An Introduction to Manual Battling in GE

OK so now I've covered a general solution to the first difficulty of expedition by negotiation, and a specific solution to clearing all 3 difficulties in Early Middle Ages.  What I'd now like to offer is a primer on fighting manually in most of the early ages (Iron Age, High Middles Ages, Late Middle Ages, and Colonial Age although things are starting to change significantly by this point).  Fighting in these ages share most of the same strategies with minor variations.  The Mounted Archer in Early Middle Ages throws a wrench in the strategic assessments as you won't see units quite like it again until Progressive Era but if there's none of those in the fight or if the battlefield isn't too flat, the strategies will still hold.  In the case of expedition you can surrender and restart to attempt to get another battlefield if you wind up with a bad start due to Mounted Archers rushing your fragile troops like artillery.  Before we get too far into this I should note that to accomplish this without a large collection of rogues or a high military boost you will need a city significantly oriented towards military barracks; say 10 or so barracks of your current age oriented towards the types of troops you're likely to damage in the strategies of your choice.

First off the troop types (from here on out I'll refer to troop types usually instead of a specific troop):

Age/Unit Type	Fast	Light	Heavy	Ranged	Artillery
Iron Age	Mounted Warrior	Soldier	Legionnaire	Archer	Ballista
Early Middle Ages	Heavy Cavalry	Mercenary	Armored Infantry	Mounted Archer	Catapult
High Middle Ages	Knight	Berserker	Heavy Infantry	Crossbowman	Trebuchet
Late Middle Ages	Heavy Knight	Greatsword Warrior	Imperial Guard	Longbow Archer	Cannon
Colonial Age	Dragoon	Ranger	Grenadier	Musketeer	Field Gun

Fast units have bonuses against Ranged units but are weak to Light units.  As their name suggests they have high movement.  They have middle of the road base stats for attack and defence which tends to put them at a disadvantage against Heavy units as well.  Towards colonial they will start to bias towards more defence than attack.  As such the only time you really should use them is if you're facing a large number of Artillery and Ranged units and their closing speed is important.

Light units have bonuses against Fast units but are weak to Heavy units.  They also gain defence bonuses in bushes and forests.  Use the terrain bonus when you can but don't go out of your way to be on good terrain.  They have moderately fast movement speed that allows them to be used against everything but Heavy units well.  Towards Colonial they bias more towards attack than defence and become more capable of dealing with stray heavy units.  If there's one or two Heavy units on the field they can take them out by ganging up on it one turn as only the first attack will be retaliated.  In colonial, Rangers gain the ability to hide in forests and are unable to be attacked in this state except by units directly adjacent to them.

Heavy units have bonuses against Light units but are weak to Ranged units and Artillery units.  They have defence bonuses on flat terrain.  Since flat terrain is by far the most common you should usually be able to keep them on it but as with Light units, don't avoid a square you need to go to just because the terrain is wrong.  Despite Artillery units having bonuses against them, the high base defence of Heavy units protect them from taking too much damage, especially if you have some military boost.  The main problem with artillery is getting to them as Heavy units tend to be quite slow.  If the battlefield has a reasonably flat path all the way across though they can usually get to them in time.  In Colonial, Grenadiers gain the ability to attack with a range of 2 and avoid retaliation.

Ranged units have bonuses against Heavy units but are weak to Fast units.  Truth be told, Ranged units with moderate boost can two shot anything their own age, including the Fast units strong against them.  But even with high levels of boost anything can two shot them too!  This makes their biggest problem opponent Artillery units which can in general hit them before the Ranged units have hope of being in range of the Artillery.  Fighting either with or against Range units primarily becomes a game of who hits first.  Do your best to stay out of enemy units range until you're ready to start killing them - first strike makes a BIG difference.  Mounted Archers as mentioned are different than other Ranged units in these ages.  Their combined movement and ranged can allow them on relatively flat battlefields to hit slower opposing units before they can move.  This makes bringing Artillery in against a defence of Mounted Archers a risky proposition.  If there's only a couple Mounted Archers I sometimes still risk it though.

