Dealing with Legionaries

MeteorPunch

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Is there a good strategy against Legionaries in the Ancient Age? The kill me, yet I can't kill them. My units were having very bad luck vs their 3 defense+terrain bonus.
 
Try using some catapults. Catapults will weaken them before you have to attack. If you can get them to attack some heavily fortified areas, that might work too. Legions are very hard to kill, so make sure you attack them when they're in the open, not on hills/mountains/forest/jungle/across a river.
 
Life was good...until the Romans invaded. My simple people didn't have but one catapult. Let it be a lesson.
 
For some reason, when I play as the Romans, the Legionaries are too easy to kill! :mischief:
 
Also, when starting near romans and persians, it's worth investing a couple of scouts / warriors to map his territory and find the iron.
Know where his iron is, then if Rome / persia invades you can chop off the iron resource, and at least prevent them from replenishing their forces.

Oh, also city walls are underrated in my opinion. A cheap way to give your spearmen 3 defence, enough to give them a fighting chance against a legion invasion (though not an immortal invasion).
 
1) Taking over their iron mine will only work in lower level game. When you play Demi- or Deity level, AI will out expand you and took all iron mines before you do (they know where all resources are without the need of civil advancement).
2) As for city wall, I rarely build them because if AI figure they have less chance of beating you, they will pillage your improvements instead. By turtling yourself, you will see find all improvement gone.

Here is what you can do -

1) Play Celt or Iroquois. Celt's Agr and Relig civ and you will get a faster start. As long as you can hold on to an iron mine and start pumping Gallic Swordsman, you can defeat Legionaries. When you look at 3-2-2 vs 3-3-1, since you have the speed advantage, you can always be the one attacking and hence getting a 50% of winning chance. Another thing about having a movement speed of 2 is that even if you lose the fight, there is a big chance that you unit will flee from the battle and you get to keep your unit. Just build plenty of barracks for faster heal and producing veterans.

Iroquois's UU is 3-1-2 and if you can make sure you are always the one init the attack, it is as good as Gallic Swordsman and cost only 30 shields to build instead of 40. Also, for Iroquois, you only need to get horse to build your UU instead of iron. Horse is easiler to get in the game.

2) If you don't play those 2, your best bet is make roman your friend in early game. Get ahead in tech and give them 2gpt for free in early game so they will not attack you. If you can get a good size in army with good cult pts, you can pay some money to allie or sign passage deal with them. After that, you should be safe.

3) If you can't be peace with them, you can only try a combination of horseman and swordsman to defend your towns. Use horseman's 2 movement advantage to attack first to hurt the Legionaries and then flee back. Then followed by swordsman to finish them off. If you can't get iron, then you have to relie on horsemen or just pay them for peace.
 
Fair comment about the difficulty level, what works for me at emperor isn't likely to cut the mustard at deity.

The improvements comment is valid also, although this is very much open to interpretation. As I see it, AI pillaging is a real hassle, but it does buy you time to get reinforcements in place. And it's often preferable to lose some worker turns than lose expensive units or the entire city.

And it all depends on where the attack is. If you are turtled into your capital, and he is pillaging your irrigation, then you have a game threatening problem. If it's on a border city, it's less serious.

Like you say, the best method of dealing with any Swordsman UU civ is peace. A smart player would join the romans in a battle with your closest neighbour, and have a few settlers on hand :)
 
Totally true. If you see Persion, Roman, Iroquois, or Celt as your neighbor. Pay them whatever to allie with you to fight another neighbor in ancient time and you gonna expand faster than you think.

There is this one game I played that I was trapped in middle of of an mid size island with Celt to my left and another civ to my right. I paid my part to keep peace with them. Soon they start fighting and I saw all the Gallic Swordsmen running across my turf and in no time, they destroyed the civ in my right side. It was done so fast that I sweared to myself to never piss off a high level Celt AI neighbor in ancient time.
 
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