Tea's Hun Hunting Guide: How to Kill the Huns Right From the Start

So perhaps you have got into conflict with the Huns early? Perhaps they wiped you out and this filled you with hatred for these horse-fu****s. That happened to me, so of course I swore eternal vengeance upon the Huns. After wiping out seven armies with the Visigoths and carefully keeping track of what happened I have some news to share on how they work, act and respawn.

The initial Hun armies can be easy to take if you are prepared. What you need are either of the Goths (I prefer Visigoths), and to camp for 1-2 turns and recruit Germanic spearmen. Track the Huns via the diplomacy marker and hunt them down, pick up the mercs of your choice as you go. Steppe horse archers are actually pretty good against the Huns if you lure them to shoot shield-bearing spear units and then send in your horse archers to snipe them.

Simply put, to hunt the Huns early, you want spears and shields.

The Huns have their specific starting areas, but use the diplomacy trick because they can move quite fast, and the game can cheat in the distance they can cover (another little Hun trick). To get the advantage you will want to fight the initial battles (you can auto-resolve later). There are plenty of forests out east, so camp a bit, lure them in, send out your melee cav towards theirs, backed up by spears. Lure them on to the spears. Then, with the melee cav dead retreat back to the trees. Let them waste their ammo and impale them when they come. One stack done, bye bye UIdin.

You can of course then mop up the next armies with auto resolve if you like. It is even possible to cripple them for a few years so that there is only one weak Hun army out there (track them with the diplomacy faction marker) and patrol the wild areas east and north of the Eastern Romans killing them as you. The advantages in being so anti-Hun is your generals will level up quite quickly. I have been left alone by others, who were content to let me kill the Huns, but you may need to take their vassals as well.

Now by exterminating the Huns some things become evident. Once an army is defeated, often another weaker army will pop up nearby. You can push them down to one army, but they will always respawn. Often they are weak, but by killing the Huns they may also, after about five years from the starting date begin to spawn with more advanced units. It is up to you when you stop chasing the tails of the Huns, but they do improve quite quickly and clearly their research is shooting up and they can get into elite units swiftly. If you don't actually try to eradicate these pests, they can have the same initial weak starting armies for some time. Generally I've seen other barbs or Romans eventually hurt and take out a few armies, but they come back stronger (eventually).

Truly beating upon the Huns and letting some of the army live and retreat, live and retreat can also lead to the Hunnic separatists faction emerging. They can build up to a full stack in power, but I did not find them to be very strong. They could not really compete with their many German neighbours.

So why kill them then, apart from satisfying vengeance? Well there are other amusing effects. As I said you wipe out Huns and more come, but sometimes their stacks spawn in very strange places. I have seen them pushed more westerly, but I also wiped out a Hun army and then had a stack spawn at Constantinople. What happens after the armies are wiped out and where they spawn next can be highly varied so I recommend you give it a go. I have even beat upon a Hun army so badly, that Hun separatists formed. I certainly didn't see that in any of my other games.

Alas as reported by others, you have to kill Attila before the Huns are completely wiped. Generally you will kill him and then mop up the rest. Game over then, good ending, you saved the world (what is left of it). There are some possible complications with pursuing this strategy, which I will speak about next.

By spending your time wiping out the Huns, you aren't gaining very much except experience. You are also lessening the strain upon the Romans and some barbarian factions. This will have definite game changing effects and alter the political shape of the game. I find the campaign is most certainly varied in how it can go, but just keep in mind that by stopping the Huns (and you can really neuter them by restricting them to one army for years) some factions are going to be better off. I also found diplomatically I didn't have many problems with others upon pursuing my Hun extermination policy. You can be left alone. Of course you are also not settling your faction and will be spending a lot of time on the move, so you aren't upgrading your horde either. It is of course also costly to keep full stacks roaming about.

As I also mentioned, by wiping out Hun armies before too long you will be fighting very strong Hun armies. They will have higher tier cavalry and often a range of mercenaries and steppe infantry (which can be surprisingly solid). Your initial armies that were great at wiping out the early armies may not suffice.

Good luck hunting the Huns, and show them no mercy!