View Full Version : How Effective Do You Think Militia Spearmen, and Spearmen In General Should Be?
I'm starting this thread as another thread that is a bug fixing thread has degenerated into a: "Cav should dominate the early game at the exclusion of all melee infantry" thread.
Since the thread is about finding and fixing bugs and creating a balanced game as a result, such unbalancing suggestions contribute nothing to the real purpose of the thread. So this once I figured I'd start them a thread on the matter to argue it out in and hopefully leave the bug fixing threads to bug fixing:clown:.
So How do You think Spears should do vs. cav?
My basic line is that whatever era it becomes available in it should beat the cav of that era, and be able to inflict heavy losses on the next era up's cav before being destroyed, (that’s way it doesn’t become instantly outdated).
This seems balanced in m mind and is similar to what the Shield Fix produces.
Now Post your own opinions and why~:).
Militia spear should be pretty weak. Town militia should fall to basically anything, and proper militia spearmen should be able to hold Feudal Knights at best imho. Professional spearmen are another story, they should be able to do ok against Chivalrics perhaps... but they should all fail against heavy infantry of approximately equal "tier". I like the rock/paper/scissors system.
Way I see it is very simple. It's pretty much kinda what you said already. Anyway, I want spearmen to hack cavalry to pieces, but I want no overkill --> example: if they're very well-armoured horsemen and horses, surely spearmen must have some trouble with 'em.
@Musashi: I’m largely fine with that, you have to remember that whilst fixed Papal Guard can beat Chivalric Knights head on, they do suffer a lot of losses, (about 50%), and most of these are from the effects of the initial Formed Charge. It just happens to kill half the knights and the other half die fast on he charge too. I doubt Papal Guard cold even take on any non-spear infantry above Peasants.
Town Militia actually have Light-Spears (short spears basically), and thus have no penalty vs. infantry. With their better stats and slight anti-cav bonuses they do fine. hey get beat by most cav charges with few losses inflicted. But in close quarters they make good backup and are great at holding walls I imagine.
My main Bone of contention with having weak Spear Militia is that they are the only SP anti-cav unit many western European factions get prior to Pike units. So without them being able to give cav serious issues, it breaks play balance badly. Whish is more important than historical accuracy to me.
Some factions are meant to be weak in infantry though. A lot of factions with great cavalry are deliberately neutered in terms of their line troops, in order to force them to field more cavalry.
Well of course. But some arn't.
The problem is if Italian spear militia and armoured sarges are the only good non-pike cav counters most armies have no cav counters in the early stages (beyond their own cav), and some still don't have enough into the late game.
Pike foot armies for example rely on them to protect their flanks from cav as pikes turn too slow. Spanish defintly rely on them for anti-cav infantry, and they have an otherwise decent unit lineup.
Again, not every faction is meant to be able to field a foot army and win.
More to the point, many many factions have weak spears but strong shock infantry. Their spears are meant to receive charges and simply die slowly enough that the shock infantry can work over the enemy engaging the spears.
Very few factions are meant to have a cavalry counter that can simply grind the cav up on their own.
General Zhukov
01-16-2007, 23:06
I consider militia spearmen to be little better than peasants. In fact, they are peasants except for one point of attack, a nice shield, and an unspecified "bonus vs. cavalry". What exactly is that bonus? +3 attack? Doubled attack? It matters.
Also, spear militia cost about 1/3 of your average mounted knight. Their hand spears shouldn't do anything special vs. a heavy charge, but with the bonus in mind, they should be able to inflict minimal to moderate casualties in the general melee. That is opposed to town militia, which do and probably should inflict minimal to no casualties. Professional spearmen should do serious damage to cav in a general melee, to the point of forcing late era knights to withdraw. Spearmen should not be able to resist any kind of heavy infantry, but even the cheap cheap pike milita unit can cause 30% casualties to dismounted knights using swordplay. That is quite effective from a logistical point of view.
Nothing from any era should stand against a frontal charge by knights except a braced pike formation. IMO knights, and cavalry in general, do and should dominate this game all the way up to pikes. And even then, there are ways for the canny cavalry commander to break up and defeat pike-based armies.
@Zhurkov: Your one of the history trumps balance guys I take it. All I’ll say is that for me I’m more interested in balance and thus I don't CARE what would have happened historically.
As an aside, the knights I'd expect them to beat are actually only a half again as expensive as them and considering they are anti-cav I’d expect them to beat these knight with heavy losses, (with silver armour they do this great for me with my shield fix).
The bonuses are as follows: 8 attack extra against cav, reflect charge abilities, (I presume this means that they get the attack bonus of the enemies Charge value as well), and an as yet undisclosed extra.
