Losses in (and after) battles

[William the Silent]

My tactic to avoid many losses is fighting a defensive kind of battle:
If I am the attacker I shower the enemy with arrows (target the less armoured or skirmish units) and push them in a corner untill they decide to attack me.
I keep my spearman line in defensive mode (Attacking units get tired and get more casualties). Even against superior units you can hold out in defensive mode.

I back my infantry up with throwing spear units (Briton cavalry is perfect) that can cause infantry to waver before they reach the line.
When cavalry or generals attack your lines your throwing spear units kill them in big numbers and their attack falters quickly.

Send melee units in when the enemy gets tired.

[eyelurker]

A combination of ranged units and fast killing enemy general is the best way to protect your army from a bloody battle. Is's quite important also a good "human supply chain", keeping some fresh units in a settlmement near the battle so you can change o merge the most damaged units. However, i personally prefer SSHIP battle system to the EB one. When i played EB, i remember very long battles with lesser casualties but with less impact of mounted and ranged units. According to my point of view, this means a weaker impact of the human touch managing the battlefield because it lowers the importance of thinking the best position and actions of units.

Yeah the range unit dominate in SSHIP, most of my bloody battle is in siege where ranged units are much less effective and i need to use my melee unit. So i guess prepare my manpower reserve during siege. Also from what i read if i want to rout my enemy looks like i have to inflict wither huge casualties in short time or kill their general and shock them to rout? Since non militia tends to fight to the death.

I prefer EB2 battles though. I actually heard this a lot about EB battle being slow but i never really had this problem? If you try to kill the enemy it's going to be a grinding affair but i always aim to rout them by kill their general and flank my enemy which to be fair does make Cavalry indisputedly important to quickly finish EB2 battle. But yeah if you play like what Roman do and use a mostly infantry tactic it's going to be sloooow because even light infantry can fight for a long time if you don't force them rout with your cavalry.

[eyelurker]

Okay i retract some of my statement a bit. First Knight is in weird position of both glass cannon and killing machine, just like in vanilla that i have long not play which is why it doesn't click for awhile.

While their charge are devastating their melee are equally deadly, the key is to keep them engage since if the cavalry is in combat the enemy infantry cannot re engage and will promptly slaugthered. Failing to handle cavalry correctly or getting caugjt in missle fire however, will lead to even heavy cavalry slaugthered en massed. Also weirdly enough, heavy cavalry should not engage either mass light cavalry or general bodyguard. They can win but they will suffer high casualties.

Also army do rout, they just require shock charge/missle barrage and if they general die the chance of routing increase immensely. Which are hard to applied in siege hence my complain of infantry having high morale. I shoupd have try to lure the enemy out and avoid siege battle which is like Total war 101.