im not sure: i tried custom battle, and truth be told, the pikemans did brace, with a spear that didnt look like 230+.... THey were vlandian troops, but not the pikeman. cause they had shields as well.
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Spear Bracing (1.6.2)
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Philozoraptor
Sergeant
Couched lance and pikes had very similiar restrictions and limits historically due to the fact that these two spear types had similiar thickness, material and length used. But you are correct that hitting / mortaly wounding the horse is not going to prevent it from srashing into the first lines of pikemen if it was in full charge in moment of death. This is contested but many people believe that historically outcomes of cav charge vs pikemen vs roughly 50:50 which is still not desireble by the more expensive cav and their often noble riders, but still its not how its portraide in total war games where pikes tend to be lightsabers you cannot touche frontally.Well... i have 2 things to say about that:
1. the cavalry would till charge into the pikes, because of a simple thing: the impact of the hourse charging is bigger than the dencity of the spear. aka: it will break, and the line will break as well... Think of it as Winkelried moment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_von_Winkelried)
2. If you would change the cavalry AI, i htink it would kind of make them obsolete a bit. because, if not charging towards infantry what would (and could) they do?
But im not an expert, so if anyone has better info than i have, do tell
About the length in game, what the devs meant is length of handle piece, it can be shortened on actual spear (like 50-70%).
As for the mod, we are working on update for 1.6.2 (mod is working), we are trying to implement some AI reaction to cav when they use the bracing (it works fine when you are player, but AI needs to stand still or walk for it to trigger) and we are balancing the damage according to physics.
Out of curiousity, I decided to go through the crafting pieces, spitems, npccharacters files to see check out these kinds of things. I'm not sure if I was grabbing the right info but it's late to play but if someone could confirm these it would be great.
In terms of vanilla weapons and troop using them, I have found two weapon parts in total right now that are length 230, and when it comes to length between 240 and 295.. there are 7 to 8, but a lot of them don't allow bracing.
Handles used in polearms that are 230 length exact and can brace
spear_handle_8 - eastern_spear_5_t5, empire_polearm_2_t5 (I exclude the voulges, glaives and such obv)
spear_handle_21 - southern_spear_3_t3, northern_spear_2_t3
Handles used in polearms that are 295 length and can brace
spear_handle_7 - vlandia_pike_1_t5 / thamaskene_pike_t4 / fine_pike_t4
Handles used in polearms that are under are between 230 and 295 length but can't brace :/
spear_handle_6 - western_spear_2_t2 / western_spear_1_t2
spear_handle_22 - eastern_spear_3_t3
spear_handle_23 - highland_spear_3_t3
spear_handle_25 - triangluar_spear_t3 / western_spear_3_t3
spear_handle_26 - northern_spear_4_t5 /
spear_handle_27 - western_spear_4_t4 / highland_spear_4_t4 / wide_leaf_spear_t4 / simple_pike_t2 / military_fork_pike_t3
Troops with weapons that have 230 length polearms and can brace with them
Aserai Footman
Aserai Infantry
Aserai Mameluke Regular dismounted
Sturgian Solder
Sturgian Hardened Brigade
Sturgian Spearman
Sturgian Veteran Cavaran Guard
Sturgian Militia Veteran Spearman
+ some minor faction troops like the Sturgian Skolda dudes or whatever
Troops with weapons that have 295 length polearms and can brace with them
Vlandian Pikemen
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Again: id call the cav behaviour in BL somewhat acurate. beside, how many cav and pikeman there will be in normal BL campaign? in a army that has 100 soldiers maybe 20 will be cav. and maybe 15-20 will be pikeman.
And second thing is that BL was never really up for realism, let be honest. so i wouldnt really worry about how the cav "charges blindly into spearman"
Are you (or anyone else) noticing a difference in the campaign though?
I just fired up an old save and went into battle, I didn't notice a big difference but I'm fighting a mixed Imp, Vland, Battanian force of mostly infantry, so it might be the troop trees involved.
Can't say, haven't exactly started a campaign or anything yet. I just went on there to grab some info on the files out of curiousity. But if I had to guess, I would say no and that Realistic Battle AI for 1.6.1 would offer more of a difference than ~10 to 15 troops on native using spear brace with limited weaponry against AI that.. probably shouldn't charging straight into infantry holding their pointy ended polearms towards them.
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2. If you would change the cavalry AI, i htink it would kind of make them obsolete a bit. because, if not charging towards infantry what would (and could) they do?
But im not an expert, so if anyone has better info than i have, do tell
Hit the flanks. Have anything else pin down the enemy infantry and have your own cavalry use their mobility to attack the flanks.
What if they have spears braced in the flanks...?
