DonвЂ™t send swordsmen into battle against giant beasts. That means basic things like: donвЂ™t let your archers get charged by cavalry. That is to say, you want your units to be attacking the thing theyвЂ™re strongest against, while protecting your units from their vulnerabilities. The general principle of all Total War games is to maximise your strengths and weaknesses. Micro-managing units is better, but group formations at least lets you issue an attack order to a bunch of units without everyone trying to clump up at once, which is a recipe for disaster. This tells the game to (roughly) maintain their formation and spacing when the group is formed, and they will try and attack targets in relation to their formation positions. You can set group formations by pressing CTRL+G on a selected unit or units. Want units to go on a little adventure behind enemy lines? Hold SHIFT, right-click and drag and youвЂ™ll be able to set a custom route for your armies. ALT + right-click + CTRL lets you rotate your army/units, but fixes the rotation as a single point.

Holding ALT and right-click lets you rotate the direction your units are facing, keeping their current formation. Very handy for inching your forces forward without everything going to pot, although youвЂ™ll want to keep an eye on troops with different move speeds so they donвЂ™t wander too far ahead. If you drag-select your entire army, or part of an army, you can move them forward or back in formation by holding ALT and left-click. You can toggle all of this stuff on or off via the toolbar on the right hand side. If youвЂ™re going to use SPACE a lot, youвЂ™ll probably want to disable firing arcs so the screen is less visually cluttered. Holding SPACE will show you all scheduled orders for your entire army, like so: You only ever want your faster troops (mounted units, chariots, flying units and so forth) to chase enemies down, so use this liberally. Without guard mode toggled, your troops will chase down enemy forces whenever they disengage вЂ“ often breaking formation, leaving you vulnerable and liable to be cut open in two. This is guard mode, and itвЂ™s crucially important.

ThereвЂ™s a button at the bottom of the UI that looks like two shields.

This is especially important for spellcasters or hero units when you need them to intercept an enemy beast, or pin down charging cavalry. To make life easier, assign units to control groups (CTRL + 1-9) so you can access them quickly. Generally youвЂ™ll only want to move a few groups at a time, so you can keep your army in formation (more on that later). Once youвЂ™ve got the basic camera movement down, hereвЂ™s some keys youвЂ™ll need to know:Д¬TRL + I will select all infantry, but this isnвЂ™t StarCraft. Total War games come with plenty of tooltips, but there are plenty of hotkeys and shortcuts that are easy to gloss over that can make a massive difference in battle.

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