Pergamon vs Odrysian Kingdom (Online Battle #95)

Hey, what's up guys, this is Oakley and we're going to be back in Total War Rome 2, trying out the different Black Seas culture pack factions and so I'm going to be playing as Pergamon and my opponent is going to be once again Darth Pyrrhus of Epirus and he's going to be playing as the Odrysian King and you can see his build right here. So my deployment is going to be such that I have my cavalry positioned on the wings, two citizen cav, one on one wing with a Hepaeus Lancer to join it and the same mirrored on the other side, although this is going to be Pergamon's noble cavalry. In the front is where I put my three archer units and I did give two of them a little bit of veterancy and then in the center I have three Thoreau Spears to back that up and shower the opponent with Spears, two Pict Peltasts because they served me well in the last battle and I feel like they can do well in a skirmishing and also melee fights and then you have these Galatian Swords, pretty cool to once again mix barbarian forces, four of those guys, two Pikemen and then two Agema, however you pronounce that, Spears in the rear to back up this force, let's put this on play and my main objective is going to start pushing forward. I'm now splitting my wings, I figured that my Spears can hold the center well enough and I want to reinforce the sides and then push my Pikemen through the center where they can be defended. My opponent is going to be equally moving forward and we can see his build right here, he's been in every game pulling over about, yeah, a lot of these ranged units, so Mixian, what is this, I guess two Bowmen, a Peltast and then two Skirmisher and Slingers. Okay, so he always brings a lot of ranged units and Thracian Warriors there and then, yep, a couple more there, so five of the Thracian Warriors and one Thracian Noble and then Mercenary Hoplites lining up the back on this wing, Thracian Horsemen who are going to actually be very, very brutal in this game, he even gave them more veterancy and then his General over here and again, Hoplite veterans on the side to help reinforce the flanks, he has good positioning of his forces and these Slingers are going to start pushing out to the left to try and engage with my guys and over on this wing, he has put his Thracian Cavalry going into skirmish mode as they fleet around the sides of the map, so this is something you've seen consistently used from my opponent where he has a skirmishing wing and then a heavy cavalry wing on the other side, very heavy skirmishing potential in the front and so I'm going to have to counter that, obviously, and I have a more even splitting up of my wings and the way I'm going to counter this is by putting some of my own Thoreau Spears on that flank and then get ready for beating him back in center with basically all of my archers ready for the engagement, I have some of my Galatian Swords positioned here to ward off his Thracian Cav and I'm just ready to take this engagement, I'm going to send forth my archers and start to get this engagement underway, however, he's going to be backing that up with a huge charge from his infantry in the rear, we can see his Peltast getting up front a little bit too eagerly, so I'm already going to get some early volleys against them and here they go, they're going to return fire against my guys, he's going to do, oh, wow, that guy is still alive, but anyways, it's not going to do as much damage as I think he would have liked, however, the second volley as it comes in is going to start picking apart more of my men, I'm getting a decent amount of shots on them, but in the engagement he's going to have more armor than me and now you can see him pouring forward with all of his guys, what I decide to do is push forward my Thoreau Spears here on intercept duty to get their own Javelins to halt that assault and then I'm going to charge forward with my Citizen Cav and I want it to break up the brutal charge of these Thracian Warriors, really beat that back and then my pushing in here, he's going to go after some of my units here who are exposed and my Spear Thoreaus units are going to be exchanging with the opponent, but here comes the Thracian Warrior charge, he did brace at the last moment against my guys and as you guys said, I should be leaving my Citizen Cav in the fight for a while, so I left them here, hoping to get more kills and it looks like it's working, over on this side, he's getting around the rear of my guys, I am going to go about and I think turn my Agama Spears around and I can hopefully get some initial shots against his Over on this flank, he is going to be doing a full-on charge right into the center of my infantry, he's crashing into my Spears in the front, I can hold that up, I just have to be able to hold back this force, so I'm going to counter charge with my Citizen Cav, not the best against these Thracian Royal Cavalry, these guys are going to do crazy amounts of damage to me, but I can absorb this charge of three cavalry with just a couple of my forces, position another one here to do rear charge and then send in some of my own Galatians right there and then we have to intercept more of these Thracian Warriors, over in the back here, I've turned my guys around and we're going to start getting some early volleys, so let's put this on slow motion and we can watch what's happening, my opponent has scooted around the rear, I'm taking a