DUAL Commentary with Indypride! - Battle 1/3 (Massive Battles)

Hey what's going on guys, IndiePride here with MilkandCookies Total War. And this is Oakley Haidaf and I'm going to introduce the players right here. I am over on the right as Carthage. IndiePride is in the center. He is going to be Egypt and on our left is going to be Attila the Great. He also has another YouTube channel. I'll link those below and yeah he's going to be Pontus as I said. And then across from us we're going to be playing against Rome, Carthage, and Athens. Jankadoodle, my friend, is going to be on Athens. Most of his army is hidden in the trees at the moment. Across from me SifFrozenBG is going to be on Carthage and then SifPiper is going to be on the Roman army. So if we want to get in this replay three, two, one, press play. Let's get into it. All right yeah so we'll get this started. We'll take a look at some of the factions I guess that's happening over here. So I'm looking at Attila on the left. So he's going to be pushing forward with three of these Scythian horse archers. That's always almost always going to be your first move in these battles is basically getting your mobile skirmishers out front and then Indy's pushing up the center. And I'm going to push into the force but at this point I have no idea what to expect from Athens so that's kind of the wild card at this point. Yeah that's going to be a really difficult fight for you because Athens as we know on this patch hoplites are completely ridiculous in melee combat and last forever. So if you can't get your skirmishers shooting into those trees and of course shooting into trees with skirmishers is very hard. That's kind of a difficult fight for you to take so we'll see how that progresses later on. As for Attila the Great on Pontus, I absolutely love Pontus on this patch. They are really good. The eastern archers insane shots per minute and really good damage as well. So he's going to be able to look be looking to skirmish with Rome for a while and he also brought chariots which have gotten buffed massively on this patch as well. So if those make it into the Roman infantry line he'll be doing a ton of damage there. Yeah we've seen those get over 600 kills before Elies somewhat but you have to bring armored Elies. Chariots however you get those in the line and they can chew through any infantry block. And basically what we're looking to do in this first initial engagement is we saw this big beefy pike line and we're like oh we'll just concentrate fire on that. So Indy's got his mercenary Cretan archers, I've got my own archers on a heavy shot and they're going to try and get some initial volleys. You can see that first pikeman he's down by five but we're having some weird line of sight issues with forests and hills and so our archers are actually going to get a little too exposed when they push up on that position but I figured you know archers would be able to take on the center position because what we're facing what just four Cretan archers and we so we have the numbers advantage so we should be able to whittle that down once that's out of the picture we can just charge through that and dismantle the center so that was that was kind of our goal for the first step I guess. I actually didn't notice it when we were playing in the first battle but he actually has three Cretan archers and a Balearic slinger I thought they were all Balearic so I engaged it a little bit differently because I saw the one Balearic and I guess it didn't take the time to look but I do know the line of sight was actually a really big problem for us because our Cretans should have been tearing them up at the beginning here but that that hill is just kind of making it hard for us to shoot over and they don't really have great line of sight so it was an interesting skirmish fight and we're actually not doing as much damage as we probably should have been because of that hill. But yeah Indy here you're doing a good job of doing a feint just pushing these archers back allowing us to get some more shots off and then fall back and of course they're not going to fall for it you can see how they kept some reserved Balearics to get some shots on us so a lot of good strategic moves and they're pushing forward with Tarentine cav those are going to be a thorn in my side you have these one you know one unit up here but the rest are slowly going to eke kind of their way around if you look on the very east of the map they're going to slowly get around our flanks meanwhile I can't push into this force I have no idea what is going on there so I'm going to settle in on this position and just stagger my forces while we push the center. Yeah and over on Carthage's right flank not you but uh Frozen Pontus was able to actually do a lot of damage to this pike unit and you can see he didn't have the hill blocking his line of sight so he destroyed that pike unit and you can see the power of the eastern archers they quickly dismantled that unit and he's going to move on to some of the other Kreen archers and some of the other pikemen as well. Yeah and continue look up and down that line we're just getting all these feints and our opponents are not having any of it and that's just to force any of the Kreetons back allow us more time to get shots on however they are pretty much forcing the issue if you look on the my side near the forest they're charging forward with Citizen cav, Hypaeus Lancers and they dual attack two of my guys so one of my mercenary Scutari pretty crap units they're going to take a full Hypaeus Lancer charge that's fine they were just meant to hold the enemy but he's going to do a really good turn about and disengage and you can see how he's doing all these cycle chargers with Tarantine cav on my guys Scutari right there were braced I took off fire at will you have to remember to do that to keep them braced when I did that they took no losses so that was very beneficial and I'm moving forward with pikes to help reinforce and Indy's throwing in some of his