I want to make it clear, all 5 of these people have commented about before telling me that they never knew them, that is also why they are on this list. Next Episode should be about Barbarian Invasion Total War, the Expansion for Rome. Also, sorry for my mistake at the start. You hold down ALT and click attack to change to a melee, not CTRL : )
Ace Rain, hey, I could not see you on the ban list. (Maybe you go by a different name?) Either way, if you were banned, I have to assume there was a valid reason why.
You can create lots of peasants units, move them out of your overpopulated major cities (every peasants unit decreases the city's population level slightly) and move them all the way up to the frontier. Disband inside a new settlement and you get instant colonist settlement growth.
The pikemen one is actually in the traits of the units. Pikemen have a trait called "very long spears" while hoplites do not. As a consequence however pikemen have low armour so can be considered inferior to something like armoured hoplites. Also one thing a surprising amount of people don't know is that if you have a unit of elephants, you can destroy wooden walls and so can attack a town immediately after besieging it which is pretty useful if there's a big army that could attack your army during the end turn.
5.retinue 4.elephants can be routed with fire arrows 3.alt atack mele unit(same units have secondary mele weapons)like cataphracts have AP mace 2.chariots are soo powerfull vs cavalary units 1.pressing hold button to quikly drop pikes for phalanx unit
@@firehawk8521 well pretty simple trick ,by pressing hold button usually is backspace by default , phalanx units drop theyer pikes instantaneously,it is also very helpful where phalanx unit start using their secondary weapon ,same thing again by pressing hold button force the unit use pikes instead of sword
here's a tip about replenishing your troops: say you have 3 of the same unit that need to be replenished, and they all have experience chevrons. if you retrain them, the soldiers that replenish the unit will have 0 experience (unless that city has a temple that gives experience for troops trained), which will lower the experience of that unit. instead, use the troops to replenish each other. some people may not know that in the campaign map, when you have the unit roster of an army pulled up, you can drag and drop unit cards onto other unit cards for the same kind of unit (2 hastati cards, for example) and the troops will be consolidated. if the total is more than 1 unit, you'll have a full unit and the remainder will be in a second unit. by replenishing experienced units this way with other experienced units, you will ensure that this experience is not diluted and effectively wasted by retraining these units at settlements. you can also 'steal' experience from units that are almost non-existent. say you have a full unit of 80 men with 2 chevrons, and you have another unit of 10 men with 5 chevrons (2 silver). if you use the 80 men to replenish the 10, it will reapportion all of the men, potentially increasing the experience of the 80 man unit. you can just keep doing it over and over back and forth until the 10 man unit has as few chevrons as you can get it to - this means that as many of the most experienced men are in the 80 man unit. one last thing: say you have a frontier town that you need to retrain the troops but that settlement can't make decent troops yet so you have to take the whole army back to another city. instead of sending a bunch of half full units, use them to replenish each other ensuring that each unit keeps at least 1 man (this way the unit can be retrained). this way you can keep some fully stocked units while getting the rest retrained.
One thing I never saw in anyone else's video that I'm glad I discovered. If you let a unit sit still for a while on the battlefield, they'll recover their fatigue, all the way to fresh if you wait long enough. Great for that final charge. Writing this part way through your video so let's see if it's one of your tips. Cheers!
The way I found out about the spacebar thing was in M2TW when I was still new and I had the advisor on and he said “hold down the spacebar to see where your troops will be”
My top 5 things: 1. Disbanding troops replenished population in region. 2. You can view the city battlemap in the campaign. 3. You can move retinue. 4. Rebel stacks cause unrest. 5. Gladiator Uprisings spawn giant elephant units!
Pro Tip. Send the governor alone to smash rebel stacks. Use your human brain which you probably have along with rally and charging from the left to take them out. Tire them out by making them chase a bit first if needed. The game will often give you a heroic victory despite the laguably easy fight. If you don't really troll your general will almost never die and casualties are not important on governors bodyguards away from the frontiers (you even save on their upkeep). No rebels and free very good traits like bravery and tells a tale for your governors to run your stuff better. Also useful for getting young future conquerors an early start while sending them to your cities with academies.
Protip that took me years to discover: retinue that lower unit training costs also lower unit training time. I don't know how many you need to stack on a governor, but I would assume you need a 100% or greater reduction in cost on a single governor while he recruits in a settlement. This allows you to train units that ordinarily take two turns to train like Spartan hoplites, elephants, and urban cohort, in one turn. I've only ever pulled this off with the Sassanids in BI though.
@@MelkorGG it is true. For example you can tell your cataphracts to fight with maces instead of spears. Makes them stronger in melee. This trick has won me many multiplayer battles LOL
@@Thematic2177 thats a very good example, those cataphracts not only hit like a brick when they slam into an enemy unit but their alt attack with maces is devastating and if i remember correctly also counts as armor piercing damage, another example is the carthaginian long shield cavalry (my favourite light cavalry) which can also switch to alt attack in melee (they switch to swords) for +1 increase in damage
Here is a useful one for "retraining" mercenary units. If a mercenary unit has sustained casualties, then take another unit of the same type and drag the unit icon over the damaged unit. Works great for Cretean Archers and Scythian Horse Archers. Hope that helped!
Regarding retraining/replenishing units. You can get a lot more done in less time if you merge units. Instead of five units with 10% casualties each, you can merge them and retrain one unit with 50% casualties.
I’ve always found that the best counter to chariots was actually charging them with Calvary before they get a chance to charge themselves. At least from my experience, be aggressive with Chariots people, they have 2-3 defense, so if you send your Calvary at them before they can get ready for a charge you’ll absolutely decimate them, but make sure you send more than 1 unit. Oh, and hit them in the flanks when you do it, breaks them that much faster.
