When you get besieged, sally, but just move your general out the gate and back in. The besieger will usually advance into range of your archers and towers. They, in all their wisdom, will stand there doing squat, apart from dying.I tried this against a Thracian army that grossly outnumbered me, and it didn't work...they just ran away along my walls -- out of range of the towers -- and formed a battle line on a nearby hill. When I sent my general back inside and quit the battle, with no fighting having occurred, the results screen said I'd suffered a close defeat and deducted 73 casualties from me but only 7 from the enemy!!
Something similar happened again last night - I lined up about 6 units of missile troops and sent two generals and three cavalry out as bait. I figured maybe they won't react unless to a decent-size force.
Again they simply ran away to a position near the corner of the city. I kept on advancing, parallel to my walls, and moved my missile dudes along the walls to the point nearest the Thracian position. I also brought my five Libyan Spears out as support - against a full stack of archers, peltasts, and falx heavy infantry.
The AI then kept sending single units, or pairs of units, towards me. After I'd slaughtered their two Greek cavalry and kiled half an archer unit and routed it, I thought Aaah, what the hell! and sent all five cavalry units straight into the archers and peltasts at one end of their line.
This got four of my five cavalry routed although not before they'd done some serious mischief. The Thracians then advanced again, but still in dribs and drabs, so I routed a few falx units with charges by my spearmen, reforming my line each time. At this point, one of their peltast units did stray into wall range, lost half its guys and routed. So I rallied my cavalry, and did a full-on frontal charge.
This eventually defeated them; I think I killed 400 for the loss of 200 or something. I should probably have broken it off after the initial skirmishes though - at that point I'd probably killed 70 or 80 for the loss of maybe 25 fairly expendable round shield cavalry.
I wonder if the AI goes after your general or not in these situations according to how good he is? If he's got lots of stars, would they run from him because he's too scary, or would they go after him because they particularly want to kill your top boy?
[This message has been edited by Spurius Dufus (edited 07-19-2006 @ 06:10 AM).]