A quick note is that I'm quite new and focus on only using Garthimis which means I don't have a good picture on how one should run their economy to follow the advice giving in this post. This is more of a guide on what to do once your in the battle(with light notes on what to do when it comes to training men). So if you are struggling to even maintain an army I suggest reading and doing what works best for you to use my tactics. On the plus side my tactics require very few troops and equipment so if you do win a battle or two you get tons of equipment to sell which can help you fund your army in the long run so keep the spoils of war in mind if your struggling to fund your army and know that it only takes a couple large battles to snowball.

Battles are basically won or lost before they've even started and you can figure this out by asking, Who has more troops, Who has more experience, and Who has more equipment. These three broad factors give you a quick idea on what advantages and tactics you have to use to not die or if you should just pay them to leave you alone.

Generally speaking experience and equipment are the most important factors because they effect morale and the initial charges which make or break a battle.

Morale is the willingness of your troops to stay in the fight and are effected by the melee experience of your troops. Even with hundreds of soldiers losing one squad of 50 can cause others to drop in morale which can spiral into a mass route. Because of that you always want to have the most experience troops you can have but professional soldiers are hard to maintain so instead you want to create scenarios where you men never have to get upset and your enemies are always dropping in morale.

There are 4 main "conditions" where morale is most effected. Charges, engagements, flanks/surrounding, and overall troop count.

Charges are the most lethal moments in a melee engagement with a natural morale drop as combat is finally starting and if both sides are charging into each other it will cause a lot of causalities which also drops morale. This is where equipment(which keeps your men alive and allows them to cause a lot of casualties) and experience come into play. Armoured, armed, and experienced troops will withstand the morale shock of the charge and take fewer casualties while dealing a lot of damage. Inexperienced unarmed and unarmoured units will either flee because of the morale shock before they even engage or shortly after once the casualties set in.

The best thing to do when it comes to charges is to (1) never get charged or only have your best troops get charged and (2) always be the one charging preferably into the flanks or sides of your enemy.

Flanks/surrounding is other main concern when it comes morale. Being surrounded or simply outnumbered will always cause inexperienced troops to lose morale or even run without engaging so be sure to keep large masses of men together and avoid getting flanked/surrounded at all cost.

The best way to do this is to never take unfavorable engagements and to basically always run away. The AI is quite dumb and you can often use squads of 50 troops to lure away 100-300 enemies and then overwhelm other sections of the enemies army and slowly pick away at them until the enemy runs away due to low morale.

Engagements are the long drawn out fighting that occurs when both sides survive the charge and are properly fighting it out. Morale tends not to change that much as lethality is much lower in these proper engagements. These fights can go on for ages and often come down to micro advantages with numbers/gear deciding who wins. But this also locked both units out of the battle and can allow you to get a flank in and get a charge that actually breaks the enemies morale and frees up both units. But if your using unarmed and unarmoured units who do little damage you're more likely over committing and will lose the battle so its better to simply never get into drawn out engagements.

Overall troop count is simple. Whoever has more men has more morale and lowers the other sides morale. It also allows them to force more engagements and makes them more flexible but the AI is too dumb to take advantage of this so all you have to worry about is that if your enemy outnumbers you enough you may not be able to lure and divert enough units to pick away at smaller groups.

With the importance of morale out of the way you might start getting a picture that proper engagements kind of suck and they do. So the only thing that you can do is to never take engagement and eat away at the enemy piecemeal. Charging/surrounding and causing morale drops on more inexperience and weaker troops of an enemies army and slowly causing the army to route until your so overwhelming that you can clean up the rest. One problem with the raids in this game is that your opponents will always match you or have much greater numbers/experience/equipment. As someone who plays with 100% raids I can have an army of 890ish troops and then be forced to fight against 2k raiders with near 100% equipment and experience.


So my advice of running away, luring and distracting troops, only taking favorable engagements, and basically picking and choosing your battles in the battle sounds impossible considering they are so overwhelming and can take the capture point losing you the battle even if you don't engage. And it would be impossible if it wasn't for bows

Put simply bows are broken. They are very lethal, ranged so you don't have to get bogged down, don't take long to fire so you can shoot and scoot, and the AI isn't smart enough to force an engagement so you can run circle around them and pick away at them with your bows. And because of that bows are utterly broken. But they do have a lot of upkeep with needing a lot of bows and trained bowmen to achieve the lethality you need to make them effective. For an effective division of bowmen you generally need 70-90% training and "7-8" amount of bows for them to be effective.

But once you have the econ to train even 50-150 bowmen you'll be able to take out armies twice your size as shown with my previous screenshots.

Outside of the aforementioned tactics where you basically go mongol on your enemies there are a few things you want to keep in mind. Army composition, dealing with enemy bowmen, and Runners(melee divisions in your army).

It would be very hard to keep a large fully trained and professional bow army which means your army composition will have some melee troops. I find that these troops should make up 2/3 or half of your army composition. They don't need to be trained very much but they should be equipped with some armour incase of enemy archers but generally they should exist to simply run around the battle field.

To help not be horribly outnumbered(causing morale issues) its important to use melee units to be your lures. These "Runners" exist purely to get close to enemies and then run away to pull them closer to your bow men or to get enemy divisions away from your bowmen. Because they are inexperienced you want to make sure they come in groups of at least 30 but generally you want to aim for 50-80 because if you go any lower then that they might just flee as soon as groups of 150-300 men start chasing after them.

With that in mind your army will be divided between your bowmen and your runners. With your bowmen picking off(quite quickly if they're experienced) your enemies and your runners leading them into the range and not attacking your bowmen directly. Doing that will basically win you every battle as long as you have enough bowmen with equipment.

Unless the enemies have bows in which case you want to destroy them ASAP. The best way to do this is sacrifice a runner division to absorb the enemies fire while you use all the bowmen you have to kill them as quickly as possible. Generally raiders don't have that many bow divisions so as long as you take out the 1-2 divisions they have quickly and with minimum causalities to your bowmen you should be fine.

Use hit and run tactics and bowmen basically ¯\_(ツ)_/¯