Heavy Cav Has No Impact

[Princeps Senatus]

Am I playing a different game? I see infantry form up and stop cavalry all the time? Usually seeing cav getting bogged down, because they're not smart enough to NOT charge into spears unless you micro them with orders.

The person above who gave the manual commands is basically right in my experience -- you can manually command cavalry to great results, otherwise they run around like crazy people and get swarmed by infantry.

 

[Brandis.]

If infantry is already fighting they're bad at stopping cav. In MP Captain mode we complained about this and the AI got a lot smarter and some bots would peel off from the main fight to anti-cav. However, it's still not very effective since horses have massive amounts of health and 1-2 spear bots won't stop more than that count of cav.

On SP: You don't want to be charging your cav into unoccupied enemies to begin with. I feel like that's incredibly basic strategy. In Battles I generally commander the cav and just support my infantry. But by supporting them, it gives the cav a good amount of kills too.

 

[Doktor Barber]

Yeah, I agree. While I haven't seen too much crossbows in parties.

my vlandian party is is about 50% crossbows

 

[XT-ended_2L]

my vlandian party is is about 50% crossbows

Well, I will bypass you for now ? Will come back with heavy cavalry))

 

[karijus]

What I do is form cav into a square, and tell them to follow me, run through enemy archers and then tell them to charge. Lead by example lol, worked for Alexander.

 

[Speedkermit]

Just play Khuzaits. Army of horse archers is OP atm. They just run in circles like choo-choo train keeping unreachable distance and shooting everyone like a minigun. You succeed at every simulated battle in the game with them. Another advantage is your map speed.

I can see you obviously enjoy a challenge

 

[csk1d]

5000 pounds or 2500kgs of pressure hitting you? i will say it would only deal 7 damage at most tbh

Ummm, first the unit of pressure is Pa, or N/m^2, and most if not all horses weights under 1000kg, and to describe collision you either use momentum or kinetic energy, pressure mattered more in the change material structure, and is usually described by stress instead of pressure.

The second thing, the real broken part of the damage model is the missing mass correlation, assuming the damage type correlates the process of impact and type of collision, then the degree of damage it caused is related to KE and momentum (including angular momentum).

 

[paladinx333]

The problem I have with them is there's no way to prevent your army from chasing routed soldiers when the battle is still ongoing - this is what needs fixing.

You know you can CALL THEM BACK when the charge is over. I highly recommend it. Get yourself onto the enemy flank and issue the "follow me" command. Once you cav is mostly formed up you can tell them to charge in again. In large battles you need to control the cav yourself. Keep them together until the enemy all routs and then let them finish off the survivors.

I have also reformed my infantry into a new line to meet the enemies second wave. You have complete control over your army. I suggest you use it.

 

[XT-ended_2L]

I can see you obviously enjoy a challenge

You want a challenge? Go play multiplayer.

 

[Hugo_Stiglitz]

Manual control seems fine for the time being for me.

Infantry - Shield wall -> Advance
Archers - Wait for infantry to get ahead and then charge them
Cav - Wedge formation -> Advance ->(Close to Enemy) Charge ->Run my hero through the other side with lance -> Follow commander -> advance again and charge cycle

The correct way to charge through enemy ranks is -
Face direction -> Charge
the cav will stick together in a wedge and plow right through.

Just tested in a 500 cav vs 500 infantry custom.
200 kills on cav and 2 deaths before i stopped

So yeah, no problems here.

Only issue is pikes need an option for 'Brace' to counter those cav charges

I believe with a 2H spear or lance in Warband you can plant the spear or lance in the ground by crouching or using the alt weapon stance command.

 

[JaffalAllaYourMum]

anyway besides some changes to the individual unit Combat AI's (like how using ranged weps / polearms take priority over 1H or 2H on horseback)
The general formations are pretty useful so far. Just requires alot of micro.

And the OP's thread topic is completely redundant.Result is he just cant use the controls yet (After doing a Cav vs infantry charge with a 200 kill to 2 death outcome pretty much proves it)

 

[King Yngvar]

a spear poke brings any horse to a dead stop

The spearmen in formation aren't even poking with their spears, they either try to use them and they collide with allied troops and can't be used or they switch to their side arm. Shouldn't have to be a poke either, should just have to hold the spear in front of them.

 

[SavatageRoyo]

I just had another "situation" which should fit here. So I felt like cleaning up some of the bandits and looter around my castle (they are everywhere at some point in the campaign it seems, different topic).
Since it were only 9 bandits I obviously just gave the charge command to my entire army. 3 Companions on horse back, about 35 Valandian cav which at least 20 of them were "Banner Knights" on the highest tier. I was riding along somwhere in the back of my cav. Now here is the thing, one of these bandits stood there getting two arrows into me. I didn`t pay much attention to the whole thing but it made me thinking, how on earth is there a bandit standing with all the time in the world bothered by nobody after I charged almost 40 cav units towards them? From what I can tell everybody dead but another bandit to my left which just got killed at that moment and this guy just standing there shooting his bow.

 

[YariAshigaru]

I started this campaign as a roleplay foot army with some archers and little cav. And right now i have only archers and cav.

