Warrior Ancient and Medieval Rules

I'm building a EIR late period and am trying to figure out two
things...

1) Bolt shooters (required purchase) Other than place them on a hill
with friendly troops at base of hill and make the enemy come to you,
what do you do with them other than sacrifice them?

2) I like the idea of using Auxilia upgraded with 1/2 sling. 1/2 can
also be upgraded to HTW but it seems the JLS would do better in a
prolonged fight. Will probably also upgrade them to Reg B. I was also
thinking about taking some Cohort HC as a detachment but it seems the
HC would be better used independently.

Any ideas of how to best utilize either one?

Thanks in advance.

[Bill Chriss]

> I'm building a EIR late period and am trying to figure out two
> things...
>
> 1) Bolt shooters (required purchase) Other than place them on a hill
> with friendly troops at base of hill and make the enemy come to you,
> what do you do with them other than sacrifice them?
>


I am known to use these, so I'll express my opinion. Do not assume that
artillery is easy to take out in a hand to hand fight! Almost never do you
get a chance to put them on hills and shoot over friendly troops
protecting their frontage, yet people use them nonetheless.

Remember that you'll be support shooting at huge factors and with double
crew. Plus you'll have at least two crew at other inf factors in HTH. This
after at least one probable prep shot at the opponent at long distance (up
to 480 paces). Run the factors against any troop type you like. What
you'll find is that it is very, very difficult to bust a decent sized (3-4
element) artillery unit without losing many more points of troops in doing
so. Pretty hard to do 15 casualties (1 cpf) to a three element ART unit
when you're already disordered from the prep shot last bound, charging
tired from prior prep fatigue and the support shot this bound, and
subtracting a further 4 or 5 or 6 from your dice for getting the hell shot
out of you at close range by 6 or 8 (doubled to 12 or 16) crew firing at a
factor of usually 2. And, you might well shake after being diusordered
last turn from prep fire and again from this bounds support shot and HTH.

The main weakness of boltshooters is their inability to fire in the same
turn that they move. This is when they can be taken out....So place them
and don't move them unless sure of not being charged that bound.


-Greek