Why are you guys debating if horses will charge carelessly into a mess of pikes/spears though?
We are still discussing a game though. Ingame it helps if cav has a counter (ontop of other cav beeing a counter) and horses rearing when a pointy stick (as you guys call it) is presented to them as a threat helps with that. Both for single and multiplayer. Prevents the AI or player snowballing the campaign and gives people in multiplayer a counter to cavalry to prevent it from dominating completly.
This started because Hruza claimed that
"cavalry are ineffective against formed disciplined infantry", and that "
horses physically can't charge through ranks of spearmen". When I said that horses actually can charge
short spears, he argued the length of the polearm doesn't matter, and that "horses can't charge at men with sharp sticks because they are afraid."
If the game worked that way, then melee cavalry would be underpowered: needing more investment for less usefulness, because short spears are one of the most common weapons in Bannerlord. To have even T1 recruits carrying your counter would make cavalry pretty garbage.
That's why I showed that you can make horses charge suicidally into pike formations, because it's the most extreme example that horses are not afraid of sharp sticks. Of course, charging
long pikes was a bad idea. But I do think that lance cavalry should be able to charge at formed ranks of
short spears and win.
So, I say: make melee cavalry countered by
long pike infantry, go even with shield infantry/ranged infantry/ranged cavalry, and be the counter to shock infantry (who lack a shield or pike for protection). Melee cavalry will in addition be useful for flanking attacks, but it will not be their only function, thus meaning they do not become completely pointless to have if the enemy forms a circle. In this way, melee cavalry will be worth the investment and will have a balanced role in gameplay. (Of course, these should just be soft counters. Unit tier, morale, terrain, flanking attacks and formations should all play a part).
Obviously they wont if they see the danger.... But I think in that also lies part of the problem. I think alot of factors are at play to determine if a horse is scared or not. Battlefield noises and smells probably are a part of it.A metal tip reflects light that shines on it and just a pointy stick or a broom wont. So that alone might give the horse a visual que about something beeing dangerous as well. Overall though I think its a matter of circumstances and it probably differed from horse to horse as well. To take other animals of an example of that, not all dogs can be trained to be seeing-eye dogs for example.
If a horse was afraid of shining metal they wouldn't get anywhere near any sort of battlefield covered in guys in shining armor. Even Hruza has said that horses wouldn't be afraid of spears otherwise they would be afraid of their rider's own spear. I do agree of course that in real life anything could happen due to strange circumstances, but I think I've pretty conclusively shown by now that as a general rule, warhorses can be made to charge men with sharp sticks, either because their heads are down on the bit, their eyesight is poor, or you can train the fear out of them.
The example of the guy charging into a pike formation seems more like an oddity, a rare occurance then something that happened regulary. Otherwise, why would they bother report it at all if it happend all the damn time?
Of course, no disagreement there. I don't think it happened all the time. Charging long braced pikes is a very poor strategic choice. I was just using it as an example that warhorses can be made to charge sharp sticks.
I feel cav charges can be alot better done in the game. The riders miss so much of their attacks against infantry its kinda weird.
Yep, this is the major problem with cavalry at the moment.
Realism argument aside, here is all I want done with cavalry, and overall troop balance things that impact cavalry:
- Make stabbing polearms more effective.
- Make stabbing/couching polearm using AI much more accurate vs infantry- they should only be missing their couches like 5% of the time unless they have a low weapon skill. It shouldn't take 9 couch attempts to kill a looter. This should make them able to slaughter shieldless infantry, which is what I want.
- Add bracing to polearms in SP. Can only be done with long two-handed polearms (pikes). Deals momentum damage based on the speed at which something runs onto it. Will kill or seriously wound a charging horse (depending on horse's armor) and make it collapse and throw the rider, but will also knock down and damage the pike holder in the process of having a 500kg horse fall on them.
- Give a medium-sized increase to the physical impact and push-through of cavalry charges. Not to the amount it was pre-release, but between that and now. Right now even the heaviest cavalry has a tendency to get bogged down in the first few ranks of a loosely packed archer formation. Instead, it should be that a braced pike formation will skewer a cavalry charge in the first rank, but knock both sides over. A cavalry charge can knock down the first rank of a tightly packed shieldwall without injury to the horse and rider, but get bogged down without inflicting casualties. Any other sort of tightly packed formation should get bogged down about 5 ranks in. But if it is a loose infantry formation with no shieldwall or braced pikes, a cavalry charge should just smash right through it and retain most of its momentum.
- Make armor more effective so that ranged infantry/cavalry can't slaughter melee cavalry so easily.
- Reduce the accuracy of ranged infantry and melee infantry against fast-moving targets so they can't slaughter melee cavalry so easily.
- Make the morale system work better so that cavalry charges provide some small amount of morale damage, and a T6 formation of cavalry charging a T1-T4 formation of pike/shield/shock infantry will make them break and run, if something else has already lowered their morale.