charge of that, destroying his cavalry with my Spears, same over here and I fixed him in the front with a couple of my units, over here, he's charging my Spears, the rest of his force is waiting and over here, we have a big cavalry mess and that's where I'm going to be trying to win in that engagement, I think I'm going to win the rear, my opponent is not going to be able to do too much to me, however, he is decimating my early ranks and over here, these Citizen Cav are doing a pretty solid exchange against these Thracian Warriors, I've killed 30 of his, he's only killed about 33 of mine, so that should be okay and I'm going to back that up with Peltas to clean up that force, I have more guys to combat his Thracian Nobles, but I am collapsing a little bit in the center, he's pushed through, he's broken my Spears and now I have to retreat with all my picked Hoplites, thankfully, I was able to decimate his Cavs, so they can no longer wreak havoc on my guys, over here, I'm continuing to just commit my guys to this fight, but I'm going to have a problem where in my Pergamese Noble Cavalry, we can look at their stats, they're not going to be super good for some reason, I figured they would be, but he's actually going to end up killing my General in the not too distant future and so this engagement that I thought would be going well, he's going to start to slowly turn against me, mostly because he has now Thracian Warriors in the mix and a lot of the supporting units in the back, his Cavalry is definitely very, very beefy and tanky and now he's going to just send in more guys, so I'm committing not enough troops to win this fight, over here, I'm getting caught up on successive ranks and these Thracian Warriors are just going to be making mincemeat of my Hoplite units, they can cut through my guys relatively easily, so it's going to be up to me to now use my Peltasts and other units to specifically target his guys and try and take them out as soon as possible, I get some early volleys against my opponent's infantry, but he has just so many reserves of these guys who can come in and just keep sending volleys and volleys and volleys against me, I'm going to break up this charge with some of my own guys, keep them from reinforcing and now some of my guys are going to be peeling off, Cavalry have been pulled off to the side, drawing away his men and now I have more of my returning archers, but it looks like the battle is going to come down to a general vs general combat over on this side, it's going to be a little hard to pick off who is whom, but you can see the battle is definitely hotly contested, my opponent is going to peel off a couple more forces, you saw some Cavs run over from the main fight and they're going to be trying to engage in this fight to balance, turn the tide against me, so my guys are down to 21 men, my opponent has 36, so he's going to be doing everything he can to knock out my general and this is going to be a very problematic engagement for me because I myself am not necessarily going to win this and if I lose this flank, I lose my gel, not only, but also a huge clump of my infantry and this is still very much up in the air, you know, he's crushing my Thoreau's spears, I think the Thracian warriors were just, you know, built to do this kind of bloodbath and I wasn't able to blunt their charge enough and so they just are carving up my guys and I'm finally starting to get some return fire with the archers, you see some of those darts coming in from the distance, point blank range, but it's not going to be enough, I have nowhere really left to fall back to with these forces and just some of my guys here are trying to take out his veteran hoplites, but with my cheap-ish Galician troops against these mercenary veteran hoplites, it's going to be taking me forever to knock those guys out, so it looks like this engagement is going to end up being mostly stalemated, at the same time I've lost my general, this force over here of mine is going to be getting destroyed and now you have all these returning horsemen who are in the rear, let's watch some of these guys actually, I wonder if I can follow them, oh no, we're gonna have to watch from a distance I guess, yeah, oh, there you go, yeah, here comes the cavalry coming in for the charge, so losing that cavalry engagement was very, very detrimental, obviously that's something that will always happen in a game and someone is usually going to win the cavalry engagement, but in this game, in this particular instance, it went to my opponent and it went to my opponent in a way that I could have maybe drawn a stalemate in certain parts of the battlefield, but now he's going to be evening off those odds, much to his favor, charging over, bowling over all my guys, I do still have some pretty good Agima spears and I'm going to use them to, you know, shore up some of my peltas, but he's charging right through, crushing all of my blobs and releasing a lot of his dudes, coming in here, yep, breaking another unit of mine that has mercenary hoplites bottled up, I still have some more cavalry who are going to be trying to, you know, chew up those infantry, I've committed more troops to this engagement, throwing in some pig peltas and we've seen these guys prove to be very, very good before, so hopefully we'll be able to clean up this mess on this flank and now I'm going to be starting to shore up the rest of my forces here, moving back my archers and, yeah, two