Becouse it was laways like this:

1. AI like a moron send cav and infantry in front
2. We cut them to pieces and now AI has tons of archers
3. We are going forward, they are going backward and constantly shooting
4. We are taking casualties, but pushing, then we start to cut the archers. And boom - 200 men just silently spawn behind my back, cut my archers to pieces, and charge to my back. And my reinforsments like a mile away.

I recorded some stats after another battle:
60 archers 288 kills 1 dead
15 cav 90 kills 0 dead
120 infantry 170 kills 50 dead (and it was almost all t5 troops)

So i just disbanded them and now i play with 50 50 cav archers and can beat army like 4 times more without any casualtes.
And i even can cut archers too, becouse they are toaly useless in sieges, I guess TW made them dumb as hell in siege atacks (so player cant just shoot all defenders like you can do it in warband)

Just command your archers to fall back and go cut enemy cavalry and archers. And after that may be you can go and kill runing infantry, but usually archers can deal with it ezpz witohut you.

Yeah, in warband i mixed my swadian doom stack with rhodok sharpshooters because i needed some sort of foot on the ground to clean up anything my doomstack didnt kill in the first charge.

But in Bannerlord the AI just cant pick a target. They'll mindlessly chase after 1 dude and ignore other people shooting them in the rear or hell even stabbing them in the rear.

The reinforcement spawn issue is something I've always tried to be aware of since it was there in Warband as well. During close beta days in PVP captain mode i led a force of legionary's and had to chase 2 dudes of light archers for the entire game because my men could never catch up and he wasnt able to kill me with just 2 men. It's worse in PVE Singleplayer for sure Infantry serves so little of a role because of how stupid the AI is and how **** spears are.

I never fully commit my men to a charge becuz of how useless it is to charge them. Just have the infantry clash until the AI reinforcement spawns and the AI retreats to regroup and then i just tell my men to form up and rinse and repeat while my cavalry and archers do 99% of the killing.

 

[Badcritter]

Cavalry charge should be a single event. Cavalry captain does ONE charge in formation and then prepare for another. Todays "charge" is basically a "break formation and attack" and has little to do with "charge".

Counter-intuitively you can currently achieve this by using the "advance" (F1-F4) command, which causes the cavalry to hold formation as they ride at the enemy and attack. So you use F1 and click to position your cavalry where you want them, or lead them there with "follow me" (F1-F2), then when you want them to charge DO NOT use the "charge" (F1-F3) command, instead use "advance" (F1-F4). Once they strike the enemy line, pull them out via F1 to a location or F1-F2 to follow you out, then reposition and F1-F4 to charge again.

 

[h1zchan]

Two handed lances are very hard to use at the moment. Try it for your self you'll quickly start to miss your one handed spear. No wonder then the AI doesn't know how to use it properly. I'd suggest giving an alternative mode to spears and lances to allow grip changing to shorten the reach so that they can be used in close quarters when they're stuck in a pile of enemies. As for the two handed lance in particular id say make it slower in the normal long range mode so that you can more easily hit stuff on horseback before the animation is over, Then give it a fast shortened grip mode where it's held closer to the tip, to use on foot and maybe on horseback when stuck inside enemy square.

 

[JaffalAllaYourMum]

I just had another "situation" which should fit here. So I felt like cleaning up some of the bandits and looter around my castle (they are everywhere at some point in the campaign it seems, different topic).
Since it were only 9 bandits I obviously just gave the charge command to my entire army. 3 Companions on horse back, about 35 Valandian cav which at least 20 of them were "Banner Knights" on the highest tier. I was riding along somwhere in the back of my cav. Now here is the thing, one of these bandits stood there getting two arrows into me. I didn`t pay much attention to the whole thing but it made me thinking, how on earth is there a bandit standing with all the time in the world bothered by nobody after I charged almost 40 cav units towards them? From what I can tell everybody dead but another bandit to my left which just got killed at that moment and this guy just standing there shooting his bow.

that why i use advance and then charge.

The charge command isn't programmed to what we think it is. It literally pursue the nearest enemy until its dead then switch target.

So your lone bandit was lucky his mate was getting pursued by a mob and he was next only after his mate died lol

 

[TheCalradian]

I want to lead an iconic coordinated charge into a single enemy formation like Total War does for a large moral boost of my troops.

However, the game would be do much better than now if you could just give a order and select the unit icon you see when pressing "alt"-key. So that I can actually have my cavalry archers chase down the enemy cavalry archers without starting to tackle the main body of the enemy. Or have my cavalry attack specifically the enemy archers on the other side of the battlefield.

What about all the orders that the boss is giving you if you command a group in his army? Why can't you give such orders?

 

[DanAngleland]

5000 pounds or 2500kgs of pressure hitting you? i will say it would only deal 7 damage at most tbh

What is supposed to weigh that much? Five horses with riders? Certainly not one. Unless you think there are horses which weigh that much....Wikipedia tells me that the heaviest known horse of any kind weighed 1,500kg- and that was an outrageously large shire horse, not a riding horse.

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

I agree Cav is bad and needs help, but what I do i put them on fallow me and go attack the archers (or whatever) and because I'm much faster then my Cav the enemies are always turning to aim at me and my cav get a chance to get in some damage.... sure they're still durpy but they don't get stuck and die as much.

I never select to make Cav though., always archers or horearchers. Inf and Cav just need improvement But I'll take whatever Cav rpisoners I can get and put them to work. Inf too, but in the garrison.