It took me years to figure out you can merge 2 or more units into 1 to have one bigger unit then 2 almost gone units.. :D Its btw number 6 on this list
Interesting that you got an audience that wants to learn the basics guess I'll add something to every list so this isn't just completely dumb xd 5)Holding alt while dragging with right click adjusts the rotation of units. This is super helpful when disengaging with cav because otherwise you're kinda forcing the cav to escape backwards (idk how to explain that lol it's just cleaner) 4)You can assign faction heir from family tree I guess 3)Guard mode vs no guard mode. Think pmuch everyone knows how the more armoured hoplites are supposed to turn off guard mode to push through, but something that I keep forgetting is that units in guard mode kinda don't behave as defensively when given an attack order, also if you keep the units stationary under guard mode like testudo or phalanx they won't tire despite being in combat. 2)idk what to add for retraining troops, I guess that xp upgrades carry over to the retrained unit so you can have a super experienced unit that's now full strength 1) Now I really don't know what to add. like just press spacebar and just look at the battlefield ? XD
Another one I found out recently is that if you have a bunch of the same unit say Hastati and a bunch of them are less than full strength you can click and drag another hastati unit over them and drop it and it will take guys from that unit to replace the ranks in the depleted units... works good for keeping veteran units at full strength so not to get wiped... what I do is dump a fresh lvl 1 unit into the veterans works good too if you need to clear up space in an army stack to merge armies.... btw I just learned the Retinue thing from you that's a total game changer on the very hard difficulty, i knew i was missing something...
One thing that took me a while (about 7 years) to notice was that you can merge two units of same type if they are not at full strength. Very useful for speeding up retraining since fewer units will need to be retrained. Can be also used to refill units with fresh recruits in the field as alternative to retraining.Things to keep in mind: 1.Experience is averaged between original and added soldiers, unlike retraining which retains experience level. So it is best to merge units with similar level or using lower experience units to replace only small casualties. 2.Automerge (default M), performs all possible merges in selected army/fleet. For example if you have 4 units with 30 men and maximum size of that unit is 100, automerge will create one unit with 100 men and one with 20 men, in a way destroying 2 units. It also doesn't optimize merging units with keeping experience in mind, so merging manually is almost always prefered. I curious why are you playing on large unit size instead of huge? Is it toaster?
Besides pathfinding another reason can be is that the AI never upgrades small settlements with huge scale because they keep training shitty tier 1 troops in them and that drains so much of the population on huge scale that they never upgrade those settlements. This is still a thing on large unit scale with some settlements like Ancyra, but so widespread on huge unit scale that most of the barbarians never develop cities of their own. Of course this is only applicable to campaign
You can also merge units by dragging the unit cards ontop of eachother. This is pretty useful. You can create fully filled units and send the empty husk units back to your largest city to get refilled. Its pretty much necessary for max unit size campaigns and mods like EB.
What about merging units that aren't at full strength? Instead of sending 6 units back to retrain, you just merge them by dragging one unit card over another and releasing it. Now you have 4 or 5 full strength units and can send 1 or 2 back to the city to retrain. It does affect their experience level though (as you are breaking up an experienced unit over less experienced ones)
You can also combine units of the same type (haststi = hastati for example) into one unit if both are missing men or took casualties. This is good for consolidating units that are low on manpower and u need to quickly reorganize your army on the fly.
Avoid doing that except if you need to before a battle or to be able to combine armies in a single stack, retraining is much better exp-wise as it retains exp instead of avrging it.
It's actually difficult to find out you can retrain your troops in Shogun and Medieval I. You don't get a prompt for it. What you have to do is drag the card into the recruitment queue in a province that can train that unit. The unit also disappears from the map while retraining, and if the province is overrun while the unit is retraining... The manual explains this, but there's no indication of it in-game.
wow I didn't know some of these myself. Like the retinue one. A couple things I just finally learned recently are being able to position your troops a certain way by clicking a unit and then holding right mouse button to scale out how you want your unit to appear when they stop moving. I was surprised when I saw that in another video. The second thing is when a town gets too large and morale drops too low even when the tax rate is the lowest it can go then I can just destroy the barbarian shrines and build roman shrines and then upgrade to larger temples and to a pantheon. Then morale went very high. It's because one of the things that causes unrest is culture penalty. The roman citizens in the new city don't like worshipping foreign gods.
I figured out about replenishing units despite my lack of knowledge in English because it was very intuitive in another game. Just click on a damaged unit and press + ( the game is Knights of Honor)
One mechanic I did not know about was the cultural penality from captured buildings, I have not played since I found out from watching legend of totalwar remove those penalities, but I imagine it would make lategame so much easier as I usually got for conquering the entire map, and end up with most armies just recapturing and massacring my own settlements from the rebels near the end of the game due to public order issues.
another advice. if u charge spear cav at a too short range, they wont aim their spears and only crash into the enemy, taking significant losses. if u want them to use their spears, they need more distance to do that. HOWEVER, if u want to charge up close WITH the spears, u can do that, but they need to be correctly aimed at the target first. then they will use their spears and do the correct charge animation. can be really useful.
Another thing you can do is use your existing units to replenish other existing units if you can't retrain them. If you for example have archers in a city where you can't train archers yet, you can't retrain/replenish them via the city's overview. What you can do though, is drag one archer unit to the other and it will use the one unit's soldiers to replenish the other. For example, if you have 60/81 archers in one unit, and 40/81 in the other, it will move 21 of the latter unit to the first one, and leave you with one 81/81 unit, and one 19/81 on the other. If they the two units combined are less than 81, the units will combine. This is something I found out this week after playing for years
took me weeks of playing before i realized you could merge units. like if you have two busted up Principes, click and drag it onto another principes unit and they're merge into a single full-strength unit. you can then send the remnant unit back to settlement for retraining, or if it's not worth the effort, just disband it. And even weeks after learning that, i found out that ctrl+M on the campaign map will auto merge all units for an army. You can also mass disband units by multi-selecting them and ctrl+D. that's a time saver for real.
best trick in the game is being scipio. you can steal apollonia in 3 moves from brutus using the brutus army and only 1 unit of your own. when brutus lands on appollonia they do not attack that turn so you need to ship a unit straight away to get there from scilly, ideally with a few units so when you use brutus army in battle to win the city they will head for corinth of which you quickly jump on boat with a general and 2 or 3 units wait until brutus general gets to corinth to attack you do exactly the same thing, you land at the city of corinth and attack using brutus clan to win the city. this usually messes brutus up and youve gained 2 territories in very few moves. during this you sent 2 units of scipio to sardinia before juli clan gets there and youve created enough hastati to attack syracuse before 10 moves. or you can sit and rule scilly being the smallest but richest clan if you have syracuse as neptune god worshipping city, vulcan where the volcanos are and saturn in most the others that arent related to improving troops. Its probably a good idea to send an army to egypt to destroy alexandria memphis and thebes early so they do not destroy everybody else in the east to quickly or wipe them out so another army can rise and give the game a different perspective. even so try save 7 or 8 empires and then when you rule most the world destroy all the cities apart from unique buildings the cultures have and let it all rebel, shrink all the armies back to scilly and see who rises. destroy brutus and uli during the game and see culture arises from the rebellion world you created when you dessert them. Always deny other romans marrying the women, only use scipio name generals if you can, do not accept marriage proposals unless your generals are all impotent. i do sometimes like to steal greek macedonian and thracian generals because of the names.. spartacus and the sparta clan then hopefully they breed to create a new roman bloodline.