Ignoring the unknown extra, Militia Spearmen get 5+8+6 against charging mailed/fuedal knights for attack. Or 19 attack. The Knights get 16 attack.
Very few factions are meant to have a cavalry counter that can simply grind the cav up on their own.
The problem is this is exactly what ALL spear units are actually supposed to do.
I also did a quick check of unit lists. England, Scotland, Portugual, Hungary, Poland, and Spain all lack decent Spears. The 4 Italians get their spear militia and France and HRE get armoured spears. Denmark seemed weak here too.
Again, not every faction is meant to be able to field a foot army and win.
Of course not. but without good spears, enemy cav render any foot forces totally pointless unless they are Dismounted Saxon Knights or better, (13/20 is about the minimum, give or take a bit).
Their spears are meant to receive charges and simply die slowly enough that the shock infantry can work over the enemy engaging the spears.
The problem is, that isn't what happens with spear vs. cav or anything vs. 2-hander fights though.
Their are 2 possibilities, (spears 3 ranks deep):
1. The cav charges in and badly damages out the front rank of spearmen but they also suffer heavy damage to their own front rank. The second rank of knights then hits and wipes out the remnants of the front rank and badly damages the second rank whilst suffers moderate damage, (charge effects have dropped off by this point so the reflect charge seems less deadly). After this about half the knights and half the spearmen are dead. The spearmen then massacre the remaining knights.
2. The Knights charge into and annihilate the first 2 ranks for the loss of their own front rank and lightly/moderately damage the 3rd rank. about 6 or 7 seconds later the spearmen rout with about half the enemy knights dead. Occasionally a really powerful cav unit will have more than half left.
Their isn't any situation in which spears pin" cav that I’ve been able to produce, they either take the charge with heavy losses on both sides and win by themselves. Or take it with decimation on their side and light to moderate losses to the cav. Theirs never any spearmen grinding up cav moments because spearmen that aren’t annihilated by the charge wipe out the knights normally.
General Zhukov
01-17-2007, 00:31
@Zhurkov: Your one of the history trumps balance guys I take it.
That's a fair statement. I would like the units to perform roughly as their historical counterparts did.
The bonuses are as follows: 8 attack extra against cav, reflect charge abilities, (I presume this means that they get the attack bonus of the enemies Charge value as well), and an as yet undisclosed extra.
Wow, I didn't know the spearmen bonuses vs. cav were that extensive. That's militia spearmen too? Those really do seem to justify cav losing a decent amount on the charge. And with 13 unupgraded attack in the general melee, they should give any knights a stiff fight. But I wonder if there are other factors in play that skew the results of cavalry versus infantry?
Of course not. but without good spears, enemy cav render any foot forces totally pointless unless they are Dismounted Saxon Knights or better, (13/20 is about the minimum, give or take a bit).
As I understand it, mounted knights really did dominate the field in western Europe during most of this period. In the vanilla version of the game that is modeled pretty well.
Blademun
01-17-2007, 00:39
I've already stated my opinion on spears plenty. I believe spear milita should be weak and Professional spearmen like Armoured Sarges should be more effective.
Doesn't this forum have a Poll function? Thats what this post needs, a poll.
That's a fair statement. I would like the units to perform roughly as their historical counterparts did.
AND
As I understand it, mounted knights really did dominate the field in western Europe during most of this period. In the vanilla version of the game that is modeled pretty well.
As I say, I prefer balance to trump history where necessary. However, I respect your opinions nonetheless. to each their own, (and just a few years ago I’d have had your view on the matter too).
Wow, I didn't know the spearmen bonuses vs. cav were that extensive. That's militia spearmen too? Those really do seem to justify cav losing a decent amount on the charge. And with 13 unupgraded attack in the general melee, they should give any knights a stiff fight. But I wonder if there are other factors in play that skew the results of cavalry versus infantry?
Yeah, it's surprisingly extensive. Papal Guard for example have 22 attack in general melee, and 28 vs. charging Feudal. 30 vs. charging Chivalric's. They can actually beat said Chivalric with some guys left even if the Chivalric charge. 3 gold Chevrons and weapons upgrade adds 4 to those values so it's now 26, 32, and 36 respectively.
For what it's worth, Militia Spearmen can beat Chivalric’s in general melee, if the Chivalric’s don't get to charge them.
You're having different results than I am Carl... I can field a bunch of Spear Militia, and while they'll take heavy losses on a charge vs say, Feudal Knights, the kill rate then drops quite low... The Feudal Knights will win in the end, but it's a MUCH slower process than if they had charged say, my dismounted knights, or axemen, or something along those lines. Once they're held up like that, my dismounted knights, or axemen can annihilate them by sweeping in from the flanks.
