The Devastation of Constantinople (Massive Battles)

Hey what's up guys it's Oakley and I'm here with IndiePride. Hey what's going on guys? And we're doing a three versus two massive siege of Constantinople on the second level of Escalation so there's gonna be a lot of holes in the walls. This is going to be awesome we're going to be the Eastern Roman Empire trying to defend the city to the last. We have a lot of catapults and all that set up but you can see the opponents have three Ostrogothic army so a bit historical for their and I just want to point out the little details or the massive details to this battlefield are just blowing me away right now. Yeah the city of Constantinople in this game is absolutely beautiful I really love all the effort and attention they put into Ravenna and Constantinople and some of the unique cities. I was really excited to play this battle because you guys have probably seen our Fall of Athens video and I thought that was one of the best videos I've done on Rome too and this replay is absolutely insane again we're playing 2v3 and on a city as epic as Constantinople it was just a lot of fun to try to defend it to the end and this is gonna be a long replay strap in boys but it is really epic it is worth staying to the end it comes down to literally the last couple seconds of the battle. Yeah so I'm gonna actually go ahead and position my camera back where the battle is gonna start and IndiePride was kind of new to the way Escalation works so he has a bunch of his guys over on the walls here we'll get a pan from the defender's perspective and I'm ready to go when you are. All right 3 2 1 press play yeah so like he was saying kind of new to the siege escalation and didn't realize that the walls had already taken a ton of damage so they're at 85% and I moved some of my elite balistari up to the walls getting some shots off on the gothic palatinate defectors and on the edge there but you can see these walls are now at 95% damage already lost some balistari here and these are 800 talent crossbowmen so pretty pretty important units you don't want to be losing them early on and then he's gonna get a bunch of catapult shots into the walls and you can just see me lose about half of my crossbowmen right at the start of the battle so not a good start for me not exactly what I wanted there's 75 men left and one balistari and looks like there are 86 left in the other so yeah that's not what I wanted to do but I do get a great shot off with my catapult kill 20 gothic palatinate defectors now one thing that's really important about this battle is that because we're on siege escalation 2 Constantinople is already in ruins a bunch of holes in the walls and such but the biggest thing about siege escalation is that you get a huge morale and melee attack debuff as you can see my elite balistari actually have zero melee damage and my protectories domesticae have 14 melee attack and some of my other units have 18 melee attack so they have a really big morale penalty and a really big melee attack penalty and that means that the gothic palatinate defectors that have 62 melee attack can absolutely run through us in melee combat yeah so ca has done a really good job actually of trying to balance out these sieges we thought we were going to have to uh kind of handicap ourselves by making it two versus three but actually as indy said with all the holes in the wall the fact that the just morale and all the stats of the defenders is actually going to be super low especially on escalation 2 um kind of more than makes up for the fact that um yeah we're outnumbered so it's going to make it even harder to defend this city and already on my side the walls are starting to collapse um and i think right off the get-go we weren't really sure how to defend this and so what we decided to do was try and concentrate our forces the idea was eventually we're going to fall back uh and so now you can see the enemy making their way up towards the walls and we just have a couple actually um archers and sagatari over on my flank of the battlefield defending but i'm really not trying to hold it as much as possible most of my forces are going to be in the rear cavalry patrolling in the back pikeman setup and heavy axemen just waiting in the rear and then we're taking charge of some of the catapults on the walls and just trying to do as much damage as possible yep one thing that i really wanted to do right here was sneak some cavalry out one thing that i've noticed people kind of get tunnel vision in siege battles and they just focus on their section of the walls and especially on a map this huge sometimes especially kind of inexperienced total war players not always gonna look at the mini-map and see where your units are so one thing i've always loved doing in siege battles is using cavalry aggressively and attacking enemy army outside the walls with cavalry because a lot of players don't bring armies that are suited to defend against cavalry attacks and cavalry on attila very very strong and so i saw hey look look at all these elite germanic archers i'm gonna charge into melee here and actually my guys are gonna be hidden as they move to the woods he's not gonna notice it they were only visible for a little bit as they crossed the open plane and they got directly into the force so what i'm gonna do is just go straight for all those elite germanic archers and try to kill them and whoa i just pressed insert and that is not what i wanted at all let's see if i can actually i don't know why i pressed insert and it went to a different unit than i wanted it to but uh gonna go into melee combat here with a scully palatine and they should be able to crush archers in melee combat got a really good charge off here and he's kind of isolated at this point a lot of his units are already up near the walls but he is gonna run some of his archers away and uh one thing you're gonna notice here as soon as he turns some of his archers around the bonus first large for archers that plus 10 melee or that plus 10 missile damage does work like i charge in here expecting to have an easy time killing all these archers but these three archers get away he turns around and as soon as he starts shooting flaming arrows into my cavalry i'm gonna have to pull out because i'm gonna lose