Forts are no needed because your troops will just as happily keep standing in the open, for many turns. No ill effect on troop morale and there's no attrition in RTW.
I think the only time I ever used a fort was: 1. Roleplaying as a Roman faction (gotta build a fort at the end of the march) 2. When I was using pike heavy faction and my army was surrounded by enemy armies. I could raise a fort before getting attacked, then use the phalanxes to plug breach points and slaughter everything. Even worked well against other phalanxes as marching through those points would disrupt their formation. 3. Blocking off a mountain pass or something.
Did you also know thaf when you have selected a settlement (any), and you hit the H-button on the keypad, it selects and locates your capital. Just found that out today by accident, lol
oh and another trick is to use in game save before you next turn so you can keep your generals alive upto over a 100 years old because very few make it and it will go to 0 at a certain age but i forgot but its above 125 years old. thats if you choose to keep your best generals because if you go back to last save the general will probably live the next turn and probably wont die so you dont lose progress nor will you have to do anything else to next turn again.
How do you move your army up and keep them in the same formation? Every time i want them to advance they always break formation and mix together at the point i clicked if that makes sense?
What bothered me those most was Accuracy. During Carrhae it took 1,256,000 arrows roughly to defeat 44,000 Roman’s. So why do Egyptians cause damage when their bows never exceeded 60lbs? Most being 40-50lb draw weight
I´ve learned about the Retinue thing by playing Divide and Conquer (as Isengard) because when you take the settlement where the ring is your General get´s the ring as a retinue. Medieval 2 only allows 8 Retinues for a General and i needed Saruman to get the ring but he already had 8 so i searched forums for a command to remove Retinues. Then i read you could simply swap them :D Learned the other things through Legend´s Videos :D
While I figured out how to retrain units, I never knew, you can drag and drop to merge two small units into one large, and that gave me so much pain in Imperial Glory, where you can't retrain units, until you advance one certain technology.
@@nomad2915 But it works only after army hospitals are researched, before it the only way to replenish losses is to merge two units together, which is pain because they lose experience that way.
I can't believe u didn't mention that u can make ur units twice as large, from 80 to 160 At the main menu u can can go into the options, video or gaming options, advanced options and the settings are there to change the unit size from large to huge. Makes the battles way better Also U can replenish ur troops in the field by mixing them urself For instance You have 4 units of Hastai 3 of them are down to 140, one is still 160 Well U can drag the 160 over to each of the 140s in turn and u have 3 160s, one 100, bring that unit back to base But Make sure the one that's doing the replenishing has more experience otherwise the other unit will lose any it has. And an added bonus is that this experience can be passed on to the unit u are replenishing. U should do that all the time, it gets experience up far quicker.
I learnt about the alt button and that you could move retinue from Many A True Nerd lmao, I had played the game for so many years before he taught me that
= 2:34 no fucking way :D good to know, when senat want sucide lider with many retinue, or is old :) = tip: read key option, before start any game ! RTW have many key bind = btw. about retrain, you can connect branch in army on world map. and after connect you can send one branch (without couple of it) to city to re-trine. but when connect always remember to left minimum one solder because we can retrain it, if no one left in branch after connect you lost it (retrine dont take turn, so...)
"Suddenly generals are useful" Me who conquered the entire world using only british chariots at small scale: *_AM I A JOKE TO U_* Also,my brother plays with the seleucids,and while I must admit their troops in general are awesome,their generals are...Pretty much the worst in the game to say the least lol(he plays on large scale tho).Like,he played a defensive battle in his campaign,where the enemy(parthia),came all the way to his town/city plaza(he had a stone wall),and all the enemy had left from the battle was a bit of eastern infantry,archers,and their general(u know,the one that can throw javelins?yeah.that one lol).I could've easily won that with my general,even on large scale,but oh well. Ps:He lost both his general and the town lol
Just gone back to playing RTW on mobile cause after a rough time I don't have a PC anymore. Been a nightmare figuring out how to do all this shit on a mobile port. Being able to keep playing has kept me sane though
About the ALT thing... Aren't developers just tell you this in the Tutorial? Every time I start a new TW game, I'm always walking through the Tutorial, just in case, I forgot something.
Omg dude. How did you not know about retraining depleted units? It literally only gives you the option of doing it to begin with if there's something that can make them better! How did you not even accidentally find out by getting armoured upgrades?? Sorry man, but that one is mind boggling haha
Dont u know about XP sharing/boosting? If u got multiple stacks of the same unit with different xp After a Battle u can use to one with more xp to fill up the others and after retraining u mostly end up with more xp overall
How and can I find the original version of Rome 1? There is only remastered version available/buyable on Steam. Do you think remastered version worth it?
Did you really not know about the alt button? The thought of you getting frustrated about missile cav not running down routing units without using up all their ammo is pretty damn funny actually. Sorry.
Yeah, there is the thing. I always play with infantry and normal cav, and avoid missile troops as much as possible (just because I find them less entertaining at times). Meaning I had no reason to know about that.
MELKOR believe me you don't know what you're missing when not using ranged units. Play as Scythia or Parthia and get whole stacks of Scythian Nobel horse archers or Persian cavalry and watch entire armies melt as you loose no men. Scythia have a worse economy but since they can only go up to minor city you can exterminate basically all towns you come across making loads of money and adding to the barbarian hoard feel of the faction.