own Citizen cav to force that back you can see all the archers from Athens are being forced back too but we won't get too engaged at that front. Yeah at the moment I'm trying to focus down some of his picked hoplites and I actually noticed that his pikes had moved up a little bit too far forward for my liking I didn't want to engage in a melee fight yet because my line is completely comprised of regular pikemen and African pikemen are going to beat them head-on in a melee fight so I didn't want to engage in that right away so I kind of just backed up and reshifted my lines I realized that Oakley was going to get overwhelmed by all this cavalry coming in so I had to help him I sent a bunch of my Citizen cav over to engage some of the Athenian cavalry on the right flank and then up the middle I sent a couple of my Ptolemaic cavalry to tie down this Carthaginian cav that was threatening our archers and if we lose our archers this early on in the battle we're screwed so we had to do our best to just commit all of our forces here and make sure that he didn't get through because they they really wanted to take out our Cretans at the moment. Yeah they basically threw a bunch of cavalry through the front pushed through our gaps pulled through whatever units were trying to hold them back and they chased off our archers which was a good move like Indy said and then you can see here on the very far east they're charging with more Hephaestus Lancers more hidden units just pulling through these woods it's almost like barbarian invasion coming through here but if we do wheel over to the other side of the map in the center it's the the lines are starting to collapse Rome is doing a good push with concentrated forces and Attila the Great's line is just melting because of all those javelins that they're getting forward plus the archers that are being kept in the back they're just destroying Attila's line so it looks like we're gonna have to commit the chariots which you can see them already starting to engage on some auxiliary and they're gonna get pulled through and try and stem the tide of Rome's advance but they're also flanking with triaries so this is going to be a major problem on that part of the battlefield. Yeah I had to commit my Thorax Swordsman over to the Roman fight because it was going to be a really big issue well first off I didn't need to engage with Carthage at the moment because he has a bunch of pikes so those aren't very useful or they are they are very mobile at the moment so like he can't really charge them forward and get into melee combat and reinforce people very easily so I was like I'll just kind of avoid it I'll send a couple pike units to deal with one of his pike units and then I'll send the rest of my Thorax Swordsman to help Pontus win his main engagement but one problem here is going to be that Pontus commits his chariots and kind of sends them into a a weird location I actually can't okay here they are he pulls them through and he wanted to hit the back of the Carthaginian pike line which I understand but the problem with that is that he needed to commit them to the Roman infantry line that was where they could easily do the most damage and help him turn the tide of battle over there instead he's going to send them over here behind Carthage get them caught up in enemy cav and they're not going to make their presence quite as felt as maybe they should have been and he does get a nice pull through on that pike line but like Indy said they're already pretty wasted so they already you know he already destroyed that front so they would have been better used on this huge Roman blob that's pike that's uh stuck on pikes that would have been much more useful yeah meanwhile on the flank over here it's kind of chaotic some elephants were committed to that fight I braced and had all my cretins shoot them to death so they weren't super effective but it was enough to sort of break and force me back so now I'm doing sort of a rudimentary defense force with my sacred band and uh my remaining infantry particularly this mercenary samnite warriors very veteran troops they're trying to hold the line and I have some more pikes on the very right of my line holding that front and I'm just trying to commit what few cavalry I have to try and clean up these engagements strike at the back but it's uh the countdown is uh is sort of ticking for my guys the archers and back of Athens it's getting a lot of shots on my men and I'm starting to be overwhelmed yeah so the engagement over here with Carthage and Athens is not going particularly well what I realized was we had to kill Rome if we wanted to have any chance of winning this battle and obviously that that is very obvious we have to kill one of the factions on the other team but but what I noticed is that like Carthage I was still holding out with Carthage against some of my pike units as you can see he's running baleric slingers and cretin archers that are out of ammo onto the front of my pikes I was like we're gonna win this fight I need to just pull what cav I have out and bring it over to the Roman fight because if Pontus can take care of Rome without losing too many men and we get keep our cavalry alive we'll have a good shot of winning this battle but if we end up just uh losing on the Roman side of things we're just not gonna win the battle period so I decided to commit a lot of my troops over to try to take out Rome and we're all in group chat at this point so I still have one of my mercenary companions who are still alive they're gonna rack up a lot of kills for me so it was kind of in the group chat us shouting about where we needed to put those crucial troops and it was really a decision you know do we commit them to the east or the west and I think we made the fateful decision to send more forces over to the west and try and clean up those Romans had we still had chariots you can see right now they're engaged in some of the Roman lines had they been there earlier I think we could have probably sent in enough