Artillery units have bonuses against Heavy units.  While nothing has bonuses against them, it's really not needed.  Anything can two-shot their low defence.  Their bonus against Heavy units just allows them to do about the same amount of damage against Heavy units as they do against Light units or Fast units.  Towards Colonial their attack increases slow down dramatically.  Starting in Late Middle Ages they gain a 'Dug In' defence bonus against long distance attacks.  Combined this means that they start requiring more and more boost to keep using them the same way as you can before Late Middle Ages even against a zero boost opponent.

Before I get into further details - what do I mean by boost?  Boost is provided by buildings in your city and scales the base stats of units you are using to attack or defend your city.  In all cases in this article I'm referring only to the buildings that affect your boost while attacking which are: Statue of Zeus, Cathedral of Aachen, Castel del Monte, Drummer's School, Speaker's Corner (a one-time event building), and select barracks in Contemporary Era or higher.  In the case of the great buildings, it is not enough to merely place them and let them sit.  You will need to put some effort into levelling them to get worthwhile amounts of boost via swap arrangements such as GB chains, clubs, and private swaps or via self-donation and alerting your guild or global when they're close to level and the rewards are worth donating for.

OK so...  the battlefield!  Once you've selected your 8 troops to attack with and pressed attack you enter the battle.  There's several key features you should know about:

• At the bottom left there's 6 buttons.  The flag is surrender.  You can only do this when it's one of your units' turn to move.  All of your troops will leave the battle in their current state (dead/alive, hp remaining).  If a battle is not going according to plan you should use this as soon as possible.  The swords button is automatic.  You can press this and then the red 'Results' button at the top of the screen to finish a fight FAST!  Note that this will typically involve you taking additional losses and is not recommended unless the battle is going to be very lopsided in your favour or if you're fighting GvG and time matters more than losses.  The 4 smaller buttons are sound-effects, music, full screen mode, and animation speed.  I recommend you switch the animation speed to 'fast'(3 arrows) to reduce frustration with how slow units trot along.
• Beside these buttons you can see the timeline.  This is the order in which all units in the battle will move.  You can highlight units in the timeline to see where they are on the map which can be useful to focus fire on units you can kill before their next turn and save yourself some damage.
• On the field to begin with you can see highlighted the range of your current unit's movement.  When you highlight a square you could move to a new highlight will show defining where you could attack from this square.  If you click one of the squares you could move to you will move there.
• You can highlight enemy units to see their movement and attack ranges.  movement will be a darker highlight and attack range a lighter highlight around that.  It can be confusing with 3 highlights (your movement, enemy movement, enemy attack) all overlapping but you get used to it after a while.
• Units that are in range of your movement+attack will have swords over their heads.  You can click one of these units to directly move and attack them from the square closest to your origin that it is possible.  This is usually not ideal, but sometimes it doesn't matter and is faster.

Some general advice:

• Combat in early ages is usually defined by the presence or lack-there-of of Artillery.  You should endeavour to either bring more Artillery than your opponent or none at all.  Usually twice as much is a clean option.  Remember that in Late Middle Ages and Colonial using artillery to take out artillery is more difficult and will require boost to do reliably in 2 shots.  
• Ranged units should not be brought if your opponent has more than 1 Artillery and you're not bringing Artillery of your own to take it out fast.  Stick to melee units in this case.
• Heavy units can generally hold their own against any balanced set-up, but are seldom ideal in teams with other melee units as their slow movement either makes them late to the battle or has them slowing down other melee that would like to be moving forward faster.
• Repeating this from the overview of the battlefield screen but it really is very important: Use the highlighting of the timeline and range of enemy units to pick targets and avoid unnecessary damage.
• The defensive AI will always attack if there's something in range.  You can sometimes use this to bait enemy units away from your squishier targets.  If there's nothing in range but a target just one square out of range it will often still chase that target even if it's the 'wrong' direction.  Fast units are particularly good at this style of baiting.
• When facing two-wave defences you should aim to annihilate the first wave and take 7-8 units into wave two even if they're the wrong units.  The last 4 fights of difficulty 3 are deliberately mismatched badly and you might need to find compromises in the first wave to get by them in ok shape with units that can still win against the second wave (or possibly wait for rogues).