I play the game for 10 years and I always knew about the retrain thing since the start how come you don’t realize it? the only thing I didnt know was about the retinue thing but anyways good video
Do you know how to rotate the camera vertically? Sometimes you can't see things on a hill even after you zoom out all the way. It's really weird cause it's RF on my laptop but on my desktop it doesn't work and it's got the same keybinds 🤣
@@MelkorGG FPS style set up for camera, rotate camera up/down, keys R/F Like I said, for some reason on the install on my laptop it works, but I can't for the life of me get it to work on my desktop. No clue why. It only goes up and down like if you scroll the mouse wheel
@@MelkorGG also, alt+s turns off sound effects. It's so annoying. Thankfully on Rome 1 you can change the keybinds, but not on medieval. Really sucks if you're playing factions with range cavalry
Legionary You can try moving your units in the direction of the enemy and have them collide. This can be applied for all units like hastati and Calvary. Idk if they gain a charge bonus though.
Legionary I finally remember what I read in the tutorial 😂😂 you hold down on your unit and draw a line to the enemy you want to attack and it will give you the option lol.
When i discovered the moving retinue traits, i ts best to give the old guy's traits to the really young guys since the generals die with the retinues they have
XD First of all, I was a dumb kid who struggled to read back then. Also, I remember trying it once with a half stack, and retrained it to full. I thought I understood it. Retrained another, but nothing happened (I got an armour upgrade, or something, instead - but did not understand retraining also did armour upgrades). So, naturally, I just assumed it to be broken and ignored the mechanic for years.
the hell about those retinue i didnt know that hahaha thanks alot And about that you didnt know you can retraine? How? Its on the settlement card How could you not know that No offense just really curious on how you did play Total war, last thing maybe you just play and play and play never watch youtube video about Total war when you screwd up, me before i just play after i accidentally deleted my Med2 i start watching on youtube then got some info. Thats all thanks tho.
Yeah, I played for about 5 years until I discovered YT. I thought retraining did replenish at some point, tried it, and it did not work. So I assumed it does not exist and never tested the mechanic again. 5 Years or so later, I learnt that you need to be able to train the unit in the settlement to replenish it, and that's what I did wrong all those years ago. : )
@@MelkorGG i find somehow funny this set of videos this you learn haha but after watching almost all of them i think your just me , playing adn enjoying the game in casual no tricks no cheats just want to fight historical battle be like those Famous general in history , keep it up man you deserve to enjoy those enjoyable games
I want to make it clear, all 5 of these people have commented about before telling me that they never knew them, that is also why they are on this list.
Next Episode should be about Barbarian Invasion Total War, the Expansion for Rome.
Also, sorry for my mistake at the start. You hold down ALT and click attack to change to a melee, not CTRL : )
Please do about BI. I'm your fan from Russia. I beg you ! 🤯
Snufcha, yep Barbarian Invasion will certainly come. The will probably be about 10 things on that list : )
Ace Rain, hey, I could not see you on the ban list. (Maybe you go by a different name?)
Either way, if you were banned, I have to assume there was a valid reason why.
Ok, Ace Rainn, I unbanned as I cannot remember what you did
And.... banned again. I remember why now as well. Well, lesson learnt there XD
"Pikes are longer"
Phillip II, battle of Chaeronea 338 b.c.
Jared Mueller XD
You can create lots of peasants units, move them out of your overpopulated major cities (every peasants unit decreases the city's population level slightly) and move them all the way up to the frontier. Disband inside a new settlement and you get instant colonist settlement growth.
That is interesting, thanks
Mercenary troops work too and you don't have to walk them all the way to the front
No me la sabía, gracias!
Or enslaving the overpopulated city, coz its easier(for me).
@@peterongan9655 Uh, if you own Rome, how do you enslave it?
Making it rebel then recapture it? That's a lot of lost money.
15 years of playing RTW and I only just now learned about the retinue thing lmao
Same here - I feel so embarrassed for not finding our sooner.
That truth I just knew just stole 15 years of my life.
I swear . I was always bummed when flavius Julius dies not knowing I could have trasfered his retinue to another general near by smh
Me too
True say
The pikemen one is actually in the traits of the units. Pikemen have a trait called "very long spears" while hoplites do not. As a consequence however pikemen have low armour so can be considered inferior to something like armoured hoplites.
Also one thing a surprising amount of people don't know is that if you have a unit of elephants, you can destroy wooden walls and so can attack a town immediately after besieging it which is pretty useful if there's a big army that could attack your army during the end turn.
Yup.and if you attack metal gates with elephants,they bump into the gate a few times and then die of a concussion...
@@elxanhaciyev8922 'Who got boiling oil all over my favourite elephant?'
its funny pikemen were invented to counter hoplites, but they get fucked by hoplites in this game
@@Heathcz I love the use of the word invented here lol
@@joegerkrep7727 Elephant trick is good one much better then press space or press alt :D
5.retinue
4.elephants can be routed with fire arrows
3.alt atack mele unit(same units have secondary mele weapons)like cataphracts have AP mace
2.chariots are soo powerfull vs cavalary units
1.pressing hold button to quikly drop pikes for phalanx unit
I wish I knew about the chariots vs cavalry thing before I repeatedly charged in all my cavalry hoping to defeat the Egyptian chariots.
