Cavalry in 1.2.0 - 1.2.1

[Dabos37]

What is your impression about cavalry in beta?

While cavalry is for sure much better in cav vs cav battles, I am finding cavalry weak against infantry, and even against archers.

Cavalry now gets stuck in melee more often and rarely switch to short weapon and remain using lances in close combat against infantry.

Plus, cavalry units rarely use couch lance, probably because move slowe than before.

It is even much worse when cavalry units are under AI command. For some reason, the AI makes a really awful use of its cavalry units and do not try to disengage them. It is extremely easy to defeat an AI army with tons of cavalry, because the AI uses it really poor.

I have just fought which looked like a really hard battle against Vlandian, and according to the autocalc it was like 75% in Vlandian’s favor, but then it actually was an slaughter in my favor, because cavalry is garbage under the AI’s command.

 

[Totalgarbage]

Yeah, I just cheated in 25 elite cataphracts to fight against 13 looters in a relatively flat map, and they held their shield 2/3 of the time while they were charging and even when they were readying to attack the looters, they whiffed about half of their attacks. From this very brief & basic test, melee cav looks like they're even worse than how they were in 1.8.

I don't mind the shield infantry being so defensive and so prone to block (though they could stand to move around a bit during tournaments), but melee cav (and maybe shock infantry, didn't test them) should be much more reckless with their attacks (also their accuracy seems to need a fix as well).

One other thing I noticed, archers are hyper focused on their targets (at least in tournaments) and don't switch targets until someone attacks them in melee, and even then, they sometimes continue to target the same enemy.

 

[Totalgarbage]

With more testing, shock infantry seems fine, although infantry in general still does get surrounded (which looked fine imo, they were outnumbered and the enemy was in loose formation, even though they were the ones charging the archers lmao)

Cavalry vs foot troops is terrible, they straight up suck, but weirdly they're much better against fighting other cavalry.

Archers are OK in field battles, in fact, they're more than okay in my opinion. Formation targeting with the advance/engage command works really well, and the individual ranged units in the same formation instinctively split against charging/engaging infantry and even kite a little bit.

Enemy AI seems a bit better in using the terrain, but it might've been the AI having good RNG on my part. They still put archers in front of the infantry for some reason, even when they're on a hill, but at least they seem more reactive in putting the archers in the backline when they're attacked.

Shield wall doesn't seem to slow down infantry when charging, legionaries seemed to zoom around in shield wall on a character without any captain or banner effects (and no companions) but I might be wrong on this.

 

[halgeir]

Cavalry under the players control is performing well against enemy cavalry and horse archers, its very helpful with the new formation targeting.
However, in 1.2 they are doing atrocious against archers especially. I had a scenario with 100 cavalry charging 60 archers holding formation and they barely killed a single archer before getting killed one by one.
Due to the new "defensive" changes to combat they just run past the archers, defaulting to raising shields as soon as something is aiming at them and moving at 50% speed while barely attacking.
The expected behaviour would be charging with couched lances should result in at least a dozen killed archers in the initial charge

 

[Dabos37]

Yeah, cavalry units are performing really bad against archers, worse than ever. It is weird because in the patch notes devs mention this: “Refined the movement decision-making process, resulting in the agents’ increased tendency to couch lances, which in turn increases their effectiveness during a charge”, but the true is that cavalry units do not couch lances at all when charging against infantry/archers. Also, cavalry charges against infantry/archers feel weaker than in 1.8, so it is weird that they specifically mention otherwise.

@Duh_TaleWorlds

 

[Duh_TaleWorlds]

Yeah, cavalry units are performing really bad against archers, worse than ever. It is weird because in the patch notes devs mention this: “Refined the movement decision-making process, resulting in the agents’ increased tendency to couch lances, which in turn increases their effectiveness during a charge”, but the true is that cavalry units do not couch lances at all when charging against infantry/archers. Also, cavalry charges against infantry/archers feel weaker than in 1.8, so it is weird that they specifically mention otherwise.

@Duh_TaleWorlds

We have a pending bug fix for this I believe.

 

[Totalgarbage]

We have a pending bug fix for this I believe.

That's really good to hear, as I've said, cavalry (literally the guy/gal riding the horse) is too defensive and starts to hold up their shields most of the time they're charging. Moreover, they also miss a ton when they're actually trying to attack.

 

[Dabos37]

We have a pending bug fix for this I believe.

Great news, thanks.

 

[BigFat]

That's really good to hear, as I've said, cavalry (literally the guy/gal riding the horse) is too defensive and starts to hold up their shields most of the time they're charging. Moreover, they also miss a ton when they're actually trying to attack.

You can feel this well in vlandian tourneys, it's a pain. It'd be great if they disabled this for cav

 

[bbaydogdu]

Oh man, cavalry sucks big time in 1.2. Cavalry AI might be even worse than e1.8.0, I'm not sure. But it really sucks.