an entire unit of cavalry to these flaming volleys so you've done a nice counter-attack but the enemy is at the walls some of the enemy general actually forces are going through the gate itself so they're definitely penetrating through the walls and this is where i'm going to have a couple uh archer divisions actually moving up into these positions trying to get some counter shots clear the defender or the attackers who are now coming up over the walls so we're going to try and do as much damage isolate those guys secure the towers defend them allow them to do as much damage as possible but it's not really going to be uh coming to much you can see on the very east or north side of the map i should say the defenders have basically blown through this sector they had catapults they destroyed sections of the wall the towers infantry poured through the gates i had to abandon this and so now it's going to be again a case of falling back and defending you can see some of our cavalry in the nice open space that you have between the walls of constantine and the theodotion walls a nice open ground where we can actually come in and reform some of our reserve cavalry and reserve infantry for the second fight and that's one of the really nice things about constant noble defending in general when you're playing on siege escalation one or two infantry is probably not going to be what wins you the battle on a map like constantinople having this much space inside a city on previous total wars is unheard of you never have this space to maneuver so cavalry generally not that good defending but in a game like attila where you have this kind of space in constantinople and the fact that melee cavalry is so strong in general i would say that the builds we brought probably weren't the correct ones if we like just banned cavalry it would probably be more efficient than what we brought here because the melee attack value that we have for our swords is pathetic again 18 melee attack they are going to get crushed by gothic palatina defectors they have a huge infantry advantage but we have cavalry and they didn't bring a lot of calvary at all so we can kind of dictate the pace of the engagements inside these walls and if we get continuous good charges off on the swords even gothic palatina defectors with 62 melee attack will die to repeated hammer and anvils and charges from the front yeah and i'm actually looking at your sector of the battlefield where again we've had to yield the the entrance to the city some of our own forces are here you can see a couple units with the cairo banner they're trying to hold firm secure the city some of our uh i think yeah crossbowmen are actually going to form up here so my own cross women have tried to secure this main passageway but again we're going to have to give up in the face of all these defenders just pouring in here um but they are staying starting to take a little bit of damage from our towers the more they sit and wait we can pick them off but it is going to be a long grinding fight for us to try and reduce their numbers yeah so what's going to happen here is he's going to pour a bunch of the gothic palatina defectors into the walls and just kind of sit there and like oakley said our towers are whittling them away towers do do a lot of damage in this game you can see actually all his gothic palatina defectors are down 10 20 men so that's been pretty good for me um but he is still shooting artillery into my army and actually just landed a huge shot here on my elite ballast are you have just gotten really beat up this game and i feel kind of bad for them they uh they have not had a good time so far but it's surprising the elite ballast 65 missile damage a ton of armor piercing so even with low numbers if they're given time to shoot into a melee engagement they can do a lot of damage so even if with only 47 men left in that unit i want to keep that alive as much as possible because they can still do a lot of work for me but i'm gonna have to keep pulling back the catapults are shooting at me still losing guys and i just want to give a space for my cavalry to get really good charges off now and if i look at yeah on that note i had to mention a couple things so we're getting pincered on both sides the enemies have a foothold and they're actually coming through the center through the main gate and they're going to try and get to our capture point we're going to try and reform and stop them from doing that your cavalry have come back from the outside and specifically these gothic palatina defectors in the center we're going to try and sandwich them prevent them from getting up to this last position in the middle you're gonna get a really good charge off the magister militum right there yeah so our objective now was the opponents are just swarming the flanks and so we're going to try and eat up all of these units in the center who are kind of isolated trying to go for strategic positions and we're just landing devastating blows on these guys i mean they're down to about yeah half strength and tumbling and now you see all these pikemen and spearmen pouring in through there that's a huge cluster that we figured you know if we can isolate that force then that's going to be a huge win for us we've already killed two of these defectors so it's all going to be about you know isolating specific units and now i'm going to have some double silver here holding up this entire enemy formation in the burnt out forest here and their goal is just going to be to keep these guys from pressing forward so they have nowhere to go and we're going to now swarm in on this small isolated group that got detached from the main assault force yeah definitely a mistake from our opponents there to let these guys come in by themselves they like oakley said they are very isolated and we are going to be able to completely surround them and do a ton of damage maybe even route all these units off the field if you had any doubts about the power of calvary and attila you shouldn't a magister militum and a tagmata calvary arguably the most overpowered unit in the game at the moment just wrecked the palatina defend defectors there who have 60 62 or 65 melee attack they're a really good sword unit but have absolutely no chance against units like tagmata calvary