Woyeyeh said:
I'll tell you 1 thing, guys; the fact that Polish winged hussars are UTTERLY USELESS when unhorsed because they only have a lance with them! They do become pikemen, though.
I have 1.138 due to the fact that I have bugs with my old save on 1.143 but if winged hussar gets dismantled they use sabres. This means that even in sieges they are pretty good with their good armour. I think Winged Hussar is the best unit in the game.
Why?
I have about 30 (vet) Winged Hussars and another 20 normal which makes 50 in total, I shutter first wave of enemy within min no mutter what, even pikeman will get hit with hussar lance before their pike hits me (I do Have hand crafted full eq for Winged Hussar). After first wave of enemies is destroyed its just child's play. On Normal difficulty with that amount of winged hussars I rarely lose more than 2-5 of them and due to high surgery often all my Winged Hussars stay alive, most of my casualties are different cavalry units (I don't use any Inf in open field, only for sieges).
As to how gather so many. First attack small patrols and like with winged hussar as prisoners, later on when you pledge loyalty to Poland don't stop attacking those patrols even when you can recruit Winged Hussars. Until you get high enough numbers of them it will be hard to gather any significant number of them, as in low numbers they have pretty high death ratio (at least for me). But above 30 you pretty much kick anyone ass, the only other challenge would be a large party with similar amount of Winged Hussars. (However they are pretty costly especially veterans).
When on foot they are not too bad they have sabres and good armour so they don't die straight away. In siege when composed with good ranged units they are pretty useful, just dwindle the walls with marksman and when they run out of ammo you can charge the walls Winged Hussars should be capable of taking anything that's left. If you have the money (+-20000) you can try bribing defenders to open the gates which would allow your hussars to charge mounted.
Sorry for Bad English its not my native.
(I had to tweak files to create troop trees as there is some kind of bug for levelling units in 1.138, no idea if it was fixed in later versions)