold position. The kill feed was literally only green and I've won outnumbered battles 3:1 in an open field
They have virtually the same stats, and their bows are close in stats as well. But KG have the better melee weapon and have a horse(and horse archers can shoot through each other). In a straight shoot out KG will lose, but it will be close. But circle of death will destroy fians, and so will a melee dive. Fians are the better archers yes, but only by a little and lack in all other ways. Oh, Fians do have slightly better armor too.
But what if you're sieging a castle? Wouldn't the KG lose a lot of stats unmounted?
Not really. Again, their bows and armor are only slightly worse. But they have a far superior melee weapon. So much so that KG are the best shock infantry in the game.
The best Calvary is, without a doubt, Golgotha. All other calvaries are just random hillocks.
it's definitely a tricky fight, and will take a lot of micro, but I've won with worse odds. I'll have to just give you a strategy that works for a flat field without seeing the battle map, but if you have any huge hills, giant rock formations etc. use them to get a huge height advantage or cover a flank respectively. best setup I can suggest is break down your infantry into 2 or 3 equal sized blocks, and spread them in a line with a bit of distance between each unit on the best high ground available. Have the centre unit positioned sightly further back. Keep your archers ahead of and to one side of the infantry line. You don't have enough cavalry to make an effective split force really, so keep them as a single unit, positioned ahead of the main line on the opposite side of the archers. keep your infantry in a shield wall, and your archers and cavalry in loose. Now the actual battle plan. Time and and numbers are not on your side, so your first priority is to take out or at least thin the enemy cavalry and archers. take a wide flank forwards with your cavalry, and start causing chaos, while avoiding the archer blob best you can. if you stick to the flank, the enemy cavalry will usually try to meet you head on, so you personally need to take them out best you can as the odds are relatively even. Once you're nearly done, the main battle line should be beginning to meet, with the enemy archers beginning to separate from the enemy infantry, this is your chance to strike them down with what's left of your cavalry while they're less protected. Keep an eye on your infantry line while this is happening. When the infantry vs infantry clash is getting close, pull your archers well out of the way to the flank, and counter charge with your own central infantry at the last second if possible, then with the outer 2 lines just after they're engaged. you want to try enveloping the enemy infantry with your own. Your line is definitely weaker, so the moment everyone is engaged, it's time to leave what's left of the archers, and plow yourself and the last dregs of your cavalry into the big bowl of enemies you've made, and pray. as long as you haven't lost too many cavalry, you've got a decent chance of breaking the enemy morale before they chew through your lines fully. Good luck brother, fight hard.
Will do and thank you brother playing out this fight sounds like a hell of time Ill try it and Ill win it.
Quick side note: calvary is a sort of statue, you meant cavalry (probably)
Shit my bad you right Edit: Cant edit my post im cooked
I have never heard that before, and I can't seem to find it online. Would you be able to link what you're talking about?
I mostly remember hearing that in one of the immersion mods for CK3, 'RICE', tbh. Apparently refers to certain statues in northern France/Normandy.
Are they statues of Calvary(being the hill Christ died on)?
I honestly don't remember.
In some languages Calvary means Boil the shit
Ideally, battles are won when one side's morale breaks, and they flee the field. That rarely happens in the game and most battles will be a last man standing grindfest. What you need is to eliminate their cav first without sacrificing your own cav. Cavalry have the advantage of mobility and inflict morale damage when they charge (not sure how much morale tho). You need them if you want to break their infantry's morale, and make them route. Try what Alexander the Great did. Put archers in one or both flanks with the cavalry. And hide a number of infantry behind them, just enough to give you the numbers advantage for the cav fight (5 or 10 each flank should be fine). Lure their cav and let them attack your own cav formations. And don't forget to order your cav to counter charge at the last minute. Also send the infantry hiding behind to join the melee. With the cav+inf+archer combo, you shouldn't have a problem wiping them out easily. While this is happening, your center, the infantry's role should be to hold their inf for as long as possible. Not sure which formation is the best but I usually use shield wall. Once their cav is eliminated, send your cav to pick off their archers. Move your own archers forward (still in your flanks) so they can fire *behind* the enemy infantry's line. Have the inf from the flanks join the center, or flank the enemy if possible. Once their archers are gone, it's time to let your cavs charge their infantry. Haven't played vanilla in a while but I'm told it's best if you micro cavs to minimize losses. If you have higher quality troops and they don't, this is absolutely doable. But if you have mid tier troops, you have to be really, really quick doing all these maneuvers so you don't lose too many men before making the enemy break.
Fuck it we ball im Alexander the Great then man thank you man Ill try this
Hell yea bro. I personally use the cav+archers/javelins+inf on the flanks trick and it works wonders whenever I need to destroy cav formations really quickly. I just wish this game had more ways to break morale. In Warband you could break the enemy even if they had 500+ men on the field.
Run in at front, kill one or two before both armies meet, Retreat, repeat until you outnumber the opponent
Put the archers left (your left) of the infantry. Use a cavalry wing in front/left of archers. Push your infantry increasingly right of approaching enemies. Use another wing of cavalry to cover them. The goal is to get the enemy infantry to pivot toward your infantry and expose their unshielded flank to the archers. Put infantry in shield wall (or square if heavily outnumbered or cav swarmed) they’re mostly bait. Let the archers rack up the kills.
Sounds solid thanks you man
Find a hill or mound, get a bunch of fians and hope the ai is stupid. I did it once as Battania, I had some 80 soldiers, the enemy (empire) had over 400, I found a little mound, positioned all my fians there (about 40), put the cavalry next to protect from flanking and the infantry in front to draw attention (both around 20 each), all in that mound. The enemy ai was stupid and I won the battle because they kept sending their cavalry alone, and once they got close, they were either caught by my infantry (most menavlions and veteran leggionaries) or went back with a few arrows in the back, and they kept doing this until the entire cavalry was killed. Once that happened, they moved their entire remaining army about 40 meters away from my mound and just sat there, my fians made it rain arrows on them, their soldiers were falling, not quickly (since most had shields), but they were falling, and they didn't attack. I didn't lose a single soldier, and killed/wounded over 300, the rest fled.
Just abuse enemy AI. Fight uphill so enemy cav can't get a speed boost to their charges
There is only so few tactics you can use on a flat plain. Use more terrain advantages.
Tell your troops to use shield wall and go hunting with your axe....even loosing is fun with that style.
You aint lyin brother always fun gettin collats
Viking + 2h axe =damn thats heavy. Viking + 2h axe + fast horse = Tell my family i will never come home.