and the magister militum so he lost two very expensive sword units right there good for us and now we're just going to try to isolate these pikes now of course you have to be very careful engaging against them they are pikes can't send calvary up the front into that but uh one thing we are going to do is it looks like oakley's going to send in some sagatari who are already out of ammunition tie down the elite ostrogothic pikemen and then when they drop their pikes then you charge in with the tagmata calvary and we can do a lot of damage to these pikes here so yeah we're going to start to exploit that pike wall that's going to try and move up against our guys but my guys are now going to shoot the gap through here and this is where the opponent does not want to be so here we're going to land a nice strike the pikes in the back the spears cannot move forward i'm going to counter charge or bait those guys infantry are going to be moving into the burnt out force in the back and now look at my magister militum he's going to be going after all those guys your dudes as well landing tons of strikes on these forces i'm just trying to get the bows off the field as quickly as possible you do kind of have to be scared when they have mass bows like this i mean it is very nice to get charges into to the bows and i should be able to wrap this up really quickly but as you saw earlier when i charged a mass amount of bows they got a bunch of fire arrows into me and that's where i lost most of my cavalry now they don't quite have the open space to run away that they did earlier on in the battle so now i'm just going to be able to tie them down in melee and as they run away they're going to actually get destroyed by our oil and let's see if you can actually see some of that maybe they already captured the gate so no oil dropping on them but they did lose a lot of guys all the bows are going to die and this entire force that he sent in unsupported going to get isolated and destroyed by our cavalry which is big for us because the way the only way we're going to win this is if we isolate units and destroy sections of the army if they sent everything they had at us at once we'd be in really big trouble yeah and at this point india and i are in the chat we're furiously trying to break these uh you know isolated units and now we're seeing sort of a chain route happening here and so this is our chance and your calvary is going to come back and we can't let any of these guys even have the a chance to reform so we waited until the infantry formations blinked we exploited the gaps and then we just all out massacred them on all sides now it's going to be a matter of just you know killing every single one of these guys not allowing them to reform um but that's not to say we're winning everywhere i mean we've completely destroyed the central army group but if you look over on my old position the enemy forces are moving up slowly long pike lines backing that up with germanic hunters who are going to be strategically pushing my guys back and then if we look on the far side they're actually doing a massive push down the main causeway and actually their calorie are clearing out these positions and they almost have a straight shot to the imperial capital which we weren't actually prepared to defend at this point so you're going to be rushing your infantry into that position yeah we just want to block off that causeway prevent them from advancing and this is where the next part of the engagement is going to happen the middle army has mostly died although yes some units still left alive but not too much the guy that was over on your side at the beginning he is kind of a little um scared to advance like he he was kind of hesitant to do a whole lot like he put a bunch of holes in the walls and moved in his guys but he's been kind of slow moving forward i think at this point he probably could have done well to just rush the capital city and it would have been hard for us to deal with it but he's actually going to make a mistake and not going for it and just kind of advance slowly and that's going to give us time to start isolating more sections of the army so now we're going to focus on this causeway on the left about where the first ostrogoth army came in through and we're going to get some engagements here with the eastern armored legio he's just going to plop a germanic spear here and i'm going to start throwing some plumbata darts at him do some damage there get them off the field as soon as i can but i didn't want to move up too much here because i don't want to let the noble germanic cavalry just charge directly into my swords i wanted to wait till my cavalry was closer as you can see it's still off the distance i wanted to make sure i had my cavalry to reinforce so i'm going to not actually engage in melee combat for a bit here wait for my cavalry to get around and then uh plop them on this side street down by the dock and prevent his cavalry from flanking me from behind because if he got rear charges off while i was engaged this infantry blob would just die and that would be a massive issue for us yeah and we already just proved how devastating cavalry can be on infantry um but that's okay for the opponents they have a lot more men than us for us that type of charge would be absolutely brutal um and i'm threatening um a lot of the positions up here keeping the opponent over on the right side from advancing if he wants to move into these cities then i have heavy uh axe guards and then also clibanari ready to counter charge so i'm checking his assaults and that's kind of i have pikes at other choke points and that's kind of what's forcing him to move up very slowly piecemeal i think it's the cavalry presence and the kind of how they were scared that we absolutely thrashed and destroyed that one isolated army so it kind of makes sense to move up staggered yeah but it's it's to our advantage where now we can focus on these other detachments and it looks like you've engaged on one of those weekend spear units yeah so that those dramatic experiments should be relatively easy to kill but now i want to focus on the pikes because in the causeways in these kind of narrow city streets pikes can be pretty scary to fight against they have gold chevrons actually definitely don't want