Patch 14 on the way!!! (Online Battle #64)

Hey what's up guys it's Oakley and I'm going to be back playing Rome 2. It's going to be a Carthage versus myself as Parthia. My main army is split up into a couple wings so I have some heavy cav on this side so Camel Spearmen backed up by median cav and then I have Sarmatian Horse Archers here and then on the right backed up by again some median cav. In the center I'm charging forward with the Sarmatian Lancers. Very cheap Lancers. They're supposed to kind of ward off any of his frontal charge and then just draw him in and try and just bait charge from his cav. I have Eastern Slingers here and then I have Elite Persian Archers with some Hoplites for reinforcement. Then in the center what I've done is I've continued to blob up my units. So another Hoplite unit guarding these Persian Archers so you can see how modular my army is. I'm really spreading them apart into different units because I figured as Parthia I have to stay mobile so I have these mobile Roving Archer or Slinger groups backed up by core units. Over here I have the core of my two Mercenary Hoplites and then two Swordsmen and then I have Elephants to back up these wings so I can fall back to various positions and just swarm around my opponent. He on the other hand has Carthage so he has Mercenary Companion Cavalry. A lot of these guys, they're very very very strong Cavalry so I have to be wary about that. Then he has a big wall of late Carthaginian Hoplites with Italian Swordsmen on the flanks. He has Peltas and then Cretan Archers in the back. So a pretty substantial build and then one group of African War Elephants. But yeah let's go ahead and talk a little bit about what I've been up to. I haven't posted anything too recently, I know I did that video where I had plans for the summer. I do still intend on producing more content for the documentaries. When it comes to the latest Punic War video I'm almost done with the script so I'm making slow but steady progress. It's a lot of time to cover but mostly I just haven't had as much time as I wanted because as I think I told you guys in one of those previous episodes, I am involved in schoolwork right now. So I'm in school in California and what I'm doing is I'm taking classes just to be sure I graduate in four years and I'm also involved in the Solar Decathlon. So I'm a Mechanical Engineer. I'm going to be going into my fourth year and as part of that I'm really interested in pursuing stuff in renewable energy. It's just been a huge part of my life, something I really want to get involved in in my professional career. So I'm getting involved in the Solar Decathlon, that's going to be my senior project. So for those of you guys who don't quite know what it is, I'm pretty sure you probably won't, Solar Decathlon is essentially a contest to build a net zero home. So actually let's go ahead and watch some of the comment. I'm just going to bait his troops here. You can see I outnumber him but his quality is better so I'm just going to bait him. Anyways, back to the Solar Decathlon, yeah it's a contest to build a net zero home. It's basically fielded throughout the United States and there are international colleges and various groups that come in. It's hosted by the Department of Energy and it's called the Solar Decathlon because there's decathlon meaning sort of ten. There's ten of these various contests within the overall contest that you seek to win and it has all sorts of different aspects to it, partly for engineering, architecture, communication, all sorts of stuff. So it's a really cool contest and it's supposed to try and promote new and innovative techniques for making more efficient houses, more renewable technology, stuff like that. So I'm involved in our house and we're really moving along with the process. It's an awesome process, something I greatly enjoy and that I hope I can share with you guys. We've done a lot of work scheming and coming up with the various designs and ideas so maybe I'll be able to share that with you guys in the near future, however too much information does run the risk of me informing the other teams potentially of what we're doing. Now I know the end goal of this project is to benefit the greater society at large with what we develop but at the same time I don't want to risk showing off too much of what we're trying to pull off because it's still a competition at the end of the day and it's a competition that fuels this sort of innovation. Anyways, I was able to position my archers right back here and they're going to be on flaming arrow mode. I'm not sure quite what's going on, I remember during the battle I was shooting my flaming arrows at these elephants for a long, long time and it took them forever to stampede. But meanwhile my opponent was way too distracted trying to micro on this end so I successfully was able to force him into charging behind over here and trying to micro and chase my guys so I'm pulling back at any one point in time. Here I don't really have the numerical advantage except on this very left wing, my far extreme wing here, so I charge in with my Sarmatian Lancers. These guys are really cheap, they were going to absorb the charge of his units and come in with my Royal Cataphracts. So let's watch these guys on the charge, they're going to come in. So basically what you see me doing is kiting him with my archers then charging in with some really weak guys and then I'm going to come and try and just absolutely wreck his forces here, collapsing on all fronts, throwing in my Median Cav and that will all but annihilate his Mercenary Cav. It's going to however force my archers here to essentially die. They are getting some Parthian shots off at the horses that are chasing them but because he chased me into the corner I had nowhere to go and it's at this turn that he just absolutely massacres me. You can see his Companion Cav, just how strong they are on the charge especially against these light armored horse archers, he basically took out half of my unit in one charge. But the problem with him doing this is he's exposed this entire unit to get massacred so here I am cleaning them up, virtually no losses on my end. So I kind of exchange one archer unit for one Companion Cav unit. However back here he was able to chase off my own horse archers, I wasn't really watching and they chased too quickly. Companion Cav have good stats but I just wanted to chase away his elephants and I was firing at them with fire arrows the whole time and they just ended up not fleeing so that was too bad. I was hoping they would rampage in here and I have all my units ready to, I was going to pounce on that. In any case I'm moving with my Median Cav and my elephants over on this flank, I want to force him to react so that's what he's going to be doing, pulling his elephants here. Over on this front I'm going to be falling back, he can charge me if he wants, I'm willing to take this because I have the backing of some hoplites, you always want to have some sort of unit that you can fall back behind. Here we go, my Cataphracts are tired but they're falling back and I'm unleashing just this hail of arrows coming in here. Picking off some of his Companion Cav, they're going to think to do a