@@---uf2zl well it's a good way to kill their general
What do you mean by #1
@@firehawk8521 well pretty simple trick ,by pressing hold button usually is backspace by default , phalanx units drop theyer pikes instantaneously,it is also very helpful where phalanx unit start using their secondary weapon ,same thing again by pressing hold button force the unit use pikes instead of sword
@@cangooz2240 what's the benefits besides going faster
here's a tip about replenishing your troops: say you have 3 of the same unit that need to be replenished, and they all have experience chevrons. if you retrain them, the soldiers that replenish the unit will have 0 experience (unless that city has a temple that gives experience for troops trained), which will lower the experience of that unit. instead, use the troops to replenish each other. some people may not know that in the campaign map, when you have the unit roster of an army pulled up, you can drag and drop unit cards onto other unit cards for the same kind of unit (2 hastati cards, for example) and the troops will be consolidated. if the total is more than 1 unit, you'll have a full unit and the remainder will be in a second unit. by replenishing experienced units this way with other experienced units, you will ensure that this experience is not diluted and effectively wasted by retraining these units at settlements. you can also 'steal' experience from units that are almost non-existent. say you have a full unit of 80 men with 2 chevrons, and you have another unit of 10 men with 5 chevrons (2 silver). if you use the 80 men to replenish the 10, it will reapportion all of the men, potentially increasing the experience of the 80 man unit. you can just keep doing it over and over back and forth until the 10 man unit has as few chevrons as you can get it to - this means that as many of the most experienced men are in the 80 man unit. one last thing: say you have a frontier town that you need to retrain the troops but that settlement can't make decent troops yet so you have to take the whole army back to another city. instead of sending a bunch of half full units, use them to replenish each other ensuring that each unit keeps at least 1 man (this way the unit can be retrained). this way you can keep some fully stocked units while getting the rest retrained.
One thing I never saw in anyone else's video that I'm glad I discovered. If you let a unit sit still for a while on the battlefield, they'll recover their fatigue, all the way to fresh if you wait long enough. Great for that final charge. Writing this part way through your video so let's see if it's one of your tips. Cheers!
The way I found out about the spacebar thing was in M2TW when I was still new and I had the advisor on and he said “hold down the spacebar to see where your troops will be”
I had to put a part of my brain back in my head after hearing about the retinue.) I thought i knew every trick in book. Thanks!
My top 5 things:
1. Disbanding troops replenished population in region.
2. You can view the city battlemap in the campaign.
3. You can move retinue.
4. Rebel stacks cause unrest.
5. Gladiator Uprisings spawn giant elephant units!
Number 4, Brigands ?
Pro Tip.
Send the governor alone to smash rebel stacks.
Use your human brain which you probably have along with rally and charging from the left to take them out. Tire them out by making them chase a bit first if needed.
The game will often give you a heroic victory despite the laguably easy fight.
If you don't really troll your general will almost never die and casualties are not important on governors bodyguards away from the frontiers (you even save on their upkeep).
No rebels and free very good traits like bravery and tells a tale for your governors to run your stuff better.
Also useful for getting young future conquerors an early start while sending them to your cities with academies.
Protip that took me years to discover: retinue that lower unit training costs also lower unit training time. I don't know how many you need to stack on a governor, but I would assume you need a 100% or greater reduction in cost on a single governor while he recruits in a settlement. This allows you to train units that ordinarily take two turns to train like Spartan hoplites, elephants, and urban cohort, in one turn. I've only ever pulled this off with the Sassanids in BI though.
Also with pikes if your men switch to their swords hit backspace they will reset and point more pikes forward. Makes a difference trust
If i am not mistaken alt also changes the weapons melee troops attack with. Example spears will attack with their sword if unit has one
Yes, that is for some units and certainly in Med 2, did not know about Rome though, will double check.
@@MelkorGG it is true. For example you can tell your cataphracts to fight with maces instead of spears. Makes them stronger in melee. This trick has won me many multiplayer battles LOL
This one I did not know. Gonna be helpful.
Nice, thanks. Interesting to know it works in Rome. I was going to bring that one up in the Med 2 episode, as that is where I discovered it.
@@Thematic2177 thats a very good example, those cataphracts not only hit like a brick when they slam into an enemy unit but their alt attack with maces is devastating and if i remember correctly also counts as armor piercing damage, another example is the carthaginian long shield cavalry (my favourite light cavalry) which can also switch to alt attack in melee (they switch to swords) for +1 increase in damage
You forgot to mention that there are unique retinues, they have personal names instead of general ones.
Here is a useful one for "retraining" mercenary units. If a mercenary unit has sustained casualties, then take another unit of the same type and drag the unit icon over the damaged unit. Works great for Cretean Archers and Scythian Horse Archers. Hope that helped!
Regarding retraining/replenishing units. You can get a lot more done in less time if you merge units. Instead of five units with 10% casualties each, you can merge them and retrain one unit with 50% casualties.
How to merge..
@@nothing00164 Just drag and drop one unit card onto another.
Wait wait wait... You actually can order the legion's charge without throw their jabaleins? I need do it right now. Thanks!
I’ve always found that the best counter to chariots was actually charging them with Calvary before they get a chance to charge themselves.
At least from my experience, be aggressive with Chariots people, they have 2-3 defense, so if you send your Calvary at them before they can get ready for a charge you’ll absolutely decimate them, but make sure you send more than 1 unit.
Oh, and hit them in the flanks when you do it, breaks them that much faster.
It took me years to figure out you can merge 2 or more units into 1 to have one bigger unit then 2 almost gone units.. :D Its btw number 6 on this list
How?
Took me 10
Very interesting. These are things that will make your RTW battles a thousand times better
Interesting that you got an audience that wants to learn the basics
guess I'll add something to every list so this isn't just completely dumb xd
5)Holding alt while dragging with right click adjusts the rotation of units. This is super helpful when disengaging with cav because otherwise you're kinda forcing the cav to escape backwards (idk how to explain that lol it's just cleaner)
4)You can assign faction heir from family tree I guess
3)Guard mode vs no guard mode. Think pmuch everyone knows how the more armoured hoplites are supposed to turn off guard mode to push through, but something that I keep forgetting is that units in guard mode kinda don't behave as defensively when given an attack order, also if you keep the units stationary under guard mode like testudo or phalanx they won't tire despite being in combat.
2)idk what to add for retraining troops, I guess that xp upgrades carry over to the retrained unit so you can have a super experienced unit that's now full strength
1) Now I really don't know what to add. like just press spacebar and just look at the battlefield ? XD
I cannot explain how important the "Hold" to lower pikes/spears function is.
SPAM that fricken button!! Victory is assured.
This was so needed. I’ve played for over four years and three of the five I had no idea 💡
Another one I found out recently is that if you have a bunch of the same unit say Hastati and a bunch of them are less than full strength you can click and drag another hastati unit over them and drop it and it will take guys from that unit to replace the ranks in the depleted units... works good for keeping veteran units at full strength so not to get wiped... what I do is dump a fresh lvl 1 unit into the veterans works good too if you need to clear up space in an army stack to merge armies.... btw I just learned the Retinue thing from you that's a total game changer on the very hard difficulty, i knew i was missing something...
