Need help with Man strategy

[Huntsman]

Hello all. I've signed up for an MP game with Man and I've never played them before (in fact, I've only played Dom2 a few times at all). So I'm looking for a basic strategy and/or general pointers for playing Man and also advice for a decent pretender build.

I've read the Man guide on the freewebs site and it's been helpful but I'd like more opinions.

TIA

[PrinzMegaherz]

The longbows are great. If you play standard man, warden with level 9 air blessing for air shield are great if you combine those two

[Huntsman]

Air 9 Air Shield gives 70% protection from what? Damage?

TIA

[Tuna]

Missiles. All arrows, sling bullets etc have 70% of just not hitting anything when they usually would have. Couple that with a high-prot shielded unit, like the marignon knights, and a huge horde of your own crossbowmen, you can have a horde where a few of the knights stop the enemy and the crossbowmen do the damage on point blank (that is, place them right behind the knights very close to the frontline. This way, they very rarely miss, and dont daamge your own units.

[Gandalf Parker]

Wardens and those green guys make a fairly powerful sneak-army. Add a sneak priest. And a bard for magic.

You will notice in the standard Man theme that the magic and the gem income almost screams for using "Call of the Wild" and "Call of the Wind". So you move your army to a decent province, use CotW to air-drop troops on top of the province to soften it up, then have the army hit it. I could go alot deeper into the use of sneak armies with Man but if you arent the type to play in that mode then it wouldnt do much good. Let me know if you want more tips in that area.

The other notes here are good but let me add something on slingers. They are cheap, make decent patrollers, and in large numbers can often cause rout. Ive seen many a nasty combat god, super-combatant troop, or just big thing like elephants or hydras run away when a large army of slingers have fired at them. I guess it doesnt have to hurt much to be scarey.

[deccan]

Gandalf Parker said:
The other notes here are good but let me add something on slingers. They are cheap, make decent patrollers, and in large numbers can often cause rout.

I'm curious about this. I've often wondered, why use slingers at all as man when you have longbows? Sure, slingers are 7 gold apiece and longbows are 12 gold, but IMHO the difference in combat power more than makes up for it. Their range also gives them far better survivability (a def of 11 versus 8 helps too). Also, IIRC, longbows have strategic move 2 while slingers have strategic move 1.

It seems to me that the only use for them is as patrollers since they are the cheapest unit, both in gold and resources, that man can recruit.

[Gandalf Parker]

deccan said:

I'm curious about this. I've often wondered, why use slingers at all as man when you have longbows? Sure, slingers are 7 gold apiece and longbows are 12 gold, but IMHO the difference in combat power more than makes up for it. Their range also gives them far better survivability (a def of 11 versus 8 helps too). Also, IIRC, longbows have strategic move 2 while slingers have strategic move 1.

It seems to me that the only use for them is as patrollers since they are the cheapest unit, both in gold and resources, that man can recruit.

It might be just my sloppy impressions. Someone can download the tiny-map and setup a simulation to test it a hundred times or so.

But my impression is that against things like elephants, 20 longbows just didnt have the same effect as 30 slingers. I dont mean in damage total but the enemy seemed to rout more often. Of like most things in the game its not an absolute but it is a good "plus" to figure in. Ive found that a unit with a "fear" ability or spell does very well when backed up by slingers.

Im known for experimenting with the "worthless" parts (pretenders, castles, units, spells, nations) of the game and Ive found that most of them have SOMETHING they can be used for.

[Arryn]

I think what Gandalf is observing is the employment of tactics designed to take advantage of the game's routing mechanism. As far as winning a battle, it's more efficient to try to force a rout than to attempt to outright destroy the bulk of the enemy. 20 archers may do more damage to a target unit than 30 slingers, but the 30 slingers can inflict more morale checks, thereby playing on the odds that sooner or later the unit's morale will break if you force enough morale checks. Especially since the unit's morale goes down the more hits it takes, even if the hits are otherwise ignorable scratches. Those scratches have a greater impact for routing purposes than they do for the unit's health.

It's not the death of a thousand cuts that should worry you, it's the fear of a thousand cuts. [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Dagger.gif[/img]

[Gandalf Parker]

Arryn said:
It's not the death of a thousand cuts that should worry you, it's the fear of a thousand cuts. [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Dagger.gif[/img]

Nice breakdown of the likely answer. Sounds reasonable to me.

And EXCELLENT final line. Very Sun Tzu

[deccan]

Arryn said:
20 archers may do more damage to a target unit than 30 slingers, but the 30 slingers can inflict more morale checks, thereby playing on the odds that sooner or later the unit's morale will break if you force enough morale checks.

I agree that this sounds like the most reasonable answer. As I understand it, the mechanics of morale checks is relatively poorly known. I wonder if the amount of damage dealt makes morale checks more severe, or does all damage generate the same "quality" of morale check.