True, haha. And Lord help us if you put those archers on horses.
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'About infantry vs Cav.' - toughts about recent dev input - UPDATED with poll
- Thread starter nGabor
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VanHoven
Veteran
My experience with cav is more like this . First charge is good but if you dont micromanage them they are pretty much useless after that initial contact. Some cavalry still is nice to have vs horse archers/ the enemys ranged line but all in all i see myself more and more fading melee cav out of my armies in favor of more horse archers/ranged units or solid shieldwallable infantry.
That has other reasons though. You could just field pure archer armies and be massively successful right now because the balance is... let's say it's eArLy AcCeSs
This is more about how it propably should be and not how it currently is. Right now it's obviously awful in alot of areas.
PS: Mind you that guy is still on normal AI and in his Bandits video he didn't even understand why people are making a fuss about his difficulty and AI settings. I also feel his tests are pretty badly executed. Imho He himself and his tests are not very credible.
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Of course, cavalry charging into spear wall or pike formation would be a suicidal move. But I think the big problem now is that almost every infantryman in the game is wielding a spear. Everyone being spearman greatly hurts the cav experience. I used to be a warrior king type of player, using a one-handed sword and fighting with my troops, harvesting 4-5 kills in a killing stream. Now I use polearms and am afraid of even the lowest recruit. This game used to be mount and blade, now it is bow and glaive.
This is my experience (disclaimer: this is a custom battle):
This is with cavalry set to 'charge' using F3 and just left to themselves, no interference at all. Enemy AI controls the infantry.
Edit: I know this isn't a totally fair comparison though, as I don't have to source and pay for 100 war horses like I would in a campaign. Armies also have more of a variety of units in them that might change the outcome in a real battle. I also don't know what the damage and AI settings are in custom battles. Presumably full realistic and challenging, but I don't see any way to tell for sure. This is more just to show that enemies have a really tough time taking down (or even hitting) cavalry that ride back and forth through their ranks.
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what ai diffculty did you play onThis is my experience (disclaimer: this is a custom battle):
This is with cavalry set to 'charge' using F3 and just left to themselves, no interference at all. Enemy AI controls the infantry.
Edit: I know this isn't a totally fair comparison though, as I don't have to source and pay for 100 war horses like I would in a campaign. Armies also have more of a variety of units in them that might change the outcome in a real battle. I also don't know what the damage and AI settings are in custom battles. Presumably full realistic and challenging, but I don't see any way to tell for sure. This is more just to show that enemies have a really tough time taking down (or even hitting) cavalry that ride back and forth through their ranks.
If you don't force enemy to break formation and charge with horse archers then they aren't good but if you do that heavy cavalry is just slaughtering everything on their path..
VanHoven
Veteran
Interesting. I spend the last 20 minutes in custom battles and to my surprise I did get the same results with your setup. But then I started to play around a bit. When you set ur cav to f6(ai command) they lost to the infantry. Also a loss when you take command the infantry and tell them to charge. In every scenario a loss when you play aserai or khuzait, since their spearmen are equiped with javelins, which unsuprisingly wreck heavy cav.
So the different experience player get may be dependant on the commands they use, also explains why the results people report differ. Oh, an ai taking command seems te be the worst option you can go for.
Edit: and just tried the same scenario but with khuzait lancers... yeah... they got 16 kills before every single one of them died, on f6. With charge (f3) at least they killed 60
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Yeah which command you issue makes a big difference. 'Advance' seems to give pretty poor results too if I remember correctly. And I chose Empire specifically because it's a pure melee battle with no ranged weapons coming into play. But it's not exactly difficult to just set your cavalry to charge at the start of every battle. I'm uploading a video illustrating what's going on here as we speak.
bm01
Sergeant
Even though it doesn't explain such imbalance, don't forget that custom battle mode uses a different "damage model" than campaign mode. Charges do 2.5 times more damage for example (also these horses have huge armor).This is my experience (disclaimer: this is a custom battle):
This is with cavalry set to 'charge' using F3 and just left to themselves, no interference at all. Enemy AI controls the infantry.
Edit: I know this isn't a totally fair comparison though, as I don't have to source and pay for 100 war horses like I would in a campaign. Armies also have more of a variety of units in them that might change the outcome in a real battle. I also don't know what the damage and AI settings are in custom battles. Presumably full realistic and challenging, but I don't see any way to tell for sure. This is more just to show that enemies have a really tough time taking down (or even hitting) cavalry that ride back and forth through their ranks.