"bracing" only happens at contact that last only .5 second anything after that is still a mess, i don't think bracing have to/need to be so effective that could defeating the best cav with ****iest poles, it's looks decent but generally speaking thrusting polearms have to perform better it's hilarious to see a singleplayer game implemented those mp balancing on it
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Good to know, keep up your good work.
the problem with a cavalry charge in game currently is
-Charge damage too low. typically a horseman will do about 10 damage to a looter when knocking them down. (in real life, just falling from a horse can result in paralysis or death)
-0 trample and collision for downed units. (people that get knocked down, instead of getting ran over by a horse and die, they have 0 collision and cannot be hit by a horse till they stand back up)
-0 collision for downed horses (in real life, there's momentum, just because a horse dies while charging, doesn't mean it stops, it's still a 500kg unit going towards your formation at 40km/h)
I'm not even talking about how a fully armored cataphract can take 85 damage from a peasant poop fork or how drunk these cavalrymen are when trying to hit people with their long sticks they miss 90% of the time. just charging physics, no need to make things crazy either. just slightly buff some of these numbers.
give a dead horse some charge distance before despawning it as a unit.
give more charge damage initially but make it diminish quicker (the second person you hit in the charge will have slightly more reduced damage)
give the chance for trampling. units downed will stay downed and take additional damage upon collision.
-Charge damage too low. typically a horseman will do about 10 damage to a looter when knocking them down. (in real life, just falling from a horse can result in paralysis or death)
-0 trample and collision for downed units. (people that get knocked down, instead of getting ran over by a horse and die, they have 0 collision and cannot be hit by a horse till they stand back up)
-0 collision for downed horses (in real life, there's momentum, just because a horse dies while charging, doesn't mean it stops, it's still a 500kg unit going towards your formation at 40km/h)
I'm not even talking about how a fully armored cataphract can take 85 damage from a peasant poop fork or how drunk these cavalrymen are when trying to hit people with their long sticks they miss 90% of the time. just charging physics, no need to make things crazy either. just slightly buff some of these numbers.
give a dead horse some charge distance before despawning it as a unit.
give more charge damage initially but make it diminish quicker (the second person you hit in the charge will have slightly more reduced damage)
give the chance for trampling. units downed will stay downed and take additional damage upon collision.
I agree with those points, and have suggested to improve cavalry charges via the use of physics for falling riders and horses before.
Now all we need is a proper spearwall formation, pike formations were some of the best infantry formations in the mid-late medieval period.
The biggest problem with this is if TW were to do this then we'd have Swadia Knights all over again and cavalry would be able to dominate every engagement. Yes horse damage could probably be increased, but it needs to be balanced for the game and not real world.
that's why it's called "BALANCING" an act of making nothing overpowered comparatively speaking (in a general sense), but things should have their specializations to be extra effective in some other sense.
There are currently mods that increase charge damage. and you can fully tweak those numbers. it could become op, but not if the numbers are balanced.
maybe give spearmen or shield wall defensive bonuses against charge. so the new charge only wrecks your exposed archers
there's also the spear bracing that essentially hard counters cavalry so it only makes sense to buff them slightly in other areas
What you're proposing isn't balanced and makes cavalry op which was my point.
There is nothing wrong with cavalry being OP if it is then balanced by factors outside of the battlefield. Cost, availability, upkeep etc.
But it would have to be done well, unlike in both Warband and BL where you can prance around with nothing but top tier troops after a while because money is never an issue.
But it would have to be done well, unlike in both Warband and BL where you can prance around with nothing but top tier troops after a while because money is never an issue.
Philozoraptor
Sergeant
Cavalry (only heavy cav in vanilla?) needs to couch properly which can be done by simply increasing charge distance number (combat module). Some other tweaks can increase window of sucessfull stabbing with polearms, which helps AI aim (spear performance module). Next armor needs to do more, end of story, there can be no balancing if everyone can kill everyone in 1-3 hits no matter the tier, its just too hard to do this via parry chance, there would have to be "layer" above armor in a form of defense stamina which is even more complicated than simply buffing the armor.
Once melee formations can fight for a while (which can happen only if they can resist arrows more and if they dont kill each other in a minute), only then will some sort of hammer and anvil tactics have a meaning - because it will allow you to win drawn out fight between 2 melee formations or because it will allow you to deal with enemy archers while enemy melee units are engaged with your melee units. And then and only then will some sort of infantry vs cavalry balancing make sense, in such situation cavalry loosing to spear infantry head on might make sense bacause cav can turn the tide of battle when infantry is preoccupied.
As long as battle on the frontlines is over before you can move your cav to the flank or rear of enemy to charge them, any kind of balancing is going to be in extremely fragile maybe even impossible, because little things like 20 cm length on weapon or +0.05 attack speed is going to decide outcome of battle (because everything is dead in 2 hits).
But no single small change will have significant impact in vacuum. There needs to be clear vision what the devs want to achieve specifically with combat and they need to subject everything to that vision, not just tweaks.
Once melee formations can fight for a while (which can happen only if they can resist arrows more and if they dont kill each other in a minute), only then will some sort of hammer and anvil tactics have a meaning - because it will allow you to win drawn out fight between 2 melee formations or because it will allow you to deal with enemy archers while enemy melee units are engaged with your melee units. And then and only then will some sort of infantry vs cavalry balancing make sense, in such situation cavalry loosing to spear infantry head on might make sense bacause cav can turn the tide of battle when infantry is preoccupied.
As long as battle on the frontlines is over before you can move your cav to the flank or rear of enemy to charge them, any kind of balancing is going to be in extremely fragile maybe even impossible, because little things like 20 cm length on weapon or +0.05 attack speed is going to decide outcome of battle (because everything is dead in 2 hits).
But no single small change will have significant impact in vacuum. There needs to be clear vision what the devs want to achieve specifically with combat and they need to subject everything to that vision, not just tweaks.