One thing that took me a while (about 7 years) to notice was that you can merge two units of same type if they are not at full strength. Very useful for speeding up retraining since fewer units will need to be retrained. Can be also used to refill units with fresh recruits in the field as alternative to retraining.Things to keep in mind:
1.Experience is averaged between original and added soldiers, unlike retraining which retains experience level. So it is best to merge units with similar level or using lower experience units to replace only small casualties.
2.Automerge (default M), performs all possible merges in selected army/fleet. For example if you have 4 units with 30 men and maximum size of that unit is 100, automerge will create one unit with 100 men and one with 20 men, in a way destroying 2 units. It also doesn't optimize merging units with keeping experience in mind, so merging manually is almost always prefered.
I curious why are you playing on large unit size instead of huge? Is it toaster?
This helps in getting lower level units higher experience if you merge some fully retrained high xp units onto a depleted lower xp unit, so good
Huge unit size is not only worse on performance on an old dated game like RTW, but the pathfinding improves as units become smaller
Besides pathfinding another reason can be is that the AI never upgrades small settlements with huge scale because they keep training shitty tier 1 troops in them and that drains so much of the population on huge scale that they never upgrade those settlements. This is still a thing on large unit scale with some settlements like Ancyra, but so widespread on huge unit scale that most of the barbarians never develop cities of their own. Of course this is only applicable to campaign
Huge size is horrid in performance, even in a good machine, the game is built using 1 processor in mind
Omg that retinue change, mind is fkn blown bro
Also, the retraining takes 0 turns, so if they're queued first, you can queue new units after
It doesn't matter, in which order you place them. They'll get retrained the next turn anyway
You can also merge units by dragging the unit cards ontop of eachother. This is pretty useful. You can create fully filled units and send the empty husk units back to your largest city to get refilled. Its pretty much necessary for max unit size campaigns and mods like EB.
It also increases their experience if you do it right.
I learned that looking in a video that i dont remember, very usefull in mods like spqr
@@---uf2zl think it only works as an average
What about merging units that aren't at full strength? Instead of sending 6 units back to retrain, you just merge them by dragging one unit card over another and releasing it. Now you have 4 or 5 full strength units and can send 1 or 2 back to the city to retrain. It does affect their experience level though (as you are breaking up an experienced unit over less experienced ones)
You can also combine units of the same type (haststi = hastati for example) into one unit if both are missing men or took casualties. This is good for consolidating units that are low on manpower and u need to quickly reorganize your army on the fly.
Avoid doing that except if you need to before a battle or to be able to combine armies in a single stack, retraining is much better exp-wise as it retains exp instead of avrging it.
It's actually difficult to find out you can retrain your troops in Shogun and Medieval I. You don't get a prompt for it. What you have to do is drag the card into the recruitment queue in a province that can train that unit. The unit also disappears from the map while retraining, and if the province is overrun while the unit is retraining...
The manual explains this, but there's no indication of it in-game.
wow I didn't know some of these myself. Like the retinue one. A couple things I just finally learned recently are being able to position your troops a certain way by clicking a unit and then holding right mouse button to scale out how you want your unit to appear when they stop moving. I was surprised when I saw that in another video.
The second thing is when a town gets too large and morale drops too low even when the tax rate is the lowest it can go then I can just destroy the barbarian shrines and build roman shrines and then upgrade to larger temples and to a pantheon. Then morale went very high. It's because one of the things that causes unrest is culture penalty. The roman citizens in the new city don't like worshipping foreign gods.
3:43
this also works if you know history
no hate by the way :)
Amazed with the retinue. Had no idea very cool wonder of it works on medieval 2
No it doesn't you can move objects not people
I figured out about replenishing units despite my lack of knowledge in English because it was very intuitive in another game. Just click on a damaged unit and press + ( the game is Knights of Honor)
One mechanic I did not know about was the cultural penality from captured buildings, I have not played since I found out from watching legend of totalwar remove those penalities, but I imagine it would make lategame so much easier as I usually got for conquering the entire map, and end up with most armies just recapturing and massacring my own settlements from the rebels near the end of the game due to public order issues.
How do you fix cultural penality?
raze temples and other cultural buildings not belonging to your faction and build your own.
madchessLeviathan The buildings in the conquered cities when I click at the description say that they are one of the conquered factions
another advice. if u charge spear cav at a too short range, they wont aim their spears and only crash into the enemy, taking significant losses.
if u want them to use their spears, they need more distance to do that.
HOWEVER, if u want to charge up close WITH the spears, u can do that, but they need to be correctly aimed at the target first. then they will use their spears and do the correct charge animation. can be really useful.
There are also some units that have a secondary weapon like the Cataphracts has a mace and I believe it has the armour piercing ability.
Another thing you can do is use your existing units to replenish other existing units if you can't retrain them. If you for example have archers in a city where you can't train archers yet, you can't retrain/replenish them via the city's overview. What you can do though, is drag one archer unit to the other and it will use the one unit's soldiers to replenish the other. For example, if you have 60/81 archers in one unit, and 40/81 in the other, it will move 21 of the latter unit to the first one, and leave you with one 81/81 unit, and one 19/81 on the other. If they the two units combined are less than 81, the units will combine. This is something I found out this week after playing for years
i first played rtw when i was 6 years old, i found out about alt + attack after about 12 years LOL
took me weeks of playing before i realized you could merge units. like if you have two busted up Principes, click and drag it onto another principes unit and they're merge into a single full-strength unit. you can then send the remnant unit back to settlement for retraining, or if it's not worth the effort, just disband it. And even weeks after learning that, i found out that ctrl+M on the campaign map will auto merge all units for an army.
You can also mass disband units by multi-selecting them and ctrl+D. that's a time saver for real.