to attack that from the front i would get wrecked so i have the two balistari that are now both pretty depleted shooting into the front pikemen don't have a great shield block chance and their armor is actually pretty decent but their shield block chance isn't that high so i'm just going to try to shoot into them a bit one thing that i really like to do is when he's going to move up these pike units just run away with the swords i don't have to engage that from the front i can continue kiting get some plumbana throws off and just pull away and as you kind of move up your pikemen they kind of can sometimes get out of position and that's going to allow me to get flanking charges off so just try to pull him into a side causeway here maybe turn his flank to one of my swords or to my crossbowmen and i might be able to do a lot of damage there but definitely don't engage the ostrogothic pikemen from the front because that would be very ill-advised yeah and again we're going to use the terrain to our advantage here pikemen are great when they can face in one direction and so that's why you see him stopped here at this intersection because he can't go either way that'll allow us to get a flank and so that's why we're securing all these strategic positions on the other side of the map i'm also securing a bunch of those strategic positions but as the archers get closer i'm forced to fall back they're actually rolling some catapults into the city as well so i'm very very scared that that might actually force our hand on that side so i'm slowly pulling back but uh very strategically i'm even sending some of my uh tagmata cavalry over on this side i found a little gap where i could sneak in between the gothic defenders and some of the spears and pikes and so what we're going to try and do is exploit that and i'm telling indy basically that we need to find another isolated group to destroy destroying pikemen is going to be a little hard so maybe what we can do is destroy these defectors over here and so this is going to be like indy said the sector of the battlefield that we're focusing on isolating next yeah and that's a very good flanking maneuver from the tagmata cavalry actually already up 272 kills only lost 10 men so far gonna have to be careful because the tagmata are isolated but so are those pike units and you can see here he's pulling this elite ostrogothic pikemen down this side causeway which suddenly turns its flank get a couple uh shots off with the balistari into their their rear doing some damage there the shield block chance won't help when they're getting shot in the back all right so yeah those ostrogothic pikemen are actually going to make the decision to get charged in the rear by my cavalry and not get shot by the balistari but it's a they're kind of in between a rock and a hard place right now not in a good position pretty isolated he's not really helping them out to be honest he has a bunch of calories just kind of sitting around doing nothing um in diamond formation in the back there but then you get another great rear charge off on this pike unit that didn't turn around and then you just go back and charge the other pike unit again so this tagmata making a huge impact on the battle already and there were some really good hammer and anvils right there yeah it looks like they're at 255 and the enemy is now finally responding i'm going to pull out and kind of charge right through this pike line this is my exit out of this uh potential trap as the opponent moves in and so now we're going to just crash through this wall and then pull out and i think you're going to commit your infantry to actually cover the retreat of the tagmata who are perhaps some of the most important units i think the cavalry like you said before definitely the units when you didn't hear come the spearmen chasing after me yeah so you just wanted to pull through that pike that the remains of that pike unit to be honest there isn't much of a pike unit left anymore but yeah after that there's only 30 men in that pike unit i can engage and kill these germanic spearmen and it's going to be a blobby right here but he doesn't really have a way to punish me at the moment he doesn't have any cavalry in my flank he doesn't have these inventory that he probably should have already started moving up and he is going to start doing that but uh i don't remember do you do you engage swords from getting charges on me yeah this is this is the crisis that we're facing is you know we did have okay we isolated two pike units but now here's a whole bunch of infantry and so i'm kind of saying okay we have to target this it looks like they're going to charge so you can see me starting to pull actually all of my available cavalry back to this position in the distance the enemy is moving in so i'm going to try and slow him down put some pressure on him but the main threat is going to be these guys and so i think what i decide to do is sacrifice my tagmata they're at 280 kills we'll see what they're at after this charge but i decide to sacrifice them into these units i mean they're unbraced they're running this is the best time for us to knock out as many troops as possible yeah now do you let them stay in melee combat or do you just charge and pull out again um for a while yeah i just needed to wait for my magister militum to get into the fight yeah so now he's actually gonna be coming into the fight i'm kind of holding ground for my uh so benari wow they got they got a hundred kills off that short against elite swords it's just ridiculous what it's awesome and so now i'm yeah i have more klebanari coming in all of my cavalry friends side constant noble descended on these guys um they do have some archer fire coming in but i mean we absolutely wow they're gone his units are all gone yeah so i mean that could not have gone better for us and i mean if you just compare that to something that could have happened in rome too i mean that would have never happened like cataphract charging into the front of roman infantry you maybe would get like 30 kills some javelin fire loose and guys but here the cavalry just kind of runs through an entire section of his army six gothic palatina defectors all routed that move was huge for us and uh on a map that's like more compact where there's not