And finally a handful of standard armies I've used many times in these ages:

• Artillery/Melee mix.  The strategy here is to have your melee form a defensive line just outside the range of enemy Ranged units and give your Artillery one turn to take out some of the enemy Artillery and Ranged unencumbered.  Typically Light units make good choices for the melee since what you're blocking out is usually enemy Fast troops and Light have bonuses against Fast.   A Heavy can be useful to plug flat spots in the line sometimes though and Fast have the advantage of being able to reach pretty much wherever they need to.  I have used near-exclusively Soldiers and Ballistas to complete difficulty 2 of guild expedition with no boost in iron age.  The last 4 fights of difficulty 2 I did have to surrender and restart several times to get battlefields that I could set-up acceptable blockades on.  Note that the Fast units you're trying to stop from getting to your Artillery cannot go over rocks or water and are slowed down by swamp.  After you position your troops highlight the enemy fast units to see if you succeeded in blocking them.  Sometimes you may have to resort to bait tactics with your last couple Artillery and last melee in the second wave of a fight to buy extra attack turns for the Artillery.
• Artillery/Ranged mix.  The strategy here is to use the high damage of Ranged units to knock out any melee that's getting close to your Artillery while your Artillery shields your Ranged by taking out enemy Ranged and Artillery.  Against many balanced setups this works with less headache than the Artillery/Melee mix but you need a moderate amount of boost to be able to take out enemy Fast using Ranged in two hits.  Sometimes this set-up can be used acceptably on auto.
• 8 of a kind.  When the defence is unbalanced (4+4, 8 of a kind itself, or just a notable omission of the unit needed to counter a good general-purpose unit), you can often take advantage of it by sending 8 of a unit that acceptably counters everything there.  This has the advantage that you have none of the weaknesses of other units to cover for.  Examples: 8 Heavy against a target with no Ranged and only 1 or 2 Artillery.  8 Light units against a target with no Heavy.  8 Fast or Light units against a target with only Ranged and Artillery.
• Light/Ranged mix.  This flies in the face of most of the other advice I've given but I did successfully make use of this on one server in LMA with no boost.  The motivator to try it in the first place was that I was using Greatsword warriors and Longbow Archers for recurring quests since they were obtainable early in the age.  8 of a kind Greatswords were able to handle most of the high-cannon set-ups and with only 1 or 2 cannons the high damage of Longbow Archers was enough to make up for their extra deaths.  I may have needed to negotiate a sector or two (Imperial Guards+Cannons would not have gone well).  Note though that LMA is where Artillery is beginning to become weaker.  I do not believe equivalent set-ups would be as successful in earlier ages.
• Rogue combos.  I've avoided discussing this for most of the post because I felt it important to stress the viability of fighting without having access to large numbers of Rogues.  Rogues are a special unit available unattached or from Rogue Hideout buildings obtainable during events.  By default a Rogue Hideout contains 2 slots with 3 unlock-able for diamonds.  Alcatraz can produce them if you have Rogue Hideouts in your town and is most people's main source for them.  At any rate, the combos of interest: 1 something + 7 Rogues - GvG/GE/hood AI will almost always target untransformed rogues before any other unit.  So essentially this becomes an 8 of a kind where the first 7 hits you take are free!  This works particularly well with and against melee units as you'll get a free retaliation as well.  2 somethings + 6 Rogues - when facing two waves often if you send only 1 something it'll wind up dead and you will have to surrender before taking on the second wave - so to be safe a second something is recommended in these cases.  It can be the same unit type as the first something, or it can be a different unit if you want a little something else available to you - most of the time for reliability if possible it's better to pick 2 of the same.  6 Artilleries + 2 Rogues - slightly different numbers may also be appropriate but the idea here is similar to the Artillery/Ranged combos.  You hold back the rogues out of range and then use their large attack value to clear melee coming close or use their free hit transformation property and offer them up as bait depending on the situation.  I will discuss Rogue-centric combat further at some other time.  Note that you should not try Rogue-heavy attacks against the Continent AI as it will ignore the rogues and go for the untransformed unit.

This has been a VERY long post and doubtless I've left out something important.  Feel free to ask questions or make suggestions if you feel there's updates needed :)