unconnected said:
If you're in open battle you shouldn't bother with worrying about anything on foot. It really doesn't make sense.. On heavy charger with a lance or sword you'll be inflicting 10 times more damage than you will ever on foot. I use the lance because of couched damage and the big speed bonus I get but the horse is really the most dangerous weapon you'll ever get. Consider this: when the battle first starts the enemy comes at you in a nice pretty line, I have the best heavy charger, insanely heavy armor and enough riding skill to gain speed. I can charge through an entire line of 50 troops with my shield down 2-3 times before my horse is low on health. I'm doing 5-20 points of damage to every enemy I run down just from charging and I'm hitting about 70% of them. The first run I'll do a total of 300+ hp of damage, the second time through maybe 200+ and another 200+ on the 3rd run. That's up to 700hp of dealt damage, there's simple nothing else in the game that can even come remotely close to dealing that amount of damage in that short of a time. Plus when I finally send in my troops the enemy are soo weakened that they drop like flies reducing the amount of fatalities my troops suffer.
Agree with everything else you said. And yeah running through the lines on a heavy charger is a nice way to get things started. However, if your army is mostly infantry, you will do SO much damage if after running through the enemy lines on a charger once or twice, you go back to your line, dismount, and break out a great axe. Just start up one flank and you'll literally get kills as fast as you can swing the axe (need decent athletics and PS, of course). Not only does this help reduce casualties, but really, you would be killing at a MUCH higher rate than you could on horseback at this point.
Couched damage actually isn't so good. The number is large but most of it is wasted, and in the time it takes for you to lower the lance again, you could have stabbed with it 3-4 times. If your timing is good (hitting at optimal range) and your horse is going fast, those will usually be one-hit kills as well, which are easier to aim to boot.
The other big advantage is your horse will take much less damage. If you're trying to couch lance an enemy wielding, say, a 2h axe, you won't get hit, but your horse often will. On the other hand, stabbing with a heavy lance is easy to time so that they die before they're in range to do the damage (as an aside, that's a very easy way to solo large groups of sea raiders for some easy starting xp and money - just need a hunter and a preferably heavy lance).
Another advantage is you can keep the shield up much more often, while with couching you're rather defenseless.
Really, couching is only good if you want to take out a rider coming at you with shield up and you're not at risk from any other enemy. Even then it's still a bit of a gamble, they make an unexpected turn last second and you could wind up 1 shotted. It's mostly useful in tournaments, where the jousting lance is just so awful at everything else.
(Same goes to the weapon master book, the trading book, etc.)