Or I can bring in cavalry to countercharge.
It does work for me.
@Musahsi: How do you fix your sheilds? last time i heard you where using double the sheild skill added to the defence skill wern't you? or have you switched?
If you don't zero the sheild value I find they don't brace properly and the reflect charge effects don't go off fully as a result, (this is what kills the Knights on contact with the spearmen). It also slows down the kill rate in general melee considrebly.
I actually haven't applied a fix. I don't like the side effects of the fixes, and I like the game well enough in it's current form that I'm not going to make such a drastic change. I'll simply wait for the patch.
But even in the vanilla game I find that spearmen, even when they will ultimately lose to a cavalry squad, will hold them longer than a unit of shock infantry would have. Most shock infantry go down like flies vs. cavalry, which is how the RPS balance was meant to work.
That explains it. I use the sheild Fix, (I thought i'd stated that). When this happens:
1. The cav charges in and badly damages out the front rank of spearmen but they also suffer heavy damage to their own front rank. The second rank of knights then hits and wipes out the remnants of the front rank and badly damages the second rank whilst suffers moderate damage, (charge effects have dropped off by this point so the reflect charge seems less deadly). After this about half the knights and half the spearmen are dead. The spearmen then massacre the remaining knights.
The effect of the cav contacting the spearmen looks very similar to that of cav contacting braced Pikes with the exception that the cav take most of the front row of Spearmen with them. Spea vs. cav fights are over VERY quickly if you apply it.
antisocialmunky
01-17-2007, 01:18
To be honest, I rather have a more historic feeling campaign and a balanced MP with price tweaks. Seriously, balance is only requisite on MP.
Not for me it isn't. Besides, no price tweaks (beyond making all cav cost 3 times as muc in MP), would fix the issue.
Carl: My point is that the cavalry, even when they took significant losses in the charge, will generally win in the melee that follows. Spearmen suck in protracted melee. But they live long enough to allow me to flank.
I'm not really sure what I think the overall fights should look like between spear units and cavalry, but on one point I'm very certain:
I feel that a spear unit able to brace for the incoming cavalry should cause MAD during the initial charge.
I feel this way because cavalry cannot simply trample over guys with spears without largely getting the horses impaled on the veritable wall of spears at the same time. The end result of this ought to be that many horses die, ejecting their riders long distances, those wounded/dead horses rolling through the enemy ranks as high speed projectiles steamrolling the enemy men as well as the ejected riders of its own unit (and their own riders if they weren't thrown from the saddle). I don't really mind that the game doesn't show the spearmen bracing the spears to receive the charge... the point is that they do brace, and the reality of why it was done IS to set the spear, thus hopefully killing the incoming horse... so that kind of action and intent should be reflected in in-game results IMO. Some other factors should perhaps be considered in determining how successful the spearmen are in making that initial stand:
- Mental factors. Training and state of mind are important here, as troops in this situation would be prone to trying to run away in fear, or possibly just freezing up as the mass of cavalry descended on them at high speed. Spear militia would not be less effective because of their equipment or even their training so much as because of their lack of being hardened military men capable of standing tall in such a frightening situation.
- Spearman defense stats. I think this follows logically since units with higher armor/skill/shield values should be able to absorb/avoid/deflect otherwise deadly blows a bit better, even during a charge. I say avoid for skill as I commonly conceptualize it as not only ability to parry, but also ability to actively avoid blows in melee combat. One doesn't have to actually touch an opponent's weapon in order to avoid it, and sometimes simply dodging a blow is far easier and more practical.
- Cavalry defense stats. Again it seems only logical to suggest that a more well-defended knight and horse should in fact survive better.
Offensive stats are of secondary importance here IMO, as I can't imagine what you would do to a long spear or lance's construction to make it any more effective in this situation. The sheer speed and force behind the weapons in this situation pretty much means any grade weapon provided it is constructed correctly will get the job done. IMO this is exactly the reason for the "reflect charge" ability the spears have: that it applies the power of the knight's charge to the attack power of the spear too, which should be the case as the force of the horse hitting the spear would equal that behind the lance during the charge.
Perhaps the offensive stats are different more than anything to indicate the skill level of the given unit using the weapon... which I would freely admit should have some effect: a more capable spearman or knight can in fact do more even in this situation to ensure his blow strikes true than a less capable one can.