reinforcements to clean that up yeah I think I think that was actually a big mistake and I'm not trying to blame Attila for anything because I do think he played well in this battle but I think they have 300 kills right yeah they've done they've made a big impact on this battle no question but I think if he had quickly gotten into that Roman line he wouldn't be losing these units over here at the moment but uh yeah if we if we want to track some of our cav running around you can see my mercenary companions are starting to scoot around and they're going to help us land some of these strikes so it looks like we're starting to turn the tide here you can see some of the Roman blobs starting to waver so we're thinking we'd be able to liberate this but if you go back over to my side it's you know less and less of my units holding out and you know one by one they'll start wavering flicking and uh and starting to route but I can hold out long enough but against these hoplites I'm not going to be able to kill them so it's really you know this front is waiting to see what happens on the other side yeah and and while we are doing a good job like we're surrounding a lot of these Roman units they're evocati cohort and as you guys know on this patch they last for forever melee fights last for forever even what I noticed in this battle and I didn't really get a get a good picture of it but auxiliary infantry like they're crap tier units and they would last it against pontic swordsmen and thorax swordsmen for upwards of four to five minutes so it's kind of insane how some of these units last and it became really difficult for us because we were getting surrounds on these units and like doing a good job of hitting them from multiple flanks and angles but they're Rome they last in melee for a while and we just weren't able to route them as fast as maybe we would have liked yeah so Rome was able to reform he cleaned up his side of the battle we still have some noble blood cav and Egyptian you know Ptolemaic cav scooting around but for the most part Rome cleaned up that flank and now he's pressing the advantage re-engaging where we had like encirclements he's gonna try and break that chariots are recommitting to the fight so we'll get some more kills meanwhile if you take a look at the center of the battlefield there is some of Attila the Great his pontic roll cav that's his general charging into these mercenary Cretan archers I have my mercenary companions and we decided to shift our focus to the other side of the battle because my guys were starting to route you can see in the middle of the forest I lost one group of units one of them is drawing away three units from the battlefield before he could route and the rest of my units we have him pinned up so if we can land some decisive strikes with cavalry we could hopefully liberate those guys and come back and save the right side that was our goal but these archers they're pretty cheap but they were they were a thorn in our side they got so many kills they each got about 100 kills yeah yeah so they were they were a problem and yeah you're right I think I think taking out these archers when they're undefended was a really good idea one problem is actually your mercenary companion cav are not running they're walking and finally you got them under control and you're going to charge them in so that should be an easy fight for them as you guys know taking out blobs of archers in this patch is scarier but if you're going to do what Athens just did where you keep all of them in one big blob they won't be able to fire in on the companion cav and he's going to end up losing all of those archers so these two units both have a ridiculous amount of kills the pontic roll cavalry have 300 at this point and the companion cav are closing in on 300 as well so you obviously both microed these cavalry units very effectively at this point yeah and we have our sights on the rear of that line and you can see exactly Athens knows what's coming so he's positioning some Thoreau's spears to try and save his guys and so I'm going to go you know to the right of them Attila's going to go to the left however he's engaging on a group that was just uh just finished up the fight had we arrived there you know maybe 30 seconds earlier I think we might have been able to crack that yeah but he turned it around in time and he wasn't braced but there's still spears and cavalry in a prolonged melee fight especially hoplite so he is actually going to go into the red morale but he's not going to waver and Attila's going to have to pull that pontic roll cavalry out of that fight if he doesn't want to lose that cav unit and you can see how my guys like I said before are going to start slowly one by one crumbling and we really needed these cav earlier in the battle but uh you know they they were justifiably used on the left side of the battle but like indy was pointing out with the evocati who could hold out for just so long there at this point this flank was lost anyways yeah and and the problem is now at this point because a lot of the carthaginian forces have already routed and it's basically just cavalry not even really hammer and ambling because there's no anvil it's just the cav going into hoplites there's nothing they can do I mean you can keep you can keep cycle charging but eventually like what happened now you're gonna route and it's just not gonna be enough to route hoplites they're heavily armored they can resist cavalry charges very easily and they're just not gonna make the impact we want them to so we're gonna end up routing and that battle is over we made some mistakes there's no question but let's go to the uh battle screen and see what the stats were so yeah I had 1500 kills oakley had 1400 and Attila had 2100 what what units or I guess if you had to succinctly say what was the problem with that battle what what mistakes we made what would you say they were um I think the biggest problem would be maybe in the center we weren't able to kill the pikes that was our first