I know all of these, but I've been playing rome since I was like 6 and I learned the alt key thing like last week lmao
best trick in the game is being scipio. you can steal apollonia in 3 moves from brutus using the brutus army and only 1 unit of your own. when brutus lands on appollonia they do not attack that turn so you need to ship a unit straight away to get there from scilly, ideally with a few units so when you use brutus army in battle to win the city they will head for corinth of which you quickly jump on boat with a general and 2 or 3 units wait until brutus general gets to corinth to attack you do exactly the same thing, you land at the city of corinth and attack using brutus clan to win the city. this usually messes brutus up and youve gained 2 territories in very few moves. during this you sent 2 units of scipio to sardinia before juli clan gets there and youve created enough hastati to attack syracuse before 10 moves. or you can sit and rule scilly being the smallest but richest clan if you have syracuse as neptune god worshipping city, vulcan where the volcanos are and saturn in most the others that arent related to improving troops. Its probably a good idea to send an army to egypt to destroy alexandria memphis and thebes early so they do not destroy everybody else in the east to quickly or wipe them out so another army can rise and give the game a different perspective. even so try save 7 or 8 empires and then when you rule most the world destroy all the cities apart from unique buildings the cultures have and let it all rebel, shrink all the armies back to scilly and see who rises. destroy brutus and uli during the game and see culture arises from the rebellion world you created when you dessert them. Always deny other romans marrying the women, only use scipio name generals if you can, do not accept marriage proposals unless your generals are all impotent. i do sometimes like to steal greek macedonian and thracian generals because of the names.. spartacus and the sparta clan then hopefully they breed to create a new roman bloodline.
Wow, I did not know the spacebar to see previous orders thing. That is super useful!
The retinue thing is pretty great too.
Forts are no needed because your troops will just as happily keep standing in the open, for many turns. No ill effect on troop morale and there's no attrition in RTW.
I think the only time I ever used a fort was:
1. Roleplaying as a Roman faction (gotta build a fort at the end of the march)
2. When I was using pike heavy faction and my army was surrounded by enemy armies. I could raise a fort before getting attacked, then use the phalanxes to plug breach points and slaughter everything. Even worked well against other phalanxes as marching through those points would disrupt their formation.
3. Blocking off a mountain pass or something.
@@RJALEXANDER777 Well, you did use it a hundred percent more than I did. If I remember correctly, you couldn't retreat from a fort, or could you?
Did you also know thaf when you have selected a settlement (any), and you hit the H-button on the keypad, it selects and locates your capital. Just found that out today by accident, lol
Very interesting tips here. This'll make the next playthrough more interesting.
oh and another trick is to use in game save before you next turn so you can keep your generals alive upto over a 100 years old because very few make it and it will go to 0 at a certain age but i forgot but its above 125 years old. thats if you choose to keep your best generals because if you go back to last save the general will probably live the next turn and probably wont die so you dont lose progress nor will you have to do anything else to next turn again.
How do you move your army up and keep them in the same formation? Every time i want them to advance they always break formation and mix together at the point i clicked if that makes sense?
You could also group units by pressing Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2, Ctrl+3 and so on, so as to find my units as fast as I can even without clicking the icon :)
What bothered me those most was Accuracy. During Carrhae it took 1,256,000 arrows roughly to defeat 44,000 Roman’s.
So why do Egyptians cause damage when their bows never exceeded 60lbs? Most being 40-50lb draw weight
especially interested in an attila video, i feel that game is rather enigmatic to al ot of people
I´ve learned about the Retinue thing by playing Divide and Conquer (as Isengard) because when you take the settlement where the ring is your General get´s the ring as a retinue. Medieval 2 only allows 8 Retinues for a General and i needed Saruman to get the ring but he already had 8 so i searched forums for a command to remove Retinues. Then i read you could simply swap them :D Learned the other things through Legend´s Videos :D
While I figured out how to retrain units, I never knew, you can drag and drop to merge two small units into one large, and that gave me so much pain in Imperial Glory, where you can't retrain units, until you advance one certain technology.
Retrain? You just need to bring them back to your building..
@@nomad2915 But it works only after army hospitals are researched, before it the only way to replenish losses is to merge two units together, which is pain because they lose experience that way.
I didn't know about the first tip. I just knew it was an option in Empire and wishing the other games had it.
The retinue, I have never realized that, really op
WOW MAN about the rentinue my mind blow when i see. I LOVE U
I can't believe u didn't mention that u can make ur units twice as large, from 80 to 160
At the main menu u can can go into the options, video or gaming options, advanced options and the settings are there to change the unit size from large to huge.
Makes the battles way better
Also
U can replenish ur troops in the field by mixing them urself
For instance
You have 4 units of Hastai
3 of them are down to 140, one is still 160
Well
U can drag the 160 over to each of the 140s in turn and u have 3 160s, one 100, bring that unit back to base
But
Make sure the one that's doing the replenishing has more experience otherwise the other unit will lose any it has.
And an added bonus is that this experience can be passed on to the unit u are replenishing.
U should do that all the time, it gets experience up far quicker.
Yep, I know those. When there's a list of 5 things, what do you want me to do, count differently?
I learnt about the alt button and that you could move retinue from Many A True Nerd lmao, I had played the game for so many years before he taught me that
= 2:34 no fucking way :D good to know, when senat want sucide lider with many retinue, or is old :)
= tip: read key option, before start any game ! RTW have many key bind
= btw. about retrain, you can connect branch in army on world map. and after connect you can send one branch (without couple of it) to city to re-trine. but when connect always remember to left minimum one solder because we can retrain it, if no one left in branch after connect you lost it (retrine dont take turn, so...)
1) That we would one day get a Remaster with more interesting features added.
I was today old, when I found out about retinue swaps
I always tried to find a way to make hastati,Legionaries and Urbans go to meele and tapped F1 to find it
One day I randomly found it
Thanks a lot, really a lot.
Wow, I've played this game since it came out and I never knew you could pass on retinues! Suddenly generals are useful
"Suddenly generals are useful"
Me who conquered the entire world using only british chariots at small scale: *_AM I A JOKE TO U_*
Also,my brother plays with the seleucids,and while I must admit their troops in general are awesome,their generals are...Pretty much the worst in the game to say the least lol(he plays on large scale tho).Like,he played a defensive battle in his campaign,where the enemy(parthia),came all the way to his town/city plaza(he had a stone wall),and all the enemy had left from the battle was a bit of eastern infantry,archers,and their general(u know,the one that can throw javelins?yeah.that one lol).I could've easily won that with my general,even on large scale,but oh well.
