What is the ideal troop composition?

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Emothic

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What is the ideal composition of your army should you go for? How many Infantry, archers, and cavalry? Or Is it possible to just have all cavalry, or majority cavalry, few archers, no infantry? What would be the best?
 
For a beginning approach sure.

Right now I'm heavy archers and cavalry (40% each I'd say) for some reason and it works but takes some careful positioning- I have great cash income so cost isn't a consideration, if it were I'd have a lot less high level cav.

You'll find some of the fun of this game is that there is no death stack that cannot be broken by an alternate composition. Low level troops are always weak, but among the higher up levels some cleverness on your part can ensure you slaughter at higher ratios than any real world commander could ever dream.
 
I don't use many cavalry tbh. I try to have twice as many infantry as archers though. In my current Army of 119, I've got 65 infantry, 35 archers, 19 cavalry. I don't use horse archers because I'm a true Nord and that's a silly way to fight.

I play full realism, and as long as I don't go down, I can usually beat an army in the 160ish range fairly handily, except the Khurzaits. They hold me to equal numbers pretty well, so I've been taking larger archer forces against them.

Side note: Against cavalry heavy armies, just use your smaller cavalry force to distract their cavalry while you infantry ball their limited foot soldiers. Then form a circle of infantry with a square of archers inside. Or vice versa, a circle of archers and square of infantry inside. When they charge the circle, they lose momentum and smash into a ball of infantry ready to grind them down.
 
I watched a guy on twitch going around 50-60% archers, 25-30% inf and around 15-20% cav (shared ranged/melee).
With a full party around 250ish, he won most of his fights with around 0-12 losses(0-6 dead, 0-6 wounded ) each fight if the enemy leader had armies ranging from 100-150.
He fought vs some lords that had around 350 also and had around 50 losses (around 25 dead, 25 wounded)
 
In warband archers were deadly but needed protecting save sharpshooters. Swadian Knights/Mams in open fields took near no loses. In seiges, Husks/Rhodok sargents were unstoppable. In testing the comps in bannerlord, it seems like everything is normalized, and no units comp pulls ahead a whole lot, save cavalry which mostly ends up clearing the battlefield the fastest due to speed to chase everything down. At least after troops are Tier 4+. Before 4, archers seem fairly weak.

1 crazy thing i noticed with a test save, was to siege the same city with 3 setups. 1 with all sharpshooters, 1 with mostly sargents,and 1 with all vanguards for cav units (all the L26 units for vlandian). all 3 fights with 130 troops took the city within a small variance in deaths/wounded. Maybe it was just luck.

If you take a look at stats and how the AI plays, atm I think most units are paste/copy of each other with a couple uniques unlike warband where the units all functioned different and used different weapons.

The best comp I seen so far end is simply using whatever special units in the faction you picked that go over level 30 due to weapon skill level.
 
For roaming the map and general raiding, all horse archers. For bandit hideouts and melee combat quests it's heavy bowman or Heavy infantry with large shields. For sieges it's a mix of archers and heavy infantry. Usually the mounted troops have lower athletics stats so they are less effective when they are forced on foot like for hideouts and sieges. My favorite way to start the game is take the midland palfrey quest that gives 10-12 horses and then never turn them in. Then I go get khuzait recruits and start a company of horse archers for about 200 denars in the first few minutes. You are really mobile which picks up the pace of the early game by quite a bit, it makes trading and choosing fights really easy, and lategame with 100+ cav archers you start getting really cool cantabrian circles against parties that clump together with shields.
 
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Question: i usualy work for Southern empire, but i need advice how too equip Infantry army for fighting cavalry and horse archers?
 
Question: i usualy work for Southern empire, but i need advice how too equip Infantry army for fighting cavalry and horse archers?
If you need to fight against horse archers, my advice would be :
- Give them shields
- Square/Circle formation wait until they have no ammo then charge back
- If you have access to cavalry : try to have heavy cav with shields and charge at them.

Another idea but didn't try : put archers/horse archers inside the circle of shields.
 
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