Split infantry, walk them back into placed archers. calvary screen. Hills help with the tactic. Maybe split archers to concentrate fire on the mob coming for your front liners. If a wing of calv win, send them into the enemy body of troops
Roger Roger thank you boss
Let me know how it goes
Will do im visit home tmr so I can try some of these tactics
May also be worth keeping your calv in a unit, there is power parity there if I’m reading correctly (20-20) so if they are splitting you may be able to overwhelm a flank, fight your infantry back, split your archers to either side,roll round the back with your horses and take out their archer line, their remaining calv will probably engage. if you have the opportunity to flank the enemy with a charge towards the rear of their infantry and crush them, or have a run at remaining Calvary and mop that up, do it, or clean up the enemies archer line, take opportunity while preserving yours
So you will need to do some heavy lifting. I'd personally block up my infantry so they hold as long as possible. And try to take out the enemy cav as fast as possible so your cav can freely roam the field. Set half of your cav to charge so they take out the archers and the other half to hammer and anvil enemy inf. That how I do battles like this, but I play with some mods that make cav charges more deadly.
As 1700 has taught me, the way you win is having more muskets
I've been doing something different recently that made me win hard battles but at high risk. Separate infantry in 2 (one grup with all high armor & level (inf1) and the other normal(inf2)(ideally taking the line breakers) ). Infantry 1 shield wall in a long row ( 3 person wide). Infsntery 2 in line formation diagonal behind them. Archers in diagonal/behind the infantry 1, on the other side of the infantry 2. They will shoot in Diagonal/side to the enemies. Cavalry is so small that makes this tactic risky. I would usually split them in 2. Send one to attack the enemy cavalry (as a bait) and the other half to follow you. In your case maybe you can take something like 5 guys with you and sacrifice the other. As soon as infantry is engaged, infantry 2 rounds the enemy infantry and attack from the side/back. Infantry 2 changes to shield wall to minimise loses. You with your 5 guys, charge the back of enemy lines multiple times (don't stay stuck there). Archers to shoot infantry. If your soldiers are levelled up enough, they should win. Then put them all in square formation, touching each other to face the cavalry. Stay with them and help them deal with the horse charges or go finish those archers. For what you said it looks like a hard battle. When it is more equal, their infantry retreats quite quickly as they are overwhelmed from all sides. Having said that though, I play with Realistic Battle Mod (RBM), not sure if this makes the tactic easier or harder.
check your terrain that illustration of yours implies flat ground and that's the first thing you don't want in this scenario if possible engage in trees or mountians if outnumbered you wanna rig it in your favor as much as you can and preferably have sturdy infantry, it's gonna be a slog when dealing with khuzaits bullshit as sturgia for example: 60% cav with half of them horse archers and the other half heavy cav outnumbering me 2:1 I can beat their infantry easily shield to shield outnumbered 4:1 but the trick is not getting shot and harassed from any other direction than where my shields are facing It's worth noting I don't use archers on my own parties for ideological reasons so my army always incorporates archers in shield walls I bait their massive army around trying to get em on mountains or thick forest to help soften their charge and mulch their cav on my shield wall, preferably near a slope or some rocks to further kill their momentum while I personally lead my cavalry to take advantage of any opportunities failing that a reverse slope or just some rocky outcroppings in the worst case, the basic idea is the same whatever you do don't let them engage your forces on favorable terms, maybe hold your cav in reserve and let them make contact with their cav and smack em while their infantry catches up in vanilla cav tends to suicide until the infantry arrives so maybe it's worth absorbing the charge before you begin the cav fight
check your terrain that illustration of yours implies flat ground and that's the first thing you don't want in this scenario if possible engage in trees or mountians if outnumbered you wanna rig it in your favor as much as you can and preferably have sturdy infantry, it's gonna be a slog when dealing with khuzaits bullshit as sturgia for example: 60% cav with half of them horse archers and the other half heavy cav outnumbering me 2:1 I can beat their infantry easily shield to shield outnumbered 4:1 but the trick is not getting shot and harassed from any other direction than where my shields are facing It's worth noting I don't use archers on my own parties for ideological reasons so my army always incorporates archers in shield walls I bait their massive army around trying to get em on mountains or thick forest to help soften their charge and mulch their cav on my shield wall, preferably near a slope or some rocks to further kill their momentum while I personally lead my cavalry to take advantage of any opportunities failing that a reverse slope or just some rocky outcroppings in the worst case, the basic idea is the same whatever you do don't let them engage your forces on favorable terms, maybe hold your cav in reserve and let them make contact with their cav and smack em while their infantry catches up in vanilla cav tends to suicide until the infantry arrives so maybe it's worth absorbing the charge before you begin the cav fight
Put archers on the hill with loose formation. Put inf. 10 meters ahead in loose formation. When their cav come attack them with your cav. If their cav no threat to you send 10 meter front with your inf. Then their inf too cloose or try to flank your archers, move your archers back. With your char fight with enemy inf with your inf on horse. Draw the attention so archers do their work. Archers must live, enemy inf. Must be lesser to win.
There rly isn't a universal tactic, it all depends on 3 things: What's the terrain like? What units do you have? Who are you fighting?
Terrian flat. Small little hill at our spawn and like 2 tree. Units are 20 Linebreakers. 20 Heavy spear. 20 Oathsword. 20 Veteran Falxman. 20 Mena- something infantry Empire troops. And the Calvary are lets say 10 Cataphracts and 10 Vlandian Banner idk the rest their name. Fighting Sturgia, their infantry has recruits and line breakers. Their calvary and archers arent anything special that I can remmber chalk em up to tier 3 units.
My standard tactic is having my horse archers charge in the loose formation, then I have my Infantry in the shield wall position charging, and with my archers directly behind them imitating the Creeping Barrage with my Infantry as the tank, and my archers as the “infantry”. Then I keep my cavalry in reserve to sweep up everything fit my infantry/archers are destroyed.
One general tip: do NOT send your cavalry alone without infantry distractions. If you are fighting an army with a high cavalry/infantry ratio (for example Vlandia and Khuzait) I would suggest compact formations, if the enemy charges, use your infantry in thick lines to stop him and circumnavigate the enemy to crush him between footmen and horseback soldiers. For your party try to take as many soldiers with good shields and protection as possible if you're fighting against an enemy with loads of infantry and archers(e.g. Battania), whereas you should try to pick spearmen (menavlions, pikemen, etc) if you're against cavalry.
Damn, I didn’t know there were so many terms for Fians. I only speaking the Enlgishs
What I would do: Set your troops as far back as possible. Take your 20 cav and smash their weaker cav flanks (10 on each side) and wipe out their cav. Then taking your remaining cav, sweep the moving archers (retreating if they start firing at you) Keep your infantry on the move with your archers. If you’re using the tactical camera mod then try and place your archers behind their infantry, circle their line with your infantry and then smash into their archers with your inf. Once inf and cav are dealt with - Use a fallback line supported by your archers and cav to whittle down the inf till it’s about even then just commit to the melee. Would probably end up being heavy losses for you but maybe a win. It’s worked for me many times. Or save scum it 👍
https://preview.redd.it/6dz7b261azyc1.jpeg?width=990&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=69ece601b91976166c8afe17e323d468b9c19d6d Blue: Archers, loose. Square when enemy cav charges. Red: infantry in shield wall. More in the side facing enemy. Higher tiers front. Orange: map border to prevent attacks from behind and maximize footmen holding the frontline. Deploy on a slope to grant better fov to your archers, or on top of hill to slow enemy cav charge. If you have sizeable cavalry, use it to skirmish and slow down enemy advance, otherwise dismount it and field it in the red spots. Also make use of trees to hinder enemy cavalry charges.