charge but then reconsider. I'm not going to be able to do too much damage to these guys, they have a lot of health and armor so I only can really start to chip away at their HP. You can see after a couple of volleys they're still, you know I only killed one of their horses, two, there you go, so you can see because they're starting to get chipped off like that after consecutive volleys it probably means that they're very low on health. I'm going to try and continue to bait him with my Median Cav, however I have no intention of actually charging so I'm going to go ahead and pull back. He's going to take the bait and try and charge but then he's going to think better of it just because he's getting in range of my archers and I have another Camel Spearman. The reason for taking these Camel Spearmen is because of course they can, they have a decent stats and they're relatively cheap but also they have the fear-inspiring ability when assaulting enemy cavalry so they're very good at shattering morale. Anyways my elephants are placed back here so it's going to cause enough threat for him to withdraw into his center and then he's probably going to try and turn his Cretan Archers and Peltas around to try and deal with my elephants. Another cool thing that I wanted to mention to you guys which you're probably aware of is patch 14 has just gone into beta stage so that is super exciting. It's been a long, long time since patch 13, relatively speaking. They were super quiet about the patch and people were wondering what they were going to do. As far as, from what I've heard actually, it fixes a lot of things. It's a huge patch, it really improves the performance of the campaign AI, Rome is much more aggressive, they're longer lasting, a lot of the factions do better. I heard a guy reporting that he's 40 or 50 turns into the game, Carthage has expanded into the Iberian Peninsula, it's really shifting out there, Rome has created an empire, the upper roads are being much more aggressive, there's all sorts of good stuff going on. Then he was also mentioning that the siege AI has been really, really reworked and it's not functioning like a headless chicken anymore running around. It really is able to tackle the gates, the walls, do multiple assaults all at the same time so it seems to be performing much, much better. That's great news, a great relief to hear. So I think this will be a godsend for reviving a lot of people's hopes in CA and I'm glad that CA decided to dedicate the time to really fixing that. But yeah, it's a huge improvement and so now we just hopefully will be seeing some improvement to various other components in the game. Through beta testing they'll work out the kinks, but then also fixing some elements like politics and what not. As right here I'm going to be getting a multiple charge on those units. Over here I'm trying to pull his mercenary companion cav out of here, however I'm scared this number of peltests will decimate these hoplites so I'm pulling them back. Over on this front I basically countercharged both of those units and got a sandwich here with my camel spearman. The combination of that charge with the effects of just camels in the mix will quickly turn the tides of this battle so you can see them starting to drop slowly but surely. Over on this flank my royal cataphracts are pretty much a match for his companion cav especially since they've been whittled down. And here you can see he's starting to get some peltest shots against me, however he really did not have the support he needed so here we go, I'm going to come crashing in on his men. Something I also heard is with the new patch the elephants are going to get a new kill animation so basically what you'll see them do from time to time is pick up a unit with their trunk and just throw them away. So I haven't put the beta gist yet but that's something you'll be seeing once that comes into effect. That's super cool so I'm glad they're still tweaking those effects. I can't get enough of Rome 2's graphics, this is just so epic with the elephants, the cataphracts, the infantry, the arrows in the mix, it's all so beautiful and I can't wait until some modding team is able to work out a Lord of the Rings mod where you could really get these to be Oliphants. I think with the skins, the scale, the graphics that you could pull off it would be really really epic. But anyways I'm cleaning up these forces here, elephants are getting in on the mix doing a lot of damage and I decided to commit my hoplites to this fight. Over on this flank he basically burst up his formation, I charged into the back with my elephants, he kind of panicked and reformed and then some of his troops that charged out here I was able to pick them off so that's going to be his cavalry that charged out. But I basically crashed through his main flank, a quarter of his forces in the center split off to try and deal with this front, that's where I'm destroying them with my elephants. Another quarter went over here and then the rest were kind of pinned in the center by my elephants who charged through these hoplites. Elephants if you can keep them moving they'll just stampede through these men. I'm taking a lot of archer fire so you can see my guys starting to eat the dust but I think it was worth it, oh man, just to be able to crack his center and uh, wow, just to crack his center and keep his entire force from remaining in a singular line. But there you can see I essentially lost my entire elephant unit but it opened his guys up for the charge and allowed me to really clean up these flanking positions. Elephants on this flank are still doing well, I lost a decent amount of them but they're still alive and uh, yeah that was my opponent's elephants, there was actually an elephant on elephant battle there, that's why there were so many. But my elite Persian archers basically handpicked which elephants they wanted to destroy and uh, yeah they mostly were able to shoot the Carthaginian ones. Here we go, the elephants are going to be coming back into the mix, my cavalry are cleaning up my opponent's forces and over on this flank we're doing the same, mostly because I have some hoplites here in the mix to help me clean up his cav. And just because these cataphract units are just absolutely absurd, they're so cool, so powerful with their armor and all that, but that's going to allow me to wrap up that battle. So sorry you didn't get to see the main part of this, you know, my elephant charging in the flank, but I think you get the gist of the battle and it was mostly a chance for me to talk about what's going on and introduce, you know, patch 14 that we'll be seeing hopefully soon, maybe I'll be able to do some coverage of the new updates but otherwise check out the patch notes on TotalWarForums.com. Let's end this replay and go ahead and look at some of the stats, so you can see the cataphracts really raking in the kills, my horse archers got no damage, mostly because they're trying to deal with his companion cav, it was mostly fruitless but it did draw them out of their strong positions. Anyways that's going to be it for this video, I hope to upload more regularly and like I said that Punic Wars video is going to be chugging along, so see you next time.