Battles

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Battles and armies

You declare war, move your armies around, attack and retreat in the strategy screen; if you prefer to autocalc battles, you don’t have to enter the battle segment at all. If you do, however, you are taken into the battlefield – a 5-by-3 grid. Each square has room for one army unit from each side; the 5 squares closest to you are where you deploy forces from your reserves or pull them back out. There are also number of different-looking battlefields with somewhat different terrain features that can hamper movement and spellcasting, and learning to use terrain to your advantage is part of the fun. The grid system, again based on the board game, still today feels very different from most computer strategy games I’ve played, although there is one feature/bug in the implementation that means two hostile units can simply pass «through» each other if they both decide to advance. Nevertheless, commanding your own battles in Birthright is a singular experience and can be a lot of fun.

Battle ends once one side has 4 or more times as many men on the field as the enemy, not counting reserves. (At this point, any troops the losing side have remaining on the field will be lost.) Thus, you can try to swarm the enemy lines by an all-out charge, but this is risky since placing fresh troops behind your advancing ones means they have nowhere to retreat if the melee goes wrong – and melee outcomes are notoriously and annoyingly unpredictable; for example, sometimes lowly levies can defeat a squadron of charging knights, and even if they don’t, heavy losses tend to be the order of the day.

Arguably the greatest flaw of the battle system is that ranged units are comparably overpowered, especially on Slow or Medium battle settings. Ranged units can slaughter slower enemy melee troops without taking any losses themselves, simply by staying out of range, especially in skirmishes between forces small enough to allow plenty of space to maneuver on the field.

Autocalcing battles is much more predictable and doesn’t give ranged units any unfair advantage – winning in autocalced battles is more a question of having the biggest and most expensive army. This may be a slightly «fairer» way to play and certainly lets you finish the game in less clock time, although it perhaps doesn’t quite match the satisfaction of thwarting a much more powerful foe with your cheap archer forces. Also, if you want to beat the most powerful battle mages like The Gorgon or Rhuobhe Manslayer, be prepared to command the battle yourself or suffer massive losses against a single unit.

There is one generic army type that beats archers even if you command them yourself, at least in larger battles, and that’s summoned Skeletons. Despite being melee troops, the walking dead are so tough that they tend to wipe the floor with most enemies without taking much losses themselves.  Their main weakness is priest characters, who can decimate them with «Turn Undead» spells (which, unlike the D&D board game ability, will send off a roaring fireball to blast the Skeletons to cinders). Note that you again need a patch to avoid Turn Undead working on the living as well, turning priests to the most powerful allround battle mages in the game.

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