Ps:He lost both his general and the town lol
oh my god thank you fro that hold alt trick
Pikes are longer... but they have smaller shields.
The dogs can swim
🦦
Just gone back to playing RTW on mobile cause after a rough time I don't have a PC anymore. Been a nightmare figuring out how to do all this shit on a mobile port. Being able to keep playing has kept me sane though
Tremendous video my lord
About the ALT thing... Aren't developers just tell you this in the Tutorial? Every time I start a new TW game, I'm always walking through the Tutorial, just in case, I forgot something.
Omg dude. How did you not know about retraining depleted units? It literally only gives you the option of doing it to begin with if there's something that can make them better! How did you not even accidentally find out by getting armoured upgrades?? Sorry man, but that one is mind boggling haha
We can move retinues?!?!?! Oh my God
Dont u know about XP sharing/boosting? If u got multiple stacks of the same unit with different xp After a Battle u can use to one with more xp to fill up the others and after retraining u mostly end up with more xp overall
great vid😃 do this for napoleon/empire
How and can I find the original version of Rome 1? There is only remastered version available/buyable on Steam. Do you think remastered version worth it?
Did you really not know about the alt button? The thought of you getting frustrated about missile cav not running down routing units without using up all their ammo is pretty damn funny actually. Sorry.
XD
Yep, did not know until about a month ago.
I remember not knowing about the alt button at first either. I think I must have played the game for at least half a year before I found out about it.
Yeah, there is the thing. I always play with infantry and normal cav, and avoid missile troops as much as possible (just because I find them less entertaining at times). Meaning I had no reason to know about that.
... lmao didnt knew about this till right now. i played Rome 1 first 10 Years before xD
MELKOR believe me you don't know what you're missing when not using ranged units. Play as Scythia or Parthia and get whole stacks of Scythian Nobel horse archers or Persian cavalry and watch entire armies melt as you loose no men. Scythia have a worse economy but since they can only go up to minor city you can exterminate basically all towns you come across making loads of money and adding to the barbarian hoard feel of the faction.
How do you get legion cohort in the imperial campaign 😂?? Or any elite troops
Man, I wish I knew about the retinue.So much retinue lost
What about on mobile?
can the retainer thing be used in the total war medieval game?
...wait. Melkor? As in Melkor, Master of the Fates of Arda? You know Feanor did nothing wrong, just admit it.
I play the game for 10 years and I always knew about the retrain thing since the start how come you don’t realize it? the only thing I didnt know was about the retinue thing but anyways good video
Your channel seems like it should be 9 years old lol
Do you know how to rotate the camera vertically? Sometimes you can't see things on a hill even after you zoom out all the way. It's really weird cause it's RF on my laptop but on my desktop it doesn't work and it's got the same keybinds 🤣
I did not know that possible, can you tell me how?
@@MelkorGG FPS style set up for camera, rotate camera up/down, keys R/F
Like I said, for some reason on the install on my laptop it works, but I can't for the life of me get it to work on my desktop. No clue why. It only goes up and down like if you scroll the mouse wheel
@@MelkorGG also, alt+s turns off sound effects. It's so annoying. Thankfully on Rome 1 you can change the keybinds, but not on medieval. Really sucks if you're playing factions with range cavalry
I only play on mobile because I can’t afford a good pc. You’re videos still can be applied for mobile lol.
Does anyone know tips for mobile? Hotkeys don’t exist 😭
Damu Vang Same I play mobile. I also don’t know how to make my hastati charge without throwing their pila since there’s no buttons.
Legionary You can try moving your units in the direction of the enemy and have them collide. This can be applied for all units like hastati and Calvary. Idk if they gain a charge bonus though.
@@damuvang1915 Yeah I sometimes do that it's a bit sketchy tho hahaha
Legionary I finally remember what I read in the tutorial 😂😂 you hold down on your unit and draw a line to the enemy you want to attack and it will give you the option lol.
Number 5: hold alt to use alternative attacks.
Me: ppfft, this is going to be such a bad videos
Number 4:
Me: You can move WHAT??
thank you
How to replenish genral unit there are only 4 bodyguards left
Wait like 2 turns lmao
I discovered the second and the third thing only 3 years ago :)
have you done a rome 2 one yet?
Not yet. I don't think I will, seen as though I only have about 5 hours max in game.
Any idea if it's possible to change turns per year for vanilla Rome?
There are various mods that change time including the month per turn mod which I would reccomend over this. Googling is your friend.
¿Como le hago para cargar cuando uso caballería con arco o carroajes, en iPhone?
When i discovered the moving retinue traits, i ts best to give the old guy's traits to the really young guys since the generals die with the retinues they have
How do you fix the first problem on iPhone total war
How the hell do you learn about retraining units after playing this game "for years"? Thats the real mystery for the video.
XD
First of all, I was a dumb kid who struggled to read back then.
Also, I remember trying it once with a half stack, and retrained it to full. I thought I understood it. Retrained another, but nothing happened (I got an armour upgrade, or something, instead - but did not understand retraining also did armour upgrades).
So, naturally, I just assumed it to be broken and ignored the mechanic for years.
Thanks
tyvm
the hell about those retinue i didnt know that hahaha thanks alot
And about that you didnt know you can retraine? How? Its on the settlement card
How could you not know that
No offense just really curious on how you did play Total war, last thing maybe you just play and play and play never watch youtube video about Total war when you screwd up, me before i just play after i accidentally deleted my Med2 i start watching on youtube then got some info. Thats all thanks tho.
Yeah, I played for about 5 years until I discovered YT.
I thought retraining did replenish at some point, tried it, and it did not work. So I assumed it does not exist and never tested the mechanic again.
5 Years or so later, I learnt that you need to be able to train the unit in the settlement to replenish it, and that's what I did wrong all those years ago. : )
@@MelkorGG i find somehow funny this set of videos this you learn haha but after watching almost all of them i think your just me , playing adn enjoying the game in casual no tricks no cheats just want to fight historical battle be like those Famous general in history , keep it up man you deserve to enjoy those enjoyable games
*_HOW DO U"ACCIDENTLY"DELETE MED2_*