New player here

[springel]

I was led to this game through AGEOD Empires.

This game comes closest to my boardgame experience with the Richard Berg games (Alexander, Legion, Caesar etc) of the 1980's.
One's role is not being an ancient general with an army, but a board wargamer with his counters, or a tabletop player with his miniatures, just virtual through a computer. Nothing wrong with that, I liked wargames.

I played the tutorial battles, my first Empires battle, which was a safe guaranteed victory.

Then I started a quick battle with Franks against Vikings. Which, as a Dutchman, is more or less my native environment, albeit with the Franks as foreign rulers, and not a few countrymen participating with the Vikings. Holland, or Frisia as it was called, was ruled by a Viking Duke under the Carolingian King during a small century. We call it the time of Frisian Normandy.

Anyway, my Franks, lancers and shield wall were both defeated one on one by the superior Viking shield wall. Playing on easy II.
So I reversed sides, and now I could just steamroll the Franks with my Viking infantry.

Is this common that certain factions are outright superior to other factions? I realise that one point value cannot catch all the rock paper scissor factors of units, so this is more or less expected to happen. I guess part of the fun of this game is to discover all these relations between different armies.

Or is my observation false, and can a good Frankish player beat the Vikings reliably? I tried to used my mobility of the Frankish lancers to outflank the Vikings, but they had enough units to form a screen and receive the charge.

Edit: and then I saw this MP game when the Frankish Lancers trashed a Viking infantry army.
https://youtu.be/qNsJM-j_dcQ
But that map was a bit more open, with more room to flank

I have a question about disorder, as the manual only mentions causes (terrain), but no effects. I expect disorder is bad in combat. But is it going away as soon as you leave disordering terrain?

[springel]

So next a few centuries back, with the Franks against the Visigoths.

Interestingly, it seems the Franks learned something about cavalry from the Goths, as the Visigoths came with a kind of early form of the later Frankish army, with a fair few lancers, while the Franks basically fought with Roman time Germanic warbands, and some sub-Roman rabble. The rabble routed the light Visigoths and helped the few Frankish noble cavalry to hold up against the Visisgoth lancers, while the core Frankish infantry broke through the smaller Visigoth infantry centre.

I think it is great that you can play a small battle within an hour, while wargames in general are massive enterprises, sometimes taking hundreds of hours. My Richard Berg boardgame battles usually took the best part of an evening, with all the sorting of the order of battle, and the cleanup afterwards.

[rbodleyscott]

This is something of the "Age of the Shieldwall" in the West, and Frankish cavalry were not medieval Knights, so a frontal combat of cavalry vs shieldwall tends to favour the shieldwall. That isn't specific to Viking shieldwalls, although they do have excellent huscarls of course.

It was not uncommon for cavalry to dismount to fight on foot as shieldwalls.