To be honest, MAD on impact is my only real concern here, and I'll be largely happy as long as it happens, as it ought to be an unavoidable consequence of cavalry charging into spears. Cavalry charging into a spear formation is really scary stuff from a physics perspective... (and I can only imagine IRL as well for those unlucky enough to have faced it)
I never could get cav to suffer significant losses when charging spearmen in vanillia myself. Although i did allways use uard Mode back then.
With the sheild fix the Spears will even win in protracted melee. Hell the adviser even says it's a bad idea to frontal charge spearmen and that attacking engaged cav with spearmen is a good idea. If the spearmen arn't likliy to beat the cav, why say that. Thats a good indicator of where CA wanted them to be IMO. Namely that the adviser really dosen't think you should get cav in any kind of fight with spears.
That's gonna be a fairly hefty neutering for cavalry, if even weak spears become death for them. It's a bit too much, IMHO.
I really don't think spears should be good for killing much of anything. They should be a defensive line troop.
They arn't death to everything with the fix. But Militia Spearmen can beat Maileds with heavy losses, and fuedals the same with silver armour. So high end cav can beat weak spears. But spears of a given era will typicly beat cav of the same era. Or cav an era upwards if they have enough upgrades.
Of course, I had 8 gold armour Spera Militia units and 4 1 Bronze Chevron, 1 weapon and bronze armour Armoured Sarghes take on and defeat a 20 stack army of french cav (8 knightly Orders, 8 Chivalric/noble knights and some lancers). However it needed close grouping of units in Schiltrom formation to pull it off. A single missile unit would have had a feild day.
My point is that I just don't like the idea of spearmen having a good kill rate. I don't think they should be good on the offense.
pike master
01-17-2007, 02:26
i think they should be made as cheap as pike units since they arnt much better than peasants. i have no problem with a company of knights (40) rolling over (75) men but at least if they are cheaper you can link and block them together or you can form super schiltroms of superimposed spearmen units that would make 150 vs 40 horse which is more believable of what would be needed to stop heavy cavalry.
I think spears should be balanced according to their historical effectiveness. The problem is, no one knows for sure how effective they were in history. :shrug:
I'm not really interested in discussions about "balance" that pay no regard to history or plausiblity. Why play Medieval Total War at all, if you don't care for the realism - just find some arbitrary rock-paper-scissors game and have fun tweaking it to be perfectly mathematically "balanced". (I understand balance is important in MP, but there's another forum for that particular discussion.)
Personally, I think it is fine that a well armoured knight who has trained for combat all his life and has a big strong horse should be able to beat up vanilla militia spearmen. I've read an account of a handful (I think it was seven or so?) feudal knights defeating about 100 Welsh spearmen. And knights do seem to have been the dominant arm in most medieval battles. The basic militia spearmen should be just filler units - they perform that role fairly well (ie are pretty bad) already in M2TW.
BUT, if you get a well armoured knight who has trained for combat all his life and stick him on the ground with a bunch of fellow stout hearted men, the story changes. My money then would be on such foot to be able to beat off their mounted counterparts. That's why the French knights started fighting dismounted in the Hundred Years Wars - they could not run down the English dismounted knights and, no, it was not the longbowmen that stopped them doing so.
Unfortunately, a lot of this is messed up in the Total War system thanks to the arbitrary and ahistorical sword vs spear unit distinction. Dismounted English and French men-at-arms often used lances (cut down or not) - ie spears - but we don't really have such top of the range spear-armed units in the game. And, of course, they would probably have mini-arsenals of poleaxes, swords, maces, daggers etc for when the fighting got up close and personal. I guess we have the DEK and the billmen as compensation, but currently, they are useless against cav.
Total war does have some intermediate spear units - the Italian militias, armoured sergeants etc. I see them stopping mounted knights due to decent morale and numbers. It would probably degenerate into a bit of a shoving match, as at Courtrai, but in the end my money would be on the foot if they were attacked frontally. M2TW has the balance here wrong, IMO. Mercenary spearmen and the like die too much to cavalry charges thanks to the shield bug or whatever. MTW/VI ended up with the balance between spears and knights about right, IMO: negate the cavalry charge, then allow slow, mutually assured destruction. The spears were a bit too strong against heavy cav in STW and MTW 1.0, IMO, although I gather the MP folk liked them that way for "balance".
I'm not really interested in discussions about "balance" that pay no regard to history or plausibility. Why play Medieval Total War at all, if you don't care for the realism - just find some arbitrary rock-paper-scissors game and have fun tweaking it to be perfectly mathematically "balanced". (I understand balance is important in MP, but there's another forum for that particular discussion.)