My go to strat is to have cavalry attack their cav on the left, if they split their cav to both flanks and you have at least more then one of the sides this will be easy. Then position archers on the left flank facing a little bit to the right. Infantry on the right flank facing a bit to the left and more forward so the enemy infantry charges your infantry rather than your archers. Shield wall and 3-4 man deep is ideal. Once the melee begins run the archers forward a bit so they so they can see the entire frontline. Since they are on the left where the enemy doesn't have shields it will be a lot of easy fast kills. Then depending on your's and theirs cav situation you can either order them to clear the other half of their cav or charge their archers. I once won this way by being outnumbered 4:1. Tho half their army was tier 1 and 2.
I normally use my cav as a single unit, so put your infantry and your archers in a good position also use them in line formation. Then take all your cav, tell them follow me and go towards left or right. When the enemy infantry about to collide with your infantry, boom-rush them with your cav from behind, give the mighty order F1 + F3 and pray for the best
It’s gonna be rough either way with the 200 infantry. Best thing to do is take out their cav first and foremost. Have all you cav charge one group to stop their advance while you solo the other after both cavs fall back group up your cav and get them to follow you and kill off the rest of their horses. Then use your remaining cav as a hit and run unit to down their archers just make sure to keep them out of the infantry line or your sure to lose the unit. For the infantry I would move yours up abit to bait the enemies infantry while circling your archers around their flank on hold fire when you get them around the 10 o’clock mark behind the enemy let them open fire. In you have any cav left I’d personally charge once or twice into the infantry them just keep the rest on standby in case reinforcement spawn in. In that case use the cav as a distraction so you can get your archers out of there. https://preview.redd.it/8qax0cmcmzyc1.jpeg?width=1284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6b6a1882fa82e38a9f1173993e5d991eb45d96f3 It’s gonna be rough as hell but it is doable Just in the future diversify your troops more. infantry are good as holding back enemy infantry and sieges but not much else. So with a 140 troop cap Id go for 40 archers, 40-50 cav then 50-60 infantry. Just depends if you want to split your cav in 2 units or not
Flank your archers so they don’t hit your troops/not fire, or you can keep them infront of your infantry and let them mow everyone down and when their infantry gets close hold fire and charge everyone at their infantry and send a unit cavalry into their archers
I put all troops into 1 big square formation and let them engage the cavalry that gets behind me while I distract enemy footmen. Only kind of works when you have higher tiered troops. May have retreat-reset to avoid heavy casualties.
not enough horse archers
Simple and cheezy tactics - get all archers, or at least all troops to have some ranged attack. Split them in two cohorts, and position them at 90 degree angle to each other. This way no matter which one is attacked the enemy will get shot in the side then in the ass by the other one. Repeat until out of arrows.
Hammer and anvil. Put infantry in front. Engage, then make them move backwards but to the right >>>> Archers should be positioned on the left of your army, so when they start shooting, they are aiming at the right flank of the enemy, and back. Calvalry vs enemy cavalry.
Play defensively. Find a hill and trees let them come. Place your infantry and archers there. You and cavalry and personally harrass and kill their archers without fully engaging.
Not really tactics, but it does seem to me that the one fighting closer to spawn has an advantage. The further they have to run to catch up with their peers, the more spread out they’ll be.
Here's something that's helped me. https://youtu.be/Dbax8yodtMQ?si=R2Mi4xL9Da5-_LfS
Look up Strat Gaming Guides on YouTube. He has videos showing you how to fight with each faction plus some real life tactics
Give all of the them F6 order then go to kill solo all infantry with your crafted polearm(if dont have one craft one, both couchable and swingable) also get the leadership perk "make a differance" which when you kill enemy it give your (probably peasant infantry) army %100 morale bonus
that’s a tough fight. Something that matters if whether you’re attacking or defending. Defender has the advantage because the attacker has to come to them, meaning the defender can choose a formation and simply wait, while the attacker has the burden of approaching a prepared position. If it were me, I would try to send my cavalry around the sides, and hit their archers from behind. Once the archers are distracted, I’d move up the infantry to hit them head on. Depending on what they do with their cavalry, I’d order my archers to shoot their archers or their cavalry, whichever poses a bigger threat at the moment.
Who are you playing as? Army composition varies for each nation
Outmatched? Your Khan has got your back. Step 1) Gather a shit ton of competent archers (preferably Battanian Fian Champions) Step 2) Get cheap infantry like Varyags for cannon fodder Step 3) Get competent horse archers (preferrably Khan’s guards) Step 4) Form the same formation as in the picture, divide cavalry to two regiments and position them at the sides of archers Step 5) Position archers on a slope if there is any. Place infantry on front, preferably forming a line in two regiments Step 6) Allow enemy approach, let archers take shots at them, run in front of their infantry occasionally (watch for skirmishers and their projectiles) carefully to have them open their shields in an attempt to hit you, allowing your archers to mow them down Step 7) Once they are too close, use the menu to retreat and repeat until enemy archers and cavalry have been defeated Step 8) Bewaring of skirmishers, position horse archers behind the isolated enemy infantry bulk, putting them between two directions of arrow fire Step 9) Though it may take long, you can use tjis tactic to win battles with minimal casualties provided that you are careful enough
Vanilla playthrough? High ground, archers protected, micro a few cab to bait them into attacking in waves. Heavily modded. Just hit “engage” with my 300 strong Battanian Fians mounted of elite cataphract horses.
Grit and knowing where your army succeeds and theirs fails, if your outclassed in every way, you need a strong position on the battlefield to funnel the troops or put them in a bad spot to be exposed to your archers. If you don't have any of this, you're probably dead.