as much space to maneuver calvary might not have worked but on constance and opal was perfect and so yeah if you're going to be defending a city like constant noble definitely bring a lot of cavalry but yeah the tagmata and the cataphracts right there did so much work and actually prevented my infantry from getting surrounded which would have been probably a death toll for us probably would have lost us the game but really good use of the cavalry right there and it's kept us in the fight yeah there is another fight going on over here though that's very important down by the docks noble germanic horsemen hit and maybe his generals will oh no his generals not engaged yet but the noble germanic horsemen and some spirit units tried to get around me behind my flank and i just committed all my mail or all my melee cavalry and some of my swords to prevent them from getting around and i do have one balistari at the walls here trying to shoot down into his germanic noble horsemen doing a lot of damage there as well yeah so we did a good charge here but i i kind of wasted or not wasted my cavalry are exhausted at this point i lost my tagmata finally and his infantry the remainder are chasing after my horsemen i baited him into the woods and then i'm gonna turn about and just charge in and finish the job pretty much where's that cavalry unit this is going to be over towards the walls in the middle oh i see yeah you have some sagatari that i believe are already out of ammunition there and and one palatina pulling away here but yeah um the the thing that i've mentioned a couple times already like we really can't take melee engagements against their sword so i cannot trust enough how important it was to get those gothic palatina defectors off the field with those cavalry charges if they had engaged in my swords my entire army would have probably broken in a minute or less like they would have had no chance 18 melee attack for 62 generally not going to go very well so all those sword units routing definitely shifted things in our favor you can see the balance bar actually it's now it started out maybe like 1 7th in our favor now it's about 1 3rd and it's continuing to climb we're getting back into this like we have not we have a chance to win this for sure and just as you say that my magister militum goes down trying to fight off those gothic defectors so yeah i i'm throwing away a lot of cavalry trying to get those guys away but you can see the entire army that was on the right flank basically killed and we're having a lot of nice supporting fire from the towers which weren't destroyed yet helping us clean up this fight but the rest of my forces on the left are being pushed back some of the enemy forces on the far far left have tried to push up unsupported and they're gonna be facing my pike so i'm gonna get some good kills um so we're able to check their advance there but uh if you look at the enemy general he's actually uh saying **** this he's given up on the army on your side and he's just gonna be running into the city i can actually even see some of the um citizens now looking at the cavalry force and they're actually gonna be chasing after this uh this general this is really funny yeah so he's gonna pull that gothic general away and basically go for the capture point start trying to get some uh battlefield wide morale bonuses um but i keep trying to chase him with my calvary i do have calvary left alive and you can see oakley pointed out to me he was like oh he's going for the he's going for the capture point we got to go get him so yeah i'm gonna pull all my cavalry out of there they are exhausted and his uh general is actually mad i don't think yeah it's very tired i'm not sure why they haven't even been fighting but uh he's gonna pull away and try to start capturing those uh points here in the center of the city now i haven't actually shown downtown constantinopolis and here is hiya sofia uh really burnt i think that the uh siege escalation is really cool but it is a little ridiculous that every single building in the entire city is completely burned to a crisp not sure that's how a siege would really work in reality because everyone would be dead if every building was burned but regardless um it does look really cool and yeah he's gonna try to capture the central plaza right here which wouldn't win them the victory point but back here hiya sofia that is the victory point and if they ever manage to pull units back here and try to capture that if we don't defend it they will win the battle so the general is pushing through there and that's kind of forcing us to pull back as we pull back the enemy forces are going to be moving forward um they're going to try and capture this point over in the front sort of the the garrison fort up by the front walls and uh the more they can take those out um it's going to have actually uh sort of bonuses for them if they can take that out so they're going to try and do as much damage to us as possible and here we are this is going to be kind of wrapping up the first stage of the battle so most of our troops are going to be falling back in the pursuit of that enemy general who's going for the capital city the enemy forces are going to be moving up the only action that's really going to take place is me trying to get these guys off the capture point this garrison and i'm trying to buy time for my towers to do damage to him i'm going to have a lot of feints and charges and try and pull these guys out but it's going to be almost for nothing uh so they're going to give up and they're going to try and after these infantry in this position but again uh the player who's moving up is being very very strategic and actually it looks like we will get a little bit of action here as i try and pull back a lot of my cross women have been uh kept back here and they're going to be decimating some of these thracian warriors from the front my palatine are going to try and engage um but more of his troops are rushing in especially these thracians they're going to cut up my infantry so i'm going to try and watch a little bit of that um and it's a good move on his part to lead the assault with that and so he's going to be actually catching most of my guys and he just destroyed my palatina so he's catching most of my guys yeah