problem if we'd been able to shred that we would have you know not had to worry about the center uh second problem was on my side I couldn't quite see what was going on with Athens and then when they finally struck the enemies had a really good blow they basically charged in with all their cavalry infiltrated the gaps pulled through charged on all sides and got our archers so that basically got rid of our archer capability pressed the advantage then they threw an elephant so it was chaos on the right on the left I think Attila waited too much with his pikes on the front line and thin rows he should have pulled back and delayed uh those guys got shredded by the legionnaires who were having all their pillow exhausted without losing a single man I think if he'd done some delaying action we could have stabilized that front crushed the center and uh you know committed some of those cavalry that were sent to the that left side committed those guys instead to the right even that up and then maybe one and then dealt with Rome last um and then like you said if you want to talk about the chariots a bit but I mean you can't really bash Attila he got the most kills so yeah I mean and there's no question he did really well and yeah he almost got 400 kills there the problem was I think they weren't the kills the side chariots got weren't on the correct unit and I wish he was in here with us to talk about what he was thinking when he did what he did because it wasn't and and it wasn't because I'm not saying it was a bad idea because it wasn't because it killed a bunch of pike units and made my melee engagement easier but I think chariots in general you don't want to commit them to pike units because when they pull through if you don't quickly pull them out the way you came in they can actually run back straight into the pike unit and I'm not actually sure if I saw that happen but that might have happened and it might have caused some hp loss that made him harder to do more damage later on in the fight I know for a fact because Rome didn't have a lot of spears if we look at his army yeah he actually had he had three auxiliary infantry and all those were engaged earlier on in the fight so his chariots getting into the evocati cohort would have changed that fight completely because a lot of them were tied down you hammer an anvil with side chariots on this patch everything dies so while the chariots did amazing and Attila played very well with his horse archers with his pikes again we all made some mistakes here but I think his chariots getting into the evocati cohort would have changed the outcome of that battle yeah and we can look at our opponents uh basically so sith frozen with Carthage he got a pretty decent spread of kills but like I said you I think we shredded his pikes pretty well and those guys did not end up getting too many kills so I think you know we had the best opportunity to crack him uh but it was mostly I think Athens just destroying my side you can see his paeus lancers Tarantine and citizen cav those are the ones who I said stormed and smashed my front with the archers going uncontested in the back getting lots of kills and then follow that up with the thorough spear rushed and pick hoplites and he was just able to you know strike us while we were sort of had our head wobbling he comes in and pins us against the wall with those spears so that was you know a really good strike and you can see he got the most kills then Rome uh really sticking it to us with those evocati always getting you know very very good kills Jacob played really well with Athens I think the Tarantine cab with almost 300 kills is insane I I missed it in in this battle I didn't catch it on the camera but he told me that he actually I believe he sent that Tarantine cab all the way over to Pontus and kill a bunch of his archers and I believe all those archers had a lot of ammo left so that Tarantine made a huge impact and for their cost that's ridiculously good yeah he played really well I my skirmishers just didn't make the impact on the game I think they should have like I only had three so I I didn't have as many as Carthage did but me and Oakley together had plenty enough skirmishing power to kill Carthage the problem was again that they got some of their cavalry into our archers and I didn't have a line of sight now I actually didn't lose my cranes to cavalry at all until I was out of ammo I actually pulled them out of the fight but again that line of sight was a big problem for me because they just didn't fire and kill as effectively as maybe they should have yeah the kill the kills on my archers are they're there like they started getting the kills but that after that they our enemies did a really good job not only in this battle but future battles which will commentate of really going after you know one of our army's archers and just silencing them so you can see that on my kills for my archers they did that effectively and then also I learned the mercenaries scutari our trash yeah don't bother they kind of collapsed my line but they were sort of fodder they they went up against the full brunt of the enemy cav charge so they sort of soaked that up but yeah I could have brought better units I think even my sacred band only got 79 I would have wished they had done better than that I don't know what the cost for scutari mercenary scutari is but I think that cheap spears or cheap hoplites is probably a better option if you're going to play as Carthage because those scutari just aren't going to kill anything and they die quickly whereas the the cheap hoplites now don't die very quickly so I think that might have been a better option but again I don't think that's that has anything to do with why we lost that battle there were other issues but uh it was a really good game I think our opponents played really well and uh do you have any last thoughts about that battle no we'll see you guys in the next one all right I hope you guys enjoy it I'll talk to you all later AnyPride signing out see ya