of the archer units over here to hopefully save my Agima spears who can form up into this nice square formation and then get some excellent shots into the side of his guys, that's exactly what I have to do in order to get cost efficiency right now, is keep them from getting any kills and then use my remaining archers and javelins and anything I have to clean up these units and try and delay him from, you know, killing my guys and also delay the inevitable cavalry assault, but they have been mostly wasted over here, losing men slowly but surely and now I'm going to be able to clean up this force, but it looks like my numbers are slowly diminishing, I have a lot of these pig peltas and archers and skirmishing power left, but mostly it's going to be only defended by one Agima spear and so he's going to deciding to charge in with his cavalry, I'm going to pull back to the safety of my own spears here and hopefully be able to ward him off, however, as I said, it's going to be hard to cover three units with just one, some of my archers are still going to get some shots off, I'm going to turn these guys about to try and ward off those cavalry, you can see I'm targeting them, chasing after them, I'm going to try and keep them from dealing death to my peltas who are still in this engagement, look at this, they have five units fighting against them and they're still holding in, I'm going to try and send some reinforcements and I can't believe these guys have not routed yet, 208 kills to their name, 210 almost, and they're positioning themselves, sacrificing themselves to keep this blob fixed so I can get some initial volleys with all these units, over here I'm going to clean this up so that means my opponent is going to have to move this blob together and this blob, that's all he has left, I still have some cav cleaning up in the back and here we go, I'm going to try and harass these guys as much as possible, cover myself with the peltas, I'm going to pull back, allow my peltas to be engaged, I figure they can take these guys pretty well, we can start to see a little bit of the engagements here, they can hold their own relatively well and they're going to hold up a bunch of these warriors who are effective warriors but they're tired at this point and it's going to allow my agamas to cover the rest of my units back here, I'm going to pull back this for us to cover the rear and I'm just trying to keep my guys as covered as possible, I'm going to throw in my archers at this point because they're out of ammo and they're just going to try and tire out my opponent while I let the rest of my archers, I think, nope, they're out of ammo too so I'm trying to use this to bait in my opponent's cavalry, he's not going to quite fall for it but yeah, I'm basically trying to sacrifice everything here and it kind of works, you can see I'm now going to be knocking out my opponent's peltas, breaking two of them just by throwing in archer units, using archers effectively like this will allow you to break certain units in a particular point in time in a battle like this, just getting rid of a couple, even if they are cheap fodder units, kind of like peltas or enemy archers, it's worth throwing some archers into the fight, he's going to try and engage with his and I was really hoping to be able to knock out his general at some point in this battle, help that turn the tide against me and you can see his general scooting out of there, he's not willing to risk that engagement and I'm falling back over here, I'm scared of his peltas, my guys however are still pretty well rested whereas my opponents, all of his guys are pretty tired and that's what's allowing me to get a lot of the benefits over here, my pick peltas are getting so many kills, 193 on this unit almost and they're going to be racking up more kills even against veteran hoplites, scooting these guys around, allowing my archers to delay the engagement here and bring these guys over here because I know the point I have to break is this force here and break this force here, so here goes the archers for a rear charge into some veteran hoplites and then some of my agama spears saving themselves and also protecting the rear of my archers, allowing the archers to, you know of course they're not going to do too well, but if I can get them in the back of my opponent it's going to work well, but that was just an assault that was never meant to last for too long just to do initial damage, his horses were going to charge in anyways but I was able to bait them in and get some nice counter charges against them, whittle down their numbers and what I'm trying to do is do as much damage with my ancillary troops and save my agama spears for the very end, you can see them here still alive, I'm trying to break his general but he's still you know disengaged and now it's down to the agama spears who are pretty hefty strength, they're almost like full strength against my opponents, very tired, very depleted guys and his cavalry is still alive so it's kind of up in the air and I really have to try and micromanage two units and just see what they can do, so my main plan is to put them in square and just try and hold out, make this a grinding fight and let the stamina difference hopefully determine the battle and turn it in my favor and it's going to basically make any of these cavalry charges pretty much ineffective and now I'm going to break my guys out of square, try and counter charge his