Likewise, no one should be interested in discussions of history or plausibility that pay no regard to balance. I'm not saying don't talk about history... just don't project history directly onto the game without regard to how it affects the game play (and resulting fun of the game). An important fact of the game is that it has multiple units. You can't just make knights into a medieval wrecking ball no matter what they were really like in history, or suddenly no other unit has purpose. Each one must be useful for something, otherwise why is it in the game at all? I do not demand some sort of perfect mathematical balance be applied to the game, but it is a cornerstone of good game design for each unit to be good for something on the battlefield, and encourages better tactics as well (by providing actual viable options for players to explore instead of the linearity of "this is the only way that works" which focusing everything on historical accuracy can sometimes cause). I don't want to have a unit at my disposal that I can't look at and say "I should recruit that unit because it fills role 'x' in my army..." even if that roll is as narrow as "I hold against cavalry, and roll over to everything else." Currently spear units suck so badly that they in fact have no use, which should never happen to a unit.
The other important point I wish to make is that none of us is here strictly because we like history. If that were the case, we'd be out doing re-enactments, watching the history channel, and doing various other activities that don't involve gaming. The fact that we are also gamers indicates the nature of the genre: historical gaming. If either one is allowed to dominate the other, the genre ceases to exist, falling instead into historical simulation or ahistorical turn-based strategy. It is only by allowing each to influence the other, to counterbalance and temper the other's ideas, that we can even hope to maintain such a delicate balance, and thus be true to the spirit of the genre. So while it is possible to discuss history without gaming implications, and the game without historical accuracy, we will need to discuss them both at the same time in order to arrive at anything remotely reasonable to apply to the game.
Zenicetus
01-17-2007, 06:10
Likewise, no one should be interested in discussions of history or plausibility that pay no regard to balance. I'm not saying don't talk about history... just don't project history directly onto the game without regard to how it affects the game play (and resulting fun of the game). An important fact of the game is that it has multiple units. You can't just make knights into a medieval wrecking ball no matter what they were really like in history, or suddenly no other unit has purpose. Each one must be useful for something, otherwise why is it in the game at all? I do not demand some sort of perfect mathematical balance be applied to the game, but it is a cornerstone of good game design for each unit to be good for something on the battlefield, and encourages better tactics as well (by providing actual viable options for players to explore instead of the linearity of "this is the only way that works" which focusing everything on historical accuracy can sometimes cause).
IMO, people arguing for "unit balance" under all conditions are ignoring what historical accuracy brings to the game, in terms of replayability. I enjoyed playing the Turks after my first big campaign as a European faction, precisely because that faction forced me (through lack of decent infantry in the early game) to learn how to use HA's better.
Do we really want all factions to have the same basic "flavor" and combat tactics, with just different unit appearance?
imo:
If cavalry frontal charge a spear unit, BOTH first ranks should be decimated or rather totally destroyed. Horse impaling themselves onto a spear WILL die. The mass + speed of horse and man charging onto a human (spear unit) WILL crush him.
The second rank's performance will be determined by other factors. Spear units professionalism for example. A professional unit will form up quickly into another spear wall, cavalry continue to impale themselves. With momentum large dissipated, spear units then take some damage but not much. The professional spear unit should win ANY cavalry from the front.
Then morale comes into play. Morale determines whether the formation will be disintegrated after the charge and if the cavalry will rout. Highly trained cavalry will not rout, but they will not be able to kill a lot, if any more spear units as they cannot breach the well formed spear wall. It descends into a stalemate to be broken by flanking units.
If spear units cannot maintain their formation (failed the morale roll), melee rules will apply. Spear unit's professionalism will also extend to their fighting technique (bonus versus cavalry) which will counter by cavalry's armor and professionalism.
If a spear unit is lousy, they shouldn't be able to do much beyond bracing for first charge. They receive no bonus versu cavalry as they never really trained to do so. Most cavalry (after first rank is gone) should have the advantage, fighting from a higher position on their horse. The more heavily armored and skilled the cavalry, the less loss they will take in the ensuing melee.
History part: I agree with econ21 on this. The spearmen issue is tricky because the whole concept of disciplined spear infantry, or any infantry for that matter, in the Middle Ages is doubtful at best. Could spear infantry hold off cavalry? Yes, most definitely. Were there large numbers of disciplined infantry in the Middle Ages? History suggests not. The only serious fighting men were the knights and their retainers (and the various mercs) and they mostly preferred to fight on horseback. Thus horsemen ruled the battlefield, while infantry was often relegated to moral support and baggage train duty (just like my Gendarmes).
The distinction between swords and spears (and pikes) in Total War is artificially imposed for variety's sake. Dismounted knights used their lances as pikes against each other at Agincourt, the English falling back a spear's length before the French onslaught. Swords would of course have been preferred for single combat, but spears and polearms seem to have been the staple infantry weapon throughout history for massed combat.