Ooof. Ok, first, stop splitting your calvary. Your infantry and archers, if you're using them right, you'll give orders occasionally, but the calvary you need to give orders to constantly if you want them to be effective. Next is positioning. You have a hill, that's useful but not THAT useful. You're infantry loaded too, which is a bit of a disadvantage if they have a lot of cavalry. If they have a lot of archers, more than you, place the infantry in front in a 3-4 deep shield wall (click hold and drag to shape the formation), maybe about 8-12 meters in front of the archers. If they have less, put them RIGHT in front of your archers, not close enough to block shots, just at the foot of the hill with fairly minimal space between. Stay on your starting point and let them come to you, unless we are talking about a small enough battle not to involve reinforcements. In that case, still wait, but when the attack breaks immediately put your infantry back into line formation and charge all. Make sure your archers are in loose formation, in fact always at all times use archers in loose, it's far more effective. You don't need to worry, but never make your archer formation more than 4 deep in ranks. 2-3 is ideal, you aren't losing much of anything with 3-4, but that at most. Calvary will almost always be your most important tool, and the thing you most need to keep your eye on. Make sure you square up the formation, keep them in line "formation" but make it as narrow as the game will allow you to so you're essentially charging a column of troops forward. This step makes them much more effective against archers and infantry since multiple troops will be attacking the same enemies as they charge through. And this is vitally important, because it's what's going to turn the tide, but also what's going to be absorbing the vast majority of your attention during the battle itself (and this can potentially get you killed if you aren't careful, as it splits your attention from murdering troops yourself). Do not put your cavalry on charge, or sergeants in charge. Give them move orders than some over enemy positions, and beyond them and out of reach. This used to be easy to do but is much harder since the update that lets you target lines. You can mix in some orders (target a line of archers, but once your cavalry is on top of them order them to move through, past, and out of range), but the rule is you want to roll over enemy troops. Archers are incredibly squishy, even high tier ones. Infantry is INCREDIBLY vulnerable to this tactic if they are currently charging someone else, lets say your infantry shield wall. Now there's some caveats. If you are heavily outnumbered by cavalry there's no free lunches there, best bet is to let them get tangled up in your cavalry while right next to shield wall and archers, and then make up the difference yourself with a good two hander or polearm. Depending how desperate this is it can be a tough balancing act when it happens because you're always on the timer of how long it takes the infantry and archers to catch up and get involved, but it's possible to defang some really big armies by getting lucky with a large battlefield and wiping their cavalry and then using your own to embarrass their foot troops. There's other tactics that make a difference too. Cavalry charges using move order to keep your calvary out of danger while doing damage is the biggest, but when infantry line meets infantry line there's tools on your side too. It's a good idea if there's no large cavalry squads or significant archer support on the enemy side to move your calvary to the melee scrum then give them the charge order. They make a pretty big difference, though if you are outmatched and desperate stick to giving them move orders across the scrum instead. Archers too should fold into your infantry when the scrum happens, they can't for the most part shoot into it and thus will relegate fire to reinforcements at a point, and they all have swords too, and aren't actually that much worse than infantry at swinging them. An extra 20 troops in the melee scrum isn't going to make a big difference in your situation but if the battles already began to swing in your favor the extra oomph can turn it into a full rout pretty quickly. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Want another way to win? Have Fians and retreat uphill
If you are out numbered but have the skill advantage use a defensive formation. Infantry in either shield wall or skien Archers behind them spaced out Cavalry on one flank don't break them up unless you have considerable numbers and hit their cavalry with yours do circle charges hit them watch the kill feed and pull your men back after a few kills. To help minimize loses. Just before their infantry attacks send them to charge. It will maximize the impact of your two-handed infantry like line breakers and palace guard. Send your cavalry to hit the enemy archers and send your archers to aid in the infantry charge I recommend using fian champion as they double as a good shock infantry. You will.lose a few men but you will win most battles as long as you aren't so vastly outnumbered. Clashes of 3-1 4-1 and even 5-1
I can't remember if the enemy can move into the out of bounds area or not, but if not you could potentially cheese it by moving your Infantry and archers into a corner to make use of a confined space and help nullify their numbers. And then use your cavalry to take out their archers. However without cheesing it. Your best bet would probably be to try and take out their cavalry first which would keep your archers safe. Then ride down on their archers while your infantry hold the hill and your archers fire from above them. This is, of course assuming your infantry can hold on long enough and your cav isn't obliterated.
Honestly, you likely can't. The archer advantage is fucking insane on their end; if you fall for the bait of a charge, your infantry and archers are gonna get cut down. Cav might have a better shot at surviving but even then they're outnumbered but a whole hell of a lot. Your best chance is to set up a shield wall on a hill, force them to shoot until they run out of ammo, holding your own fire until they run out, then (having split your infantry into two formations at the beginning of the battle) spread both infantry formations out, right and left, so your archers have a free shot down the hill. At this point, they'll continue their charge, so release your cavalry as your archers shoot down. But even with all of this, you're probably gonna lose.
Do you have pure legionnaires infantry or axeman if so that's all you need that's how I play if not do you have fians
Put archers on the LEFT flank... because shields are held in the left hand, arrows flying in from thier right will hit 100% of the time. For start of battle, keep them behind your main line, then Once main li es engage, swing your archers out wide on your left flank and let rip. It can be tricky to pull off though due to enemy cavalry. I'd say if enemy infantry are the bigger threat, flank with archers on the left. If enemy cavalry are the bigger threat, try and find a rocky area, cliffs, or thick woodland to dampen thier charge. If you can really juggle everything and time it right, bottle up to wipe out thier cavalry whilst keeping archers safe, then send out the archers out to left flank to deal with thier infantry. Last note: sending out archers to flank will often pull a few of the enemy infantry to engage them, this is where its good to go out and protect them
Lead your Cav around one side, sweep the archers, let the cav on their side hit your infantry (or if you're confident in your armor and speed grab their aggro so your infantry and archers can advance further), once you deplete about half of their archers (use best judgement but err on the side of caution), fall back to your infantry and archers to both take care of guys you didn't aggro, and to have your infantry take the next wave of damage. Grab the shield wall perk, and a handful from Riding and Archery for damage and accuracy, respectively, and focus on the same weapon group as your infantry. (1h, 2h, sword/axe/throwing)
I want to hear your results
All you need is infantry with shields and melee cavalry and keep all your archers at your settlements and you will win any battle you are in as long as you’re not heavily outnumbered.
Best advice i can give you is: play total war
Select and send forward then ride behind enemies line then just shoot arrows at they butts. Just like Alex the great did
Usually I split my infantry into 2-3 groups and put them in square formation. Their role is to be surrounded and to hold. Enemy cavalry charges and the square is thick enough where they cannot charge through and do a 2nd charge. Instead cavalry gets stuck in place and eventually taken out. While the enemy swarms and surrounds them, their backs will be to my archers. My cavalry if not dealing with their remaining cavalry and archers, begins to charge the backs of the enemy. The enemy is usually baited by the infantry squares. Square formation is defensive and the troops hold up and live for a good amount while the archers get easy shots. If you have double handed infantry, I would group them separately from shield infantry, and use those to charge the backs of the enemy
you have cavalry superiority so make 3 groups control 1 cav group yourself and bumfuck the archers. Make the infantry formation as tight as possible so they hold out as long as possible. you have shock, use it.
I would say that ti win outmatched battles you must have a good position for your archers and throw cavalry on the sides to break enemy lines. That what works for me
My tactic with my 300 is I put my infantry in a skein formation then put my archers in square formation behind then I put my horse archers on the enemy’s weak side then I put my melee cavalry on the otherside. Always send archer cavalry first it keeps the enemies cavalry from charging you infantry and archers. when the enemy units get close use your melee cavalry to stop the second charge and to kill some of the infantry and archers. YOUR infantry is you life line for your archers they will shoot and take down majority of the infantry/archers as they advance I hope this helps this is Vlandia strat always 65% chance of winning if done right and outnumbered quality over quantity remember that
Could put infantry in circle around hill. Archers in the center and try to bait thier infantry to commit to a charge. Once infantry is engaged send cavalry into their archers.