lines, break this up, try and break individual units of my opponents and get those guys to shatter before I go ahead and reposition these guys closer to my own forces for mutual support, then form up into square once I see he's going to threaten me with the cav so it was a little bit of dancing micro and you can see in the wake what's being left of all my guys and all the combat that's been going on here so it's going to be a little bit of a pushing grinding match and the cavalry are so so close just watching this battle and what I'm going to try and do is wait for my opponent to get complacent, you can see I broke out of square, I'm going to charge into these guys, try and grab a couple of the enemy's generals, I got caught on a couple units so I didn't quite get into the mix but you can see me chasing down a couple of the horsemen, I was hoping that this guy would be the general and I would be able to kill him but I don't think this is going to be it, had it been it would have been a very good morale blow to my opponent that would have helped me hopefully win this battle and he really can't get these rear charges, I'm negating the effect of his cavalry because of these squares and it's slowing down his push and it looks like my guys are doing pretty well actually, I mean combat is even, my general has died but they're holding in together because these are veteran forces and my opponent is combat even as well but they're tired, casualties sustained, were I to kill his general I think that unit would break and my opponent is cognizant of the fact of what I'm trying to do, he's going to pull apart some of his guys, keep them rested and then redeploy them in certain areas where they may be more effective so it's a very smart move to my opponent but I guess at this point the strategy is over and we can just watch a little bit of the combat animations, we're getting a little bit of a staring match over here where my opponent wanted to wait, rest his guys up and then finally engage them piecemeal, general watching from a distance and he's going to be circling like a shark around some prey or a wolf around some prey and I'm very scared of these guys, I really wish my opponent had moved them over here because I could have counter-charged them and now you can see he's popping some abilities, second wind so that's when I was starting to despair because once these guys get fresh again then the stats discrepancy is going to be more favoring my opponent, if these guys were exhausted I'm pretty sure I could take that fight but now it's going to be sort of in my opponent's favor especially with this general running around with the morale abilities that he has and second wind and battle rhythm in particular that he put on these forces it's going to boost their stats. Let's watch a little bit of this again, it's not super exciting I have to say, it's just funny to watch, I've never had a battle boil down to just two hoplite battles back and forth but I guess it is a nice little different pace and it is down to the wire and it'd be funny if the battle actually came down to two units fighting each other and you can watch just you know your heroes would be left over, see how that worked. There's an interesting feature I always thought would be kind of cool is if before battle you know how you have the in Rome 2 you have the agent who is like the warrior agent, the champion, if you could actually have him embed in the army and he would fight other champions before the battle and have some sort of you know cinematic thing going on like this that would be pretty sweet before both of the armies especially in Total War Attila that's something I could see them doing because it was something that was noted during the period, even the Romans often did it at times and especially the Germanic tribes would often have blood feuds settled in front of the battlefield. Yeah I can see my guys starting to break my opponent is starting to sense this you can see his general getting restless around my force I'm going to decide to counter charge I tried to save my guys but it was too little too late my own spears are really down and tired and my opponent yep is able to pop some more abilities get these guys back up to being fresh and even though they were kind of close to routing it was uh that was it there was no coming back from this so if you guys enjoyed it despite that little stalemate at the end it was definitely a fun battle and here you can see a little bit of the stats on my own forces did decently I think my citizen cav did all right it was just my my Pergamese cav it turned out were just totally unclassed uh compared to the Thracian royal cav my opponent just had way more kills even his uh Thracian horsemen getting a lot of kills so very effective use of his guys his Thracian warriors I think were super effective his hoplite wall here was very effective his peltas were effective whereas myself on the other hand I probably could have afforded to bring a couple more of these pig peltas I got a lot of kills archers doing pretty well I think the units who didn't quite pay for themselves were probably these 30 spears who had fodder in the front but they kind of they they took the the brunt of this Thracian peltas move I probably could have benefited from a couple more of these hoplites and peltas um and something had to have been done to improve my cavalry um but anyways I'll know for next time so if you enjoyed see you guys around