before they can retreat here comes my uh my clibanari trying to come to the rescue of my units he just broke through thracian warriors i mean doing tons of damage to them i'm going to try and continue on through to save my balistari and my other units but uh no that's it so the last of our defenders on the outskirts of the town have been destroyed oh that charge yeah the thracian warriors absolutely wreck enemy infantry units but when they get charged by cavalry things go a little bit better and they do have the plumbado which i think is weird considering they have a two-handed sword but yeah clibanari actually gonna get cut up there the thracian warriors might actually still have a bonus for us large but they're going to end up routing as well and we're just going to try to pull back here because there's not much left we want to do out on the outskirts of this as he pulls his general away from combat yeah so now we're going to go ahead and skip forward to another part of the battlefield it's mostly going to be us reforming at the center of the battle uh sort of towards the inner parts of constantinople and then we'll actually get back to you as the enemy forces move up because there is some down time so we'll see you guys shortly all right so here we are i'm going to press play on the replay again hitara guards out here on the flank you can see that one of the ostrogoth players has started moving up all his units and uh some of these guys are getting isolated again kind of a not the best strategy for for them to just isolate some of their units when they have us outnumbered but they're going to move forward with some pikes here the hightower guard are going to run in and they only have 23 melee attack because of the escalation so not super impressive but i do have two one of my balistari here shooting into the gothic pikemen which only have 15 armor so going to shred through them with the high armor piercing of the balistari you can see them starting to rack up kills they're at 141 right now they're getting some really good volleys on second thought i should have turned it onto flaming arrows at this point because it causes a bigger morale damage and it actually causes more damage against units in general so uh maximus decimus meridius has done some testing and i have done some testing that shows that uh fire arrows do more damage than regular bolts for crossbows and regular bows so probably should have been using that but either way i we are ripping through this section of their units and they're going to keep sending more guys and we've kind of set up in the central plaza here uh some of oakley's pikes blocking the uh gates preventing them access and then the rest of his units kind of moving up very slowly in the back there and we've actually crushed these pikemen my hatari guard taking a you know half strength beating but was it worth it to to kill like three enemy units and now i'm going to be chasing them right into their the friends of their sort of moving up the streets and again we're just pulling more guys out of position and your crossbowmen are going to be perfect in these types of scenarios um and otherwise we're going to be staring down these long hallways pike against pike so we're going to try and pick and choose our battles and they do have some supporting uh archers actually getting some shots off he's going to pull his pikes out a little bit too far and then turn his back big mistake there gonna lose the shield block chance and my my volleys from these balistari are just doing so much damage to these units and one thing he's going to do is he's just going to keep his flank turned to a lot of my balistari he does have this one bow unit but they don't have great line of sight they're which is not generally what you want to do if you can get a line of sight on enemy units the armor piercing kicks in a lot better the accuracy is a lot better so he's going to pull up this gothic palatina defector as well and i'm just going to keep shooting into them like i have plenty of ammunition at this point and balistari definitely racking up a lot of kills so they're going to start shooting again into the flank the side where they don't have the shield and you can see in the background me moving the balistari to get a better position here but this volley or these next couple of volleys into the gothic palatina defectors going to do so much damage they're at 98 men right now as soon as i start shooting i'd say they probably they're at 98 right now one volley they're gonna lose 10 and they're gonna start losing even more men as their hp starts dropping to zero yeah and one of the advantages we have now as well as you can see our units moving in behind this are all hidden so they don't actually know how many forces we have left which kind of explains why they're being so cautious so we're we're kind of just doing as much damage as possible with crossman trying to pull them out of these fortified positions and then land the strikes with the cavalry if at all possible and uh yeah i think this is going to be the nature of the battle for a little while so we'll probably go ahead oh no it looks like they're pulling out one of their pikes um so we'll probably watch this engagement and then we'll uh we'll skip to the next focal point yes we're still shooting in there with my balistari almost up to 200 kills now probably going to get it after this volley to be honest and i am shooting into the front of the pike unit which i mean is not ideal i maybe should be a little bit more conservative with my ammunition at this point but it is a pike unit in a street and we can't engage it from the front so skirmishing it down is basically the only thing we can do but yeah just going to shoot them for a bit and i think we can pause here and go on to the next part of the battle yep sounds good so now we've moved forward and we were actually able to chew through the pikes and any defenders here and so they have now a pretty exposed flank and this is going to be the opportunity for us to charge in with the cavalry try and exploit this enemy is now going to wheel some of their pikemen to sort of block that entrance and so we're going to try and exploit that they've opened up too many gaps this is going to allow us to flood in through here and chase after these