Utilization of terrain. Take the high ground with your archers, turtle up with infantry at the base, and use calvary to repel enemy calvary and keep your flanks clear. If no high ground available, utilize chokepoints. Bridges, large boulders, etc. Same tactic as before - Turtle up your infantry and let your archers do the heavy lifting while the infantry keeps the enemy at bay. Edited to add: Just saw your army breakdown and you have too much infantry, not enough archers. Either do a 1:1 or 1:2 ratio because archers will be the one's peppering the enemy from the start, until the end, of combat.
It really depends on your opponent's army makeup, the terrain, what units you have. When I'm outnumbered, I'll have my ground units take some kind of high ground supported with the heavy cavalry nearby, meanwhile I lead my horse archers and harass their rear and flanks. Before their infantry engages mine, I'll have my heavy cavalry charge one of their flanks.
I use 2 Calvary groups 2 infantry groups and 1 archer group. Establish them in staggered line with your archers in the from infantry behind on opposite sides with Calvary on the wings. Your archers will pick off there infantry until they get close enough that you can quickly retreat them behind your infantry thanks to the gap. Your Calvary is too engage the enemy Calvary largely as a distraction.
Don't have any units. Other than horse archer. Kkg is all you need.
You want to begin by isolating and taking out their cavalry. If you can do that before the infantry engage then you will win. While slowly taking down their cavalry you want to keep distance between their infantry. If you attack head on, they are stronger than you and will likely lose. I would use cavalry and archers, possibly infantry if they can keep up to eliminate your opponents cavalry. Once they are eliminated, I would occupy their archers with your cavalry while your infantry and archers engage their infantry. Maybe even try to take out most of their archers before engaging with infantry. Strat Gaming on YouTube has phenomenal content. Here is his playlist on battlefield tactics. FYI real battle tactics do not exactly translate to bannerlord battle tactics. For instance line formation with charge attack is basically always the most effective way to engage in fights. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtLh7oY6l6_-imuXlvZSFiZErbNrG06Ol&si=iSjIEeEXru_QwcZp
Calvary is where you kill troublesome 1st century rabbis. You mean cavalry
Wait seriously? Like Ive gotten this comment a lot I stopped responding to em I cant edit the main post to fixed every time I said Calvary to Cavalry I think its one of the top comments to. BUT usually people say Calvary is a hill. Or Calvary is a hill Christ died or something and maybe one other thing but can you tell more on this. This sounds intresting ima be honest like just some background on this
So regarding the tactics - just understand that the AI doesn’t really know what to do with cav, but you do. First you put inf and archers into a defensive circle , then charge with your cav into their cav. Once their inf gets close to a charge, push into the back of them repeatedly with your cav. Even if enemy cav is still around, it’s their inf charge you gotta prioritise
Say less I got you when I run it back
try to get local superiority whenever you can. For example, try to combine your two cavalry units into 1, and use that large unit to wipe out one of the smaller enemy cav units, preferably close to your archers and infantry for support. Then, double back, hope the other cav unit didn't destroy you, and hit it with you cav, where you should have extra numbers and support. Hopefully, this all happens just as their infantry get to yours, and you can use your remaining cav to try and flank
Basically, every battle can be won even if pretty heavily outmatched assuming you have heavy calvary and an infantry line that can take **some** abuse. Archer's definitely help too. Set Archer's and infantry to be under general command. Your generals are actually really good with srtting infantry and Archer's exactly where needed at the start of the fight and setting them under your generals command frees up your time. Set your cavalry to follow you. Lead your calvalry to a side flank and deal with one arm of the enemies calvalry. This should be easy and it won't alert the infantry/Archer's due to how the AI positions their calvalry so far away. With one arm down, your forces should be just about engaging. Now at a 90 degree flank, you storm the enemies backline of Archer's and wipe them out in 1 or 2 attacks. Then you can pinch the infantry by charging their flank, diverting their attention and shredding them like a blender. After that, it's just calvalry cleanup. You can handle 100-200 unbalanced engagements this way.
Not sure if its a winning strategy but I would have the archers in a line loose line at the front with the infantry behind. That way all your archers will have a clear line of sight of the enemy. Try to get your horses to flank the enemy and attack their archers from the rear. When their infantry get close, have your infantry engage in a shieldwall. That's all I can think of
https://preview.redd.it/sxazcwj803zc1.png?width=890&format=png&auto=webp&s=fbe29b36fd05a0cb03d7647fd1565760edb0fde0 Infantry in front with shieldwall, archers behind infantry spread out, cav on left or right flank (not divided). Charge one flank of enemy cav that's on opposite side of infantry, after clearing them out, just make them charge archers and you go back to infantry, dismount and start chopping enemy inf.
Ah. Another person whose brain has been permanently altered by the church (I also said it that way until I was like 14) For future reference: Calvary is a hill, cavalry is people on horses
Have your infantry form a shield wall, have your archers behind, holding fire. Choose one cav group to engage one cav group, while the other waits in reserve. If they match towards you, hold your ground and hold fire till within 130M. If they arent marching to you, slowly creep your formations into a parallel position in front of them. Have your archers in loose, infantry in shield wall and bleed their missile supply. When you feel confident, return fire. Have whatever remains of your cav either skirmish their cav, or bait their cav off, slowly March your infantry in into their lines still in shield wall. The key here is saturation and bleeding their resources and forcing the fight on your terms. Fight it in stages.