Of course, spearmen are in the game, they behave like professional, disciplined infantry, they are supposed to be good against cavalry but not so good against swordsmen. It works, no reason to change the basic setup just to satisfy doubtful historical evidence.
Game part: Discounting the dismounted knights, spears seem to be the basic infantry for most factions. You get sergeant spearmen for the Catholics and elite spear militia for the Muslims. You don't get any cheap swords for many factions. So, if the basic spearmen are hedgehogs of death for cavalry, then the only use for the knights is running down archers until, ironically, more 'advanced' infantry units show up that were stupid enough to leave their spears at home. That doesn't strike me as fun. A moderate buffing of spearmen charge resistance to the front against cavalry charges is what I would like to see, plus fixing whatever shield bug is holding the spearmen back in melee. If fixing the shields also improves their charge resistance, then maybe that is all that is needed. The spearmen should be able to hold against a cavalry charge from the front against same-era knights, so that the cavalry player needs to actively outflank instead of brainlessly charging directly at the enemy line. 'Hold' does not mean 'suffer no casualties while killing the entire front rank of horsemen', but instead means that the spearmen should not get pulverized like they do now and should suffer maybe 10-20% losses from the initial charge instead of 80-90% like they do now.
I would suggest that spearmen also be made slightly better against swordsmen and the like, making them more 'defensive' combat troops rather than dedicated anti-cavalry troops that get beaten up by anything that goes on two legs, even by peasants. Swordsmen would be used to spearhead attacks and outflank, while spearmen hold the line. This was the balance of MTW and I thought it worked quite well. Of course, the swordsmen will often beat the spearmen because they are higher quality troops in general, but this should not happen 'just because swords pwn spears', but because elite troops beat merely average ones. Right now spearmen have very low attack values that make them easy prey for swordsmen. Buff them up a bit so they can compete, even if they lose eventually.
IMO, people arguing for "unit balance" under all conditions are ignoring what historical accuracy brings to the game, in terms of replayability. I enjoyed playing the Turks after my first big campaign as a European faction, precisely because that faction forced me (through lack of decent infantry in the early game) to learn how to use HA's better.
Do we really want all factions to have the same basic "flavor" and combat tactics, with just different unit appearance?
I completely agree, and would add that people arguing for "historical accuracy" under all conditions are ignoring what unit balance brings to the game, in terms of a full, rich, and varied gaming experience. No one would want to play a game where your every move was dictated by history, and if you didn't mass produce armies with compositions shown historically to work the best, you would be beaten easily by your foes who did so. Just as we both enjoy having varied units at our disposal when playing different factions, so do I enjoy the ability to build differently composed yet still viable armies within the same faction. This was of course the heart of my previous post: that one pillar without the other destroys the game.
As for the rest of your post, of course we do not want every faction to have the same flavor and tactics, with only a different look. The situation of the Turks lacking good infantry, however, is not analogous to that of the numerous factions that have useless spear units. The former I have no problem with, as it does not neuter the tactical options at your disposal: infantry exist primarily to battle other infantry, which the turks are more than capable of doing very effectively with HAs and early mounted melee units instead... units that in fact probably give you more tactical flexibility and options than infantry would. You won't be using infantry, so the flavor, unit, and tactics will all be different, but you will still accomplish a similar end. European armies lacking any decent anti-cavalry options until reaching pikes, on the other hand, are left with no viable tactic against cavalry. One could try to accomplish this with archers, but they will not be able to kill multiple units of knights before they can shred the entire battlefield.
Each faction needs some reasonable thing to do about cavalry, infantry, and archers, so that some strategy is possible for the player to win with. If this is taken away, it actually becomes possible that the computer can paint the player into so much of a corner that it is inescapable no matter how well the player plays or what units he tries to employ. I believe that some Catholic factions are made so weak by having horrible spear units that a cavalry-heavy attack on them might literally be impossible to beat... and everyone knows that the first rule of a game is that it must always be winnable. I don't mind if I'm beaten by AI that outplays me, but the potential to lose because there is no option that can make me able to win is absolutely unacceptable.
edit: Quoted the post I was referring to, as other posts happened while I was thinking and typing.
Lord_hazard
01-17-2007, 09:17
I would say it kinda depends on what kind of cavalry were talking about, normally knights using lances would be able to outreach the normal spear and then they would prob crush their way through the first lines of men.
But spearmen in this game should as a rule always be a match for cavalry of the same era or atleast be able to hold their own against them.
Vinsitor
01-17-2007, 09:55
So How do You think Spears should do vs. cav?