unsupported defectors so you land a good assault and you you're actually just boogie on out of there um yeah that was i wanted to charge into traction warriors but i realized with the the destroyed buildings right there they actually weren't going to get a good charge bonus off and thracian warriors with their high melee attack and at least in rome i'm not sure if they do in this game but i didn't really want to engage them with my already beaten up general if i lose my general at this point that gets really scary so i just pulled out as oakley said boogie on out of there and now he's going to pull up his pikes and try to block off the street again but i'm starting to run out of ammunition with my ballast art which is a problem yeah this is a pretty epic site actually it's my pikes just clearing the streets and they're going to form up for the rest of our infantry this is the main column and the opponents are going to charge in here with thracian warriors let's see how that goes um yeah oh my god it's like machine gun fire they're getting mowed down so yeah those guys completely just broke to our pike so um their pikes are being committed elsewhere which we've now been able to get us around in that courtyard having drawn them out and now we're going to be able to push through here with our combined infantry might against the factories who may be able to beat us but with the pike support no it's going to be uh to our advantage now yeah some high level tactical analysis guys don't charge pikes from the front with anything especially not thracian warriors yeah um so while this is happening the opponents have actually charged in through the back in the other hallways they figured that okay we can't have that many men and if they're seeing so many of our guys deployed on that side they're going to push through these other positions so we have left one eastern armored legio um but he's actually going to start routing by these you can't beat this guy by himself there's no way and now the opponents are actually um well india and i are realizing the danger of this we're going to pull our forces back um but they've actually deployed um some pikes here to keep us from capturing or for you know returning to the city capital to prevent the capture of the city more of their units are going to be streaming in so they've created an avenue for them to just swarm the city center and we realize you know even though we can isolate the rest of those forces and we're winning over there uh if we lose the capture point that's it yeah this is really scary at this point this is where things start turning like the balance bar has now made it almost to 50 percent it's like 45 55 uh advantage to them but we brought it back really close and we're like uh we started we're starting to get scared here because they're going to be able to pick off this capture point and our cavalry can't run through pikes it's been able to run through everything else in this battle but it's not just the pikes they have a full strength gothic palatinate defector that's only tired and like i said that uh morale penalty and melee attack penalty for my swords is going to mean they can't cut through them so if i don't hammer an anvil the the palatina we aren't going to be able to get back and cut through all these guys to get back to the capture point and prevent them from winning so we start panicking a little bit here and we we're like okay what can we do what can we do here well we got to pull back everything but i definitely want to get my cavalry back as quickly as possible you can see near the uh is this the hippodrome what is that i think so and you were actually able to break the enemy general but we also lost our own units so it's going to be a race to get our cavalry into position they're going to be reforming some of their pikes but by moving those pikes are actually going to open up our infantry to uh to push on that other position so we're really just going to try and be like um you know just push through all of these defenses and somehow find a little crack somewhere to return to the capital yeah i'm pulling my scully palatinate and my magister militum uh back and trying to get them to the capture point soon and i got scared there because i saw his pikes reforming i was like oh he's going to capture me i can't get through the street but then oakley pointed out to me that we can actually run our units through this broken down shed part right here so what i'm going to do is actually as soon as he tells me that i'm going to pull them back up the street pull them through here and kill the germanic hunters and maybe some of the gothic palatinate defectors that are now capturing the point in the back yeah i pulled them back probably a little bit too far but i'm going to move them forward again very soon we've been uh victorious actually in cleaning up the enemy forces on the rest of the battlefield so now you can see all our guys just running it doesn't matter if they're exhausted we're telling them to make haste and make you know best time back to the city center you can see all of our forces running back and some of these guys were actually sent back before the battle was over um we were actually pulling dudes away from that fight and only left the bare minimum to clean up the enemy forces my pikes are going to be very crucial actually for this fight um if the enemy has pikes you know the best way to combat that is with our own pikes but they're just going to be here too slow so the rest of our infantry are pouring into this fight especially over here this infantry engagement we're fighting against the opponent's uphill they're more rested than us um it's going to be hard to break through there so we need everything possible and here comes the cav actually for that sneak attack i don't think the opponents were expecting that that was pretty funny actually yeah so we're gonna pull them through the little broken down shed here and then get them around and into these sort of units but this palatina defector is actually not the most important unit on the field right now it's actually the one that's holding up the rest of our army over here and if i didn't get a hammer and anvil off on this defector no way i'm gonna break through them with my eastern armor legend they're getting beaten