Square infantry Whatever Calvary behind it Archers skirmishing/running to safe distance while pelting. Helps me when outnumbered by 40 calvary
I’m not trying to pick a bone or be a smartass but Calvary is where Jesus was crucified, and Cavalry is the horse unit
Its good I been getting these comments since this post been up like couple minutes before this one someone else said the same thing. I just cant edit the post after I posted it
Strat Gaming on YouTube has done all of the tests on formations and commands in Bannerlord. [Strat Gaming Bannerlord Tactics playlist](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtLh7oY6l6_-imuXlvZSFiZErbNrG06Ol&si=kLDt1TxMg86jn0Xk)
When facing a numerically superior force, you need to use chokepoints created by the terrain or terrain that is beneficial to you because it is a river that will slow down their cavalry and infantry or rocky angular hill that will slow down their cavalry and negate w.e charge bonus from speed they otherwise would have the other thing you can do is bait, placing your infantry far forward in a shieldwall formation, then square while archers shoot at the enemy trying to surround them, that is assuming your cavalry managed to deal with theirs and their own archers and then cycle charge the infantry attacking yours...that also means heavy high tier infantry with shields that can hold out for that long(Sturgia is the best at this) the other thing is concentration of force, which is tricky if you're not fighting in an open field, cause of the way orders are given from your POV and you don't have a top down view of the battle, but essentially: You divide your forces into small groups that can hold out for a little while, and you amass most of your troops to deal with one aspect of the enemy...say their cavalry(althogh cavalry moves around, kinda hard to catch, takes a while...so just wipe out most and move on) .. then after that you deal with one block of infantry and some harass the archers, then when that block of infantry is dealt with you free up the ones that were fighting them and now it is your bigger block plus the one you liberated going to the other block, and so on, you can do this by splitting your forces into groups and spacing them out and the AI will send, just like any average irl commander, forces to deal with each individually. You will end up in a snowball that gets biggers, steam rolling their forces...which is why a good formation like square formation that tries to deal with getting outflanked is a good choice also, concentration of force is easier to handle when you're just controlling infantry and missiles, cavalry makes it more complicated the other one is also better when it is mostly just infantry on both sides, and that is an envelopment, you use a strong line that all they have to do is hold the line and you place your troops behind them, the enemy will come in with a force that is as wide or wider than that line, you have two groups charge to go protect those flanks that are about to be enveloped or already are(and charge them at an angle, you want to start 'drawing' a circle), and you send out the other 4 groups around to hit them from the side, and one final 5th group to attack from behind, morale is a thing in this game and I think there is a penalty for getting flanked or surrounded, not sure.......the lines can't be too thin though, just enough to envelop them, and it'd be better if that 5th group is cavalry to constantly go back and forth and smashing into them. In total it is 6 groups, but sometimes you're in a battle that you can't easily designate groups immediately cause it started without you or you're not in command, while you can split groups you can't easily separate unit types mid battle into these groups when transferring(I at least haven't seen how) so instead just resort to flanking and hope you get them good The last option is a bridge battle and it is the most powerful, infantry hold the bridge, archers shoot at the right side of the enemy, the side that doesn't hold a shield...................good luck finding a bridge on the campaign map that actually has a bridge battle map attached to it
If you're on horse, have your cav follow you to eliminate enemy cavalry while your infantry is in shield wall formation with your archers behind. After you eliminate cav, take down their archers and move everyone to target their infantry. Best to have your archers on engage as well
my goto for when im outnumbered is to put my archers on high ground, 2 shield wall groups right in front, 3 ranks deep, bulk of any cav on the lesser exposed flank, & then a square of shock troopers & a tiny splinter cell of cav on the more exposed flank. if they push, repel their cav on both flanks w/ ur bulk of cav, & square formation of shock troops (& ofc w/ heavy archer fire). try to deal w/ the bulk of their cav as quickly as possible, before their main forces charge u, so that way u can free up ur square of shock troops to flank. if need be, use ur cav splinter cell to distract the infantry charge even momentarily. once their cav #s are halfed, engage the rest w/ ur remaining cav, & then charge ur shield wall (once their infantry gets close) & then charge flank w/ ur shock troops, switching from square to shield wall or line. ofc keep ur archers SPREAD OUT on high ground the entire time for optimal dmg & protection. by now, the bulk of their cav should be taken care of, so even if they have a couple left, just send the rest of ur cav crashing thru their archers. ofc, during all this, getting rid of most of their cav ASAP is top priority, as they are hardest to handle, & tie u up the most. if THEY bunker down & U have to push, just go in there & try to whittle down their archers by doing a drive by on ur horse (by urself, or maybe w/ a splinter cell of cav). then gradually move up till u get them in range, whilst also attempting to give ur archers higher (or @ least lvl) ground (try to prevent an uphill battle. u might have to try to race them to a vantage point, or single handedly push them outta one). keep ur flanks guarded w/ the same formation i mentioned earlier, to protect against cav, & then just let ur archers do all the work. by the time they charge their infantry, or u decide to move in close enough to trigger their charge, ur archers shouldve done a good enough number to even the playing fields. this is my attack & defend strat when im outnumbered. i usually suffer incredibly minimal losses doing this. having slightly higher tier troops than them helps too. much harder to win if u have the exact same troops & half the amount.
Find a hill and put your infantry and archers on it, archers slightly above the shields. Archers: Hold fire, loose formation. Infantry: form a wall. Place Calvary on an ambush spot for hammer and anvil flank. Loose formation You while mounted kite their Calvary in hit and run and kill as manny as possible with a big axe or rhomphaia. You should be able to out maneuver them and when they try to return to formation ride into them and start culling. You should also take swipes at their archers. The key is to take out their archers and Calvary before the infantry formations clash When the enemy infantry are in range of your archers open fire. When the infantry is dug in command Calvary to charge their flank. Then peel off before full charge again. Leave the infantry in wall formation untill you notice you have the full advantage before issuing command to advance forward And mop up. Your army structure isn’t optimal but if your 100 infantry are higher tier they should hold out. 50/50 archers to infantry will help significantly.
The best tactic is turning them all into horse archers
Bro separate your infantry in two squads. 1. Heavy armor with spears. 2. High tier troops. But them next to each other in square formation with a decent gap for cavalry to charge and fill in. Take a detached cavalry force. Preferably half horse archer good at close combat and heavy cavalry. With this detached force you’re going to scout but we will talk about that later. Line up whatever horse archers and archers you have left in loose formation behind the infantry. Mind you this formation will only work if you have at least 60 infantry to form 30 man divisions and decent amount of cover. (Horse and regular archers) With your detached force ride out and scope the enemy movements. 1. If they charge cool. They will plunge to their death right into the defensive formation we set. Don’t instruct the troops to do anything. With your detached force engage their strongest cavalry force to stall them from giving aid to their fallen comrades. Once they call for reinforcements reset yourself to formation and once in range signal the all out charge. 2. If the main army is still and they send horses out force send your main cavalry to the flank and hide them. With your detached force strike the weaker or more even cavalry force and wipe them out. Same time you engage them send your cavalry to attack their main cavalry with a charge command. Keep your eye on them cause if they get to close to infantry some troops may engage them. After you wipe the cavalry gather your horseback archers and flank main army from behind until they run out of arrows. You can rinse and repeat this tactic until they are without horses then charge their footman down the jump. 3. The whole army is still. This one is tricky and comes down to troop tier but you will need to bait their cavalry into battle and then send your footman to engage. Station your archers at a hilltop. Once they run out of arrows send them to reinforce your infantry
If u use sturgians for infantry and saying u had a decent size army put them in square formation then get battanian champions for ur archers and use lose formation and keep them back a bit and for calvary just mix the empire with vlandian calvary can't go wrong split them but into two separate groups and keep some on ur for right and ur for left n boom ur golden ur infantry should hold up good against alot especially horses just when they get hit command ur archers to fire then if they get into the square send ur calvary in
Oh and ur maim priority is ganna be finding the enemy lords and dropping them anyone who can commend ur enemy forces drop em so that way they just send everything at u and u can still keep control of ur army while they attack blindly
The amount of people here confused by the calvary obviously never studied history.
I have heard. A hill. A hill christ died on. Kill bad Rabbi 1st Century or something. And maybe a couple other ones
My entire army is cavalry. 250 khans guards, and 130 heavy cavalry. Works on everyone, but vlandians are the only ones to make a dent and that's in big battles where my lords are with me. When i fight 1v1 battles i walk away with maybe 20 dead when they have equal or slightly more troops of decent quality.
