How to preserve your elite troops in defensive combat?

When your units are stacked, either in a town or out of town. When they are attacked, the strongest unit relative to the attacker will be chosen to defend. This will often mean that a highly promoted unit will have to fight.

Doesn't this mean that your most experienced units sometimes will fight first and die, if the attacker is strong? When what you would wish is that your weaker units take the first blows and the experienced ones will live to fight another day. And let designated defenders with city defense do what they are supposed to do. And let units with city attack promotion attack cities. Even if they are a little bit stronger. Cost of unit production also matters.

How do you deal with this - if you want your elite units to survive?

Does this make any sense?

 

Either make sure they're injured or back them off the rest of the stack. Also promote another unit for defensive purposes so it will take the first hit.

 

You can’t. That’s why you want to meet your opponents in open terran & be the atracker. As rah said, keep only units in town you’re willing to lose.

 

1. Promote elite defenders, with Shock, Cover or Formation. It also helps to have dedicated counter units in your stack; you don’t need to worry about your CR3 Sword or Mace defending against Elephants or Horse Archers if you have C1 Spears in with the stack.

2. Never upgrade healers – you don’t want to turn that super healer Warrior into an Axe, because then he might defend, when you don’t want him to.

3. Finally, don’t put all your eggs in the elite attacker basket. CR3 units are fun, but you don’t need them if you have enough siege.

 

That is good advice. I think I will not have them in cities where they might be attacked.

this might have the side effect that attackers are not deterred from attacking the closest city because it has such great defenses (many troops).

And maybe have "doubles", that is units resembling the elites but with a promotion which means they will be chosen first.

Interesting... That is a great piece of advice. And I guess it sums it up!

@6K Man : Thanks for the advice, but a little to many spoilers for me to read (I am very cautious not to read spoilers!)

It will be exciting to try these things out!

 

If you are ever in the position you need to meet an enemy attacking stack, having a few shock-promoted Knights is a good idea: they flank enemy siege (their siege units get damaged or even killed, even if a spearman/pikeman is protecting that stack). Sadly, early mounted units like elephants don't have this trait.

 

Except on very small map or on super early rush (but then you're using any elite attacker you might have in attack, not in defense), you (should) have tens of unit waging a war, so there should be no issue implementing the advice above (like putting some counter unit in your stacks, with natural bonus or promotions like shock, cover, guerrilla, garrison...)


In addition to them, I would add that, as things scale up and as suicide units (mainly siege and sometimes flanking horse archers) appear, it's no longer as crucial to keep elite unit alive (except when aiming at heroic epic or such) - advice 3 of 6Kman. I would take the chance to keep more units alive if that means risking the life of an elite unit. Like attacking with 70% chance with an elite unit rather than softening first at 30% with an unlucky blue bee. The same still applies in defense (except for unit with promotion useless in defense, but you want to avoid putting them somewhere where they might be attacked).

IMO a lot of veteran (out of barrack/feudalism) is better than fewer elite. And if your army and war are big enough and initially well trained enough (barracks), you'll still have enough elite for your special needs.

 

You can try leaving "bait" out for the AI. Workers, and weakened but more expendable units work too. A lot of the time the random pot-shot attacks based on unit courage will go for the easier target than hitting your stack.

This won't prevent them from using a stack of their own on you though; they'll just split the necessary units off or use city garrisons to take the free kill, and still hit with their stack. The exception is if you take a city and leave a single unit inside -- if they take the city with their stack it should stay put for one turn then.

 

Calling on @elitetroops

 

Stalingrad strat. Park your killer units in a forest and/or hill next to a captured flatland city, with token (or no) defenders in it. AI army marches in, your CR units shoot the fish in the barrel

 

The single hurt defender seems to attract more fish than a totally empty city. Might just be my memory.