Pikemen and the Porcupine formation
The pikemen are the main counter of cavalry, monsters and heavy heroes, aswell as production buildings destroyers (alongside cavalry). They usually have a lot of health, but most of them are slow and easily countered by swordsmen and particulary archers (except towerguards). But since you already knew that, let's find out more about the porcupine formation:
All pikemen receive +65% armor when in porcupine formation, but they are unable to move and barely attack. It haves two main uses, but there are a few others wich will be explained below in the second part of the article:
- The first main use is to make your pikes last longer when against swordsmen or outnumbered, until reinforcements arrive.
- The second one is to force your pikes to protect the archers (or anything else) without starting to hunt enemies. While this is easy to do, it’s not all that effective after all. While in porcupine, the pikes gain a bonus, making them stop almost any foe that wants to trample. This may sound good, but due to the poor attack of the pikes in porcupine, the cavalry is actually able to survive the initial charge almost all the time (without trampling the whole pike horde), wich may allow them to kill your other units in melee (especially rohirrims due to AoE damage). Of course you can switch back to normal formation, but it’s usually too late. You would rather not use porcupine against trampling foes unless you want to slow them on purpose (like Mouth of Sauron).
- However, having your pikes stay in the right spot without porcupine can be hard to achieve, even in defensive stance and onhost. Here comes to help you the planning mode. It can be opened and closed by pressing the „z” hotkey. The planning mode allows you to make your units execute planned actions. In this case, I would set a very short guard route near your archers. It will make your pikes walk around your archers, wich makes almost impossible for enemy to trample them without losses, especially if the distance the pikes guard is the shortest possible and as close as possible to the units you want to protect. Of course the enemy can study the algorithm, and if he doesn’t have any delay he may still trample a few non-pike units, but it’s unlikely, most players don’t even know about planning mode and are not aware that the pike is moving on a route, not player controlled.
Now let’s move on to other uses of the porcupine formation:
- Scouting with porcupine formations. Check angelsfan’s guide. This is useful but not of vital importance. Can also be used for siege unit escorts to increase the shroud clearing range, so you can target more stuff and be aware of flanking enemy units.
- Destroying a production building in porcupine formation. I’m sure many times you've said: „I’d really wish my pikes survived a few more seconds, could have taken out that level 2 barracks!”, or something similar. Well, the porcupine formation can help you take out heavily defended production buildings. Note that this is the most useful when the enemy haves some defensive force there or some tower expansions, otherwise I’d just recommend you to use aggressive stance to destroy that building faster. As you already knew, the porcupine formation gives you 65% more armor, while plain defensive stance only 25%. In both cases you suffer –15% damage. In attack stance you gain +25% attack power but –10% armor…
So, you would say: "How the pikes attack the building if they are in porcupine formation? They barely attack anything!"
Well, you must first clump them well, as shown in the picture below.
Then after as many pikes reach the building and attack it at least once, you can activate the porcupine formation.
Keep in mind that if you don’t let them attack at least once the building, they won’t keep attacking it from porcupine formation, and you’ll just lose time and units.