Personally I'm fine with strong cavalry. But they need to be more expensive for the AI (I don't think they need horses to upgrade their troops) and consume more food.
In my opinion it's not so much about having stronger infantry vs having stronger cavalry.. Its about units actually being able to take advantage of the situation... What I mean is that a cavalry charge into a disorganised mess up low to medium tier infantry should absolutely crush the infantry... It's kinda silly that in the VanHoven links we have scattered peasant mobs randomly killing armored knights.
On the other hand I also want having a prepared infantry formation with a good frontline to actually make a huge different... So you you do have a bunch of pikemen setup facing a cavalry charge, the cavalry should be a major disadvantage...
Right now.. it doesn't matter.. It all turns into a big mess anyway, there is no tactics, no infantry locking together to better resists a charge... no horses actually having enough pass to crush through ill prepared men.. It all just seems just very surface level coating
On the other hand I also want having a prepared infantry formation with a good frontline to actually make a huge different... So you you do have a bunch of pikemen setup facing a cavalry charge, the cavalry should be a major disadvantage...
Right now.. it doesn't matter.. It all turns into a big mess anyway, there is no tactics, no infantry locking together to better resists a charge... no horses actually having enough pass to crush through ill prepared men.. It all just seems just very surface level coating
Here's a video showing what's going on and what (I think) the problem is:
Listen as much as you watch. You'll hear tons of the spear shaft "Thwack" sound effect when I ride through the ranks and you can see my horse takes very slight chip damage constantly. The spear shafts are hitting the horses when they thrust, completely eating all the damage. I take exactly one solid hit in the entire clip. Again, my cavalry is set to 'charge' mode.
Edit: There may be some of the allied hitbox problem mixed in still like they are trying to fix. I'm playing on the current beta + hotfix patch e1.2.0.
Listen as much as you watch. You'll hear tons of the spear shaft "Thwack" sound effect when I ride through the ranks and you can see my horse takes very slight chip damage constantly. The spear shafts are hitting the horses when they thrust, completely eating all the damage. I take exactly one solid hit in the entire clip. Again, my cavalry is set to 'charge' mode.
Whatever custom battles are set to. There's no way to check as far as I can tell. In regular campaign mode I play on full realistic and challenging AI.
Interesting, I didn't know damage models differed. That may explain some of what's happening, but I think AI behavior is the bigger issue.
Edit: There may be some of the allied hitbox problem mixed in still like they are trying to fix. I'm playing on the current beta + hotfix patch e1.2.0.
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then you do notice a difference between the video and the challenging ai in campain so i dont see it being useful in anyway possible
since its really really really diffrent then what really happens in current campains
What's really, really different about it though?
I agree with you. The cavalry already has a mobility advantage, they get to dictate when battle occurs. This is exactly what the developer was describing as historical warfare. The cavalry would make a lot of 'false charges' to force the infantry to break formation. If they don't break formation and aren't heavily outnumbered, it shouldn't go well for the cavalry.
I don't see this as a problem. Massed infantry should counter cavalry. There's plenty of real world tactics to deal with this real world problem, without dumbing down the AI.The cav can still go around the infantry and flank them, or wait for their own infantry to lock up with them before they charge, or let their archers soften up the infantry first.
It seems counterintuitive then that the best way to deal with cavalry atm is not to stay in formation, but have your infantry charge when the troops meet. When infantry stays in formation then it goes a lot worse for them in my experience.
That's weird that they would make the shield wall porous because the AI was suiciding on it. I'm no coding wunderkind but like if shield wall in front then move in another direction? Maybe go find some enemy cavalry? Kinda disappointed a single horse will just go right through my guys unless one gets a lucky spear in, which happens rarely.
Does anyone have any more insight though as to what the differences between custom battle and campaign are that would cause the behavior shown in my video above to happen in one but not the other? I don't think it's that damage is turned way down because I will still die it 2 or 3 solid hits when they land. Also, if I reverse the roles and delegate infantry command to sergeants (F6) they still seem to lose to cavalry.
khuzaithorde
Recruit
The way damage is calculated is different between campaign and custom battle.
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