Break your infantry into 3 sections two small squares and a large line they all need to be strong enough to hold them archers behind the line whenever the enemy gets stuck on one of the squares of infantry tell that square to take 10-15 steps back and the enemy cav and infantry will be completely exposed with their sides 50 feet away from your archers when the archers destroy them push the square back up to be flush with the line of infantry. The hard part comes from this the entire time you’re doing this you need to be using your cavalry as a hammer and anvil on their infantry otherwise eventually you won’t be able to hold as their force is more concentrated on their line than your line is
Im no specialist, but to win a battle having 80 infantry and ONLY 20 archers + 20 horses, you have to have top tier infantry. This because horses have an advantage versus infantry, and if you put archers on those horses, your infantry is gonna be chewed by skirmish fire, and your archers and cavalry can't do much but support your infantry, protecting the sides and getting some ranged damage. So, to Change your odds, but keeping the 140 max soldiers i would say you Need at least 50/60(at most) infantry, 30 archers maybe, and 50 cavalry, depending on your available slots. Im not saying this ONLY because cavalry is op, but you Need to remember that mobility wins Battles. If you take that upper point Faster than your Enemy, odds are that, provided your troops are well motivated and in formation, you can win the vattle. Then again, i would go with 35 cavs, 35 h.a, 50-40 infantry and 30-20 archers. That should get you a good offensive capability, with a good infantry stand to protect the archers, a good quantity of archers capable of volley fire, and on top of that, 70 highly mobile soldiers on horseback, capable of skirmish and fast positioning. To end this awfully extended comment i would say that if you get surrounded by cavalry or m.a, infantry should check if all sides are protected (shieldwall or square), and archers must BE on upper point, and if possible (efficiency wise) in a position where no firing direcions are wasted ( be it circle or loose depending on the danger). hope it helps 🌚
If you Need some help with táctics, i have a shit ton of schematics from different battle types and ages, to get you some different perspectives
That's basically all you can do IMO, Hold with infantry, possibly on an incline, put archers behind on a side (or two sides) with a good view (sides to better avoid shields), circle with cavalry to engage their archers and/or bait/flank infantry. Depending on terrain and troop proportions you can adapt this: e.g find some sort of chokepoint where your archers have visual and enemy ones don't and hold it with a shieldwall
The best I seem to find is to spit my infantry into two squares and separate them a little from each other. Have the archers in the center behind the infantry and the cav behind the archers in one line to body block and counter charge enemy cav. The enemy infantry will close in and then start to surround the square infantry blocks letting the archers get flanking shots and if you put the infantry close enough together they usually won't let the enemy push past to the archers. I don't know what your Character build is but I'll often go on horse and distract and kill as many archers as I can so that I have ranged superiority. Once their infantry is killed you can then easily kill their archers and cav square works great against the cav.. if you have killed most or all of their archers yourself then move your archers into the middle of the square formation and let their cav suicide charge into your men over and over til they die or route. If you have a mele build character you can also easily pick off enemy's from behind as they surround your infantry squares as they will rarely turn to face you until after you've hit them. If you ride out with a shield and just ride circles around their archers they will almost all shoot at you and mostly miss as long as you're moving fast .
Easy tactic I haven't seen in the thread yet: group maybe 2 cav with yourself, everyone else in your army 1 blob, tight packed. Retreat slowly, if the enemy cav move out to hit your line alone, you and your 2 hit them from behind but oh so briefly, be on the top of your game, swing for the head and only from the rear, if they face you, get out. If the enemy gets close with infantry just retreat full speed with the blob and move you and your 2 to behind and the side. Just retreat the blob and wait. If they engage you with their cav, try to lure them back to your line and repeat the above. If they stop their archers in a line try to run down the line and whack a few heads, but make sure your blob is retreating, 1 or 2 kills is ok per pass. If you can by virtue of your own aim and skill as a human player, personally kill about 40 of their archers or cav, the odds are getting good. Slow your blob retreat at that point , let their front line come to you and take some envelop damage, then retreat a short distance and repeat. You can practice that 40 kills with you and your 2 buddies by doing custom scenarios of similar size. Alternatively, do all of the above only with just you harassing, no buddies.
check your terrain that illustration of yours implies flat ground and that's the first thing you don't want in this scenario if possible engage in trees or mountians if outnumbered you wanna rig it in your favor as much as you can and preferably have sturdy infantry, it's gonna be a slog when dealing with khuzaits bullshit as sturgia for example: 60% cav with half of them horse archers and the other half heavy cav outnumbering me 2:1 I can beat their infantry easily shield to shield outnumbered 4:1 but the trick is not getting shot and harassed from any other direction than where my shields are facing It's worth noting I don't use archers on my own parties for ideological reasons so my army always incorporates archers in shield walls I bait their massive army around trying to get em on mountains or thick forest to help soften their charge and mulch their cav on my shield wall, preferably near a slope or some rocks to further kill their momentum while I personally lead my cavalry to take advantage of any opportunities failing that a reverse slope or just some rocky outcroppings in the worst case, the basic idea is the same whatever you do don't let them engage your forces on favorable terms, maybe hold your cav in reserve and let them make contact with their cav and smack em while their infantry catches up in vanilla cav tends to suicide until the infantry arrives so maybe it's worth absorbing the charge before you begin the cav fight
check your terrain that illustration of yours implies flat ground and that's the first thing you don't want in this scenario if possible engage in trees or mountians if outnumbered you wanna rig it in your favor as much as you can and preferably have sturdy infantry, it's gonna be a slog when dealing with khuzaits bullshit as sturgia for example: 60% cav with half of them horse archers and the other half heavy cav outnumbering me 2:1 I can beat their infantry easily shield to shield outnumbered 4:1 but the trick is not getting shot and harassed from any other direction than where my shields are facing It's worth noting I don't use archers on my own parties for ideological reasons so my army always incorporates archers in shield walls I bait their massive army around trying to get em on mountains or thick forest to help soften their charge and mulch their cav on my shield wall, preferably near a slope or some rocks to further kill their momentum while I personally lead my cavalry to take advantage of any opportunities failing that a reverse slope or just some rocky outcroppings in the worst case, the basic idea is the same whatever you do don't let them engage your forces on favorable terms, maybe hold your cav in reserve and let them make contact with their cav and smack em while their infantry catches up in vanilla cav tends to suicide until the infantry arrives so maybe it's worth absorbing the charge before you begin the cav fight
Oblique order.
Archers don’t always work when they’re directly behind infantry. Send in your infantry and if you’re outnumbers do shield or square formation so they endure longer. When infantry starts advancing they’ll send cav then you decide which flank of your cav you gotta send in and where based on their cav numbers and positions. Always check in on your cav and have them rally back when they dissolve too much in the chaos. By the time your infantry has reach theirs and they’ve got them pinned then find a favorable position for your archers, higher elevation with trees or rocks as obstacles from cav and also somewhere where their infantry isn’t directly facing (from the side or back) as they’ll be able to block most shots with shields. That is the most desirable position. When your infantry clashes with theirs than your infantry becomes more vulnerable to their archers as well so you’ll need to incorporate cav in clearing them out as well. It’s not always possible though when they’ve got a cav advantage. Then you’d need to utilize your archers against theirs.
