1) What happened with the skirmishing portion of the game? Part of the advantage of having cheap Thracians in rough terrain is that it slows down heavy infantry and/or discourages them from attacking those units directly - while - those extra points that have been invested in skirmishers can be used to gain a skirmishing advantage. Once the enemy's skirms are dealt with, your skirms can be hurting heavy infantry, shooting elephants, and chasing routers. I say all this as someone who has both done this and had it done to me.vakarr wrote: ↑Sun Apr 28, 2019 11:46 pm As I mentioned I first tried a game with me playing the Thracians and he was playing the Romans - I lost as there are no good quality troops in a Thracian army except for the heavy cavalry, and precious few of them. The Romans had to be beaten, then beaten again or chased off the field. If the Thracians routed it was, generally speaking, permanent. The biggest problem is that it was often impossible to charge a unit frontally and make it stick long enough for a flank charge to be made - usually a frontal charge would bounce off, sometimes making the Thracian unit fragmented or disrupted. The multiple threats in a Roman army (e.g. elephants vs cavalry) also made it difficult to outflank them, as did the terrain - although the terrain was agricultural, there was sufficient terrain to enable the Romans to box themselves in. then again the Thracians didn't have a huge advantage in numbers. The elite Roman legionaries again played their part, confounding frontal charges and walking through the forest like it wasn't there. In the second game, with my opponent playing the Thracians, he kept to the woods and hills while my superior numbers of cavalry beat up his cavalry and light horse. I then marched along a ridge to meet his troops that were on a hill and in a wood - somewhat like corner sitting. He was unable to use his numbers to beat me as my troops were so much better than his and a frontal contact, especially while mine were on a hill, was suicide. The Thracian troops on a clear terrain hill were eventually actually flanked (by accident) by the elite legionaries and it was all over.
Well that's my point, if you sit in a corner you are giving the initiative to your opponent, you don't win by sitting around. I had no defensive position (though I had planned one), there was a large area of open space in front of my opponent's hill. My only advantage was that he couldn't see most of my army and didn't know it was marching onto his flank. Having the right terrain is only any good if you know how to use it and are still able to attack from it.
2) Yes, if you sit your heavies in a corner - and do nothing - you of course surrender the initiative and have no way to directly win unless your opponent makes serious mistakes. But you should never be doing nothing. Rough terrain camping should be used for protection - while - you do something else. My point about heavies is that the good ones cost more than cheap mediums, meaning that the player with cheap mediums can spend more elswhere (cavalry or skirmishers). Sit the mediums on rough terrain to protect them from easy destruction at the hands of the heavies, and then you have more time to leverage your other advantages. It's also not impossible to do this on open terrain........you just have to focus instead of tactical withdraws of your mediums to slow down the victory march of the enemy heavies.