I think spear is the easiest weapon to use and it is good to mantain the distance from the enemy and hit him, expecially light armoured cav.
I think that shield+spears have to absorb FRONTAL heavy cav charge (cav charge bonus has to have a MALUS against spear+shield units) and hold the ground, it doesn't matter their kill ratio (but they can have some kind of little bonus in melee).
The difference among cheap and expensive spears is above all the morale, then the defensive equipmend. But I think the bonus has to be first of all against cav charge.
I am wondering (rather pathetically as I don't have the full game) if it wouldn't work better to try to negate the charge bonus against spears. You wonder how many horses would charge if the spearmen were in formation and brave enough to stay that way.
Vinsitor
01-17-2007, 10:11
I'm not really interested in discussions about "balance" that pay no regard to history or plausiblity. Why play Medieval Total War at all, if you don't care for the realism - just find some arbitrary rock-paper-scissors game and have fun tweaking it to be perfectly mathematically "balanced". (I understand balance is important in MP, but there's another forum for that particular discussion.)
I completely disagree. Actually the game is soo umbalanced 'cause of this "historical" heavy cav charge power (is it really HISTORICAL??? Or maybe is it only a French ballads influence? Where is history?) that you can win the whole campaing playing with an "all heavy cav army", charging and recharging on units all the time and killing 30/50 men at any impact, without loosing men.
Try it to believe. Is it historical? I don't think so. Is it balanced, of corse not. Is it FUNNY? Completely not for me.
Heavy cav is so overpowered that the other hundred of units are useless in the game.
Any unit must have a counterpart, to be usefull in any way. And IMO light/heavy spears have to counter light/heavy cavs
I am wondering (rather pathetically as I don't have the full game) if it wouldn't work better to try to negate the charge bonus against spears. You wonder how many horses would charge if the spearmen were in formation and brave enough to stay that way.
That's the heart of the issue. I suspect CA intended that spears do negate the charge bonus (frontally). I believe that's been true in all TW games to date - certainly it is in STW and MTW. But for some reason it does not seem to work as intended in M2TW. I personally hope and expect spears will get a boost with the next patch, for both gameplay and historical reasons.
Some folk disagree with CAs intention for historical reasons and think that knights should be able to smash up spears, which is what actually happens in the game at the moment. I am not really one of those folk, although from past debates at the Org (dig up the epic "myth of the cavalry charge" thread from MTW), I concede there is evidence for and against.
I completely disagree. Actually the game is soo umbalanced 'cause of this "historical" heavy cav charge power ...
If you read my first post in this thread carefully, you may find we agree more than we disagree.
Vinsitor
01-17-2007, 10:17
I am wondering (rather pathetically as I don't have the full game) if it wouldn't work better to try to negate the charge bonus against spears. You wonder how many horses would charge if the spearmen were in formation and brave enough to stay that way.
Yes I agree. :yes: Charge is a way to break unit's formation and to fear fighting men, not to kill them.
Once a unit have lost its formation and cohesion (expecially spears), charge has to be effective against it.
My point is that I just don't like the idea of spearmen having a good kill rate. I don't think they should be good on the offense.
I completely agree.
I have been reading up on some battle-accounts from the spanish Reconquista, and there's a lot of cav vs. spear going on there, with the quality of the cav ranging from the lightest jinetes and arab auxiliaries to the heavier late-era spanish knights and their granadine counterparts, and the quality of the spears ranging from unwilling and hastily levied peasants to the superb Lamtuna berbers and sergeants of the Order of Santiago.
One pattern that I often see is the repeated, and sometimes futile, attempts of heavy cavalry to break spearwalls, having little effect on either side. Spearmen of sufficient morale and discipline could certainly resist cavalry attacks, almost regardless of the skill of the cavalry, but they were also unable to damage the cavalry enough to render squadrons combat-ineffective, allowing them to keep retreating, regrouping and charging back in. This could keep on for hours at times.
Thus, the desired results, would be for a cavalry charge to either succeed (against poor spears) with the spears being routed on contact, or fail (against good spears, like dismounted MAA) with the cavalry having the option of fighting it out or retreating, but suffering little-to-no damage on the initial charge. If the cavalry chose to retreat, they should need a period of regrouping and rest during which they are vulnerable to counter-attack by enemy cavalry. This would, IMO, mirror the historical interactions between these unit-types.
"But if spears can't kill cavalry, what are they good for? What's the counter for cavalry, then?!?"
Medieval tactics didn't follow simple RPS mechanics; the counter for cavalry, at least in the early period, was your own cavalry. The function of infantry was not to be anti-anything, but to aid in sieges and fighting in bad terrain. The Moors, who actually had decent spearmen in the early period, used their spearmen as a moving fortress on the battlefield, creating an area where their own cavalry could rest and regroup between offensive action. Their spearmen were valuable to their tactics, even if they didn't kill anything on their own. Similarly, crusaders in the levant used their sergeants to protect their cavalry from missiles until they were ready to charge. I doubt the spearwall at Dorylaeum killed very many turkish horsearchers, but they were still instrumental in the defeat of the turkish army. Without them, the first crusade would have ended right there. And so on. The role of the medieval infantryman was not glorious, but they weren't useless either, as evidenced by their usage.
As for balancing: Insisting on unit-to-unit balance seems rather myopic to me. Playing as the Turks, I don't care that I don't have effective spears, because their historical tactics of wearing down the opposing heavy cavalry with cheap HAs before meeting them with their own heavies, actually work. Playing as the Danes, I don't care that I don't have good spears, as this is made up for by my much better melee infantry, and using archers and terrain I can still achieve victory against cavalry-heavy foes.
Balance is, IMO, achieved when no single faction has a massive blind-side that can be exploited for easy victory, and sufficient options to deal with or work around all situations they might encounter.
There's more to tactics than simply meeting scissors with rocks.
People asking for the rock, paper, scissor balance are not asking for strict adherence to it There will be exceptions, and there are other unit types etc. But atm in game spearmen ARE useless. They have always been used in the TW games to counter cav, but in M2TW they are uesless at it. But light spears should still be mauled by heavy cav, and heavy spears should still suffer large casualties in the charge.
But atm in game spearmen ARE useless. They have always been used in the TW games to counter cav, but in M2TW they are uesless at it.
I do not contend this point, they very well may be. My post concerns how I believe it should be, as per the OP, not how I perceive it to be in the present version.
Refer to original MTW, where the spearmen got a bonus to DEFENSE rather than attack vs cavalry. This made them good at holding the line defensively until something else intervened (missiles, swords or their own cavalry) but they were not exceptionally good at killing anything themselves.
I agree that massed charge should overcome spears. You should lose a few knights, but that's it. Spears are incredibly common, and making them able to stand up to a charge means you might as well remove cavalry from the game entirely. A guy with a long-reach weapon, large shield, and armor is a defensive soldier. I agree with the above point about them getting a defense bonus, rather than an offensive one.
Also, I think history is more important than balance. There's no point having a game called Medieval: Total War that bares no resemblance whatsoever to medieval warfare. If I just wanted raw stats, I'd play with a graphing calculator.
Also, I think history is more important than balance. There's no point having a game called Medieval: Total War that bares no resemblance whatsoever to medieval warfare. If I just wanted raw stats, I'd play with a graphing calculator.
Yet the kind of balance you are against is what made the original Medieval Total War such a good game in terms of battles as things were nicely balanced.
I agree that massed charge should overcome spears. You should lose a few knights, but that's it. Spears are incredibly common, and making them able to stand up to a charge means you might as well remove cavalry from the game entirely. A guy with a long-reach weapon, large shield, and armor is a defensive soldier. I agree with the above point about them getting a defense bonus, rather than an offensive one.
And spearmen on the move should be decimated by cav. Searmen holding ground should be able to resist cav charges whilst losng lots of troops, unless they've low level spearmen against high level cav in which case they should be killed.
Spears are incredibly common, and making them able to stand up to a charge means you might as well remove cavalry from the game entirely.
I can see your point, as I found knights rather optional in MTW, where they lacked the kick they have in M2TW.
But whether you are right depends on some other factors. For example, I am used to cavalry in Rome Total Realism Platinum Edition, where they devastating on the charge but fragile (not unlike M2TW). They are also very expensive. You would never dream of charging heavy infantry frontally. But nonetheless, they are still the decisive arm because of flank and rear charges. In TW, causing lots of casualties quickly can rout even high morale troops (RTR has sky high morale). Cavalry charging the flank of engaged spears could still cause such casualties, even if they were buffed to be resistant to frontal charges. This means a handful of cavalry can still have a disproportionate effect on a battle, setting off chain routs.
And I have not even mentioned the crucial role of cavalry in hunting down routers. This has been crucial from STW onwards, reflecting Napoleon's dictum that no victory is decisive without cavalry.
Vinsitor
01-17-2007, 14:20
Spears are incredibly common, and making them able to stand up to a charge means you might as well remove cavalry from the game entirely. .
Cavalry is god for it's mobility on the battlefield. If you know Total War games you would know that cavalry is usefull even if spears or any unit can stand up to a cav's frontal charge, because of flanking.
Also, I think history is more important