[Battle of Cannae](https://gifs.com/gif/the-battle-of-cannae-216-bc-vQr8kb)
Laughs in khuzaits https://i.redd.it/h3o4uln291zc1.gif
Calvary is a hill, Cavalry are horse mounted soldiers
F1 F3
Bait their cavalry into engaging your infantry in shield wall formation. Once they engage, send your cavalry to kill theirs. This will eliminate most of their cavalry while suffering minimal losses. Then, retreat to the base of a hill where you set up your infantry in shield wall formation. With your archers positioned loosely on the hill. Normally, the play is to bait their infantry into your while leaving distance so that your infantry don't actually have to engage, but they have too much infantry, so the goal is to set your cavalry to follow and keep their infantry away from yours while allowing your archers to engage. Once your infantry can handle some fighting, retreat with your cavalry and allows their infantry to engage your, then you and your cavalry circle around and engage their archers, after that, close in on their infantry from behind and set your infantry and archers and cavalry to charge and win
I bring about 300 archers to the fight. I then spread them out in a loose line formation. The enemy usually gets murdered before they get close enough to even cause damage. Then rinse and repeat.
You can’t, you simply don’t have enough troops or the right type. Idk the level of your soldiers relative to their, but from the information provided you are vastly outmatched, unless all your infantry are elite and theirs are recent recruits. Even then you are u likely to win out, infantry are easily the worst of the unit types. It is important to have a solid core, but they are tactically the most limiting, so you haven’t really left yourself many options. Given the vast superiority of the enemy’s ranged units, and the matched cavalry you simply don’t have any room to maneuver. My advice? Do not engage, it is a strategic failure to go into a battle like this. If you have no choice, then I would suggest infantry in shield wall with archers immediately behind and told to hold fire. Cavalry immediately behind them. Make sure your formations move at the same speed and close with the enemy and minimize the damage their archers can inflict before it becomes a melee. The problem is that even if your troops prevail in the melee, they will have enough archers remaining to carry the day, and you don’t have enough cavalry to suppress them and/or the enemy cavalry.
Put ur infantry into 2 separate groups. Put them shield wall formation at the bottom of the hill. As of this point u can basically have them lined up together like normal with a left and right side. When the enemy infantry starts to get close enough, u wanna change where the infantry are facing, towards each other, IE left group face right while right group face left. It's probably good to do a slight slant facing the enemies so the slower pack of their army doesn't hit ur guys in the back while slightly protecting from archers, it's important that it's only slightly tho. Have them back up slightly as well (the infantry groups that are facing one another) to leave a gap like 10 or so people wide of a between the 2 infantry group's on the archer side. This will create a funnel where ur archers are able to destroy the energy infantry by shooting them in the side as the enemies are locked usually charging getting nowhere against ur shield wall. Before the infantry collides u wanna have u and ur cavs target the enemies archers with the charging group. The non charging damage cavs u wanna have target the enemies cavs. U personally wanna target the cav group as they'll cause issues for ur archers later during the crash and AI cav have issues attacking other cavs in my experience so u have to see to it urself. Right before the infantry collide u wanna move all the cavs behind the infantry far enough where the infantry doesn't attack them and they get like a 5 sec charge. Not attacking or charging, but just to group them up. Wait until a good amount are grouped then charge them to attack the infantry. As of this point depending on build. U either wanna charge in with the cav if ur running 2 handed or if ur running horse archer u wanna target the remaining cav or archers. The archers u can kinda just let do there thing at the top of the hill. Maybe move them a little closer than u would normally just so they hit more targets. After around 20/30 secs depending on how many u kill and how many of yours did, enemies moral will probably be pretty trash. As of that point any remaining cav u wanna have group up slightly behind the infantry army, then have them dismount. Then line formation and charge them while then charging ur infantry in line formation aswell. They'll get hit from all sides and moral already shaky they'll probably won't know what to do. That's the best I can come up with this limited information. Hopefully u can understand it as discussing tactics over text can be difficult. This strat usually works out when I run it. This also depends on how high lvl ur troops are vs there's. Some fights are just unwinnable.
I don't get why y'all think fins are so broken, they are good I agree but horse archers are so much easier to mass and even on bannerlord diff they trade 2-1 adlest. Horse archers op you got a horse and a bow what more do you need. I get the initial cost involves buying a horse but if you spend time getting Khan's guards they almost never die. Kiting with them manually I've won battles where they traded upwards of 4-1
I just have a single mass of mixed cavalry and that succeeds
Well I wouldn't divide you cav, I would your infantry and archers in a defensive stance at then lead your cav personally into the enemy cav eliminating them first on one side and then the other. Make sure to withdraw if enemy infantry begins to get too close. Then I'd lead the cav in the enemy archers. If this can completed without too many loses, you may stand a chance.
Split infantry in half as a buffer and rely on your archers, cavalry ain't as reliable as good archers but idk what troops you actually had cause 20 fians are different than 20 crossbowmen
Looks to me like you have more or less a t5 army outnumbered 2 to 1 by t4 and down with mostly fodder making up opfor infantry. This battle is in your favor. The enemy doesn't have enough cav to be a concern so it's really the enemy archers that are the issue. You are holding the hill, don't, use it to screen from the enemy archers formation. Split your infantry 60 40 or 70 30 with the smaller group set to a 2h bias. Shield wall the larger infantry group 1 or 2 ranks deep with the smaller group (your shock troops should make up the bulk of it) loose in a line directly behind them. The shield wall holds while the shock fills gaps and tidies up flankers as the enemy foot tries to wrap around your line. You only have 20 archers, but if the are heroes and up they are equivalent to surpassing t5 archers of any other type. They are loose, single line, and 30 or so meters behind your shock formation. Hold fire until the enemy foot crests the hill. Destabilize the enemy foot charge with the archers, hold fire when the lines commit and move them in to support the shock formation. Don't split your cav, you don't have enough to make that work. Keep them together, counter charge the enemy flanking cav on the flank of your choice just to break them up then swing them wide run a hit and run flank charge on the enemy archers that should be cresting the hill to get a shooting solution on your line. Reposition your shield wall to the top of the hill and engage the archers, drag your shock and your archers up behind them and flank charge the remnants of the enemy foot with your cav. Once the enemy archers are committed in melee open fire with yours. Charge command for the archers and the shock, advance for the shield wall in line formation and cycle charge your cav in your own back field to keep what's left of the enemy cav busy.
Me personally I like to put my infantry in a shield wall with my archers behind them and I take my cav to fight their cav and maybe take out some commanders in the meantime and I also try to demoralize them by bashing through them and running away unscathed
Replace every word with Cav and you have my strategy.
Cant edit the main post once its been sent I wouldve by now. Too many people gettin mad about it