up in melee the palatina defectors only lost six men in about a minute of combat so i have no chance of winning that gotta kill the swords and the germanic hunters over here and then hopefully be able to pull through and get a hammer and anvil off on that unit and then let the rest of my swords crash through into the capture so you just uh pretty strategically sacrifice your weaker cavalry force to hold up the gothic palatina defectors and then you're taking out the archers to try and keep them from capturing the point it didn't work they still took it so now you're going to disengage and like you said kind of remove the the block that's keeping us from moving on to the counter the uh the capture point so if we can get rid of this quick enough then they can flood the enemy forces back at the city center so we kind of have to open the front door and make no mistake this is going to be a massive charge for the magister militum a very clean wide open space for me to get as much speed bonus as i possibly can going into the charge and we're going to get a nice little close-up of this charge over the little barricade right there into the back of the palatina defectors and that's going to be a dead unit i mean there's nothing and no sword unit in the game is going to be able to withstand a hammer and anvil like that they're going to route and that's going to free up the rest of our units over here hopefully and be able to crash in but there's now a countdown as you can see at the top there defenders remaining victory points 83 seconds left in this battle if we don't take this capture point from them or get more units into the capture point than they have we lose and it's coming down really quickly and we started panicking a lot uh we were like we gotta get everyone into melee combat right now we need to get through the pikes but how do we get through the pipes that's the kind of scary thing like these pikes aren't elite by any means they're just gothic pikemen but can our swords and pike units cut through that in time i don't know we're kind of freaking out about it at this point actually all our infantry are converging at the same time you can see your eastern armored leggio moving in through the path of calvary belistari coming in here and all our troops are going to kind of run through the front enemy pikes are actually coming through the flank so it's kind of everyone coming in at the last moment he's actually going to decide to pull them back to reinforce his pike line uh probably a smart move they don't want that to crack um you're going to land a strike on the back with your magister militum and so that's actually going to start breaking those units the pikes now are going to form into a sandwich my own guys are coming into this fight to try and break up the enemy pikes man this is going to be super close the timer left is 18 seconds we just have to try and break these units the morale is super low um i tried dismounting my magister militum here just to see if having more infantry units in it actually reduces the capture point but we are trying everything right now and the counterpoint's not going down i don't know if you once you capture it you actually have to capture it back before it counts down but uh we can't break through in time and they're actually going to win even though it was 2v3 and we were heavily outnumbered and had the morale disadvantage and had everything against us if this was real life which it isn't of course it's total war attila but if it was real life we would have crushed the remaining infantry units and won that battle uh just in reality capturing a victory point is not going to make the other enemy army lower their arms and stop fighting but uh we end up not capturing it in time and they do win fair and square by the rules of the game man oh man i'm mad son i was mad no it was actually really epic i mean it could not have been closer at the end there um came down to the last couple of units and he managed to capture it just in time and we couldn't quite break the circle in time but really really epic siege and i was so happy with ending there i mean i would have been more happy with a win of course but uh and maybe a little butthurt but it was still really epic i gotta say so let's go ahead and look at some of those stats so uh just see how many kills it doesn't tell you the whole army kills um but i mean look how many forces the enemy brought we have i think a total yeah look at that uh just 2400 men i mean one of the opponents brought just that many number of men himself they have three of those armies and we killed well i don't know like my math is bad but probably like 5500 or so enemy units here and uh didn't lose that much i mean we probably killed them about a three to one ratio or so and i mean you can look at the units some of our our calvary made a huge impact his tagmana calvary um let's see it got 387 yeah 387 318 on the clibanari 359 on the magister militum and 288 on the hytaria guards i don't actually know how to say that sorry for and then we look at my units and uh i have the scullay palatina with 354 276 on my magister militum my infantry actually did pretty well considering all the morale and attack debuffs they had but even though i lost all my ballastari at the beginning of that battle i lost like half of them at the beginning 268 kills 103 kills made a huge impact there as well and then we look at their kills not super impressive in fact a lot of their units kind of got thrown away to be honest but at the end of the day they did what they needed to they moved in the capture point and prevented us from being able to take it back so well played to them i mean i like these kind of sieges way more than even ones where it's like 3v3 or 4v4 when when you're outnumbered or limit your funds i just think it makes for much epic much more epic much closer games and this was definitely no exception i think this has got to be and i'm not a bias source at all one of the most exciting sieges on youtube so i hope you guys enjoyed what you watched because i certainly enjoyed playing there's a lot of fun all right we'll see you guys for the next one and we're up for suggestions for what types of battles or scenarios you'd like to see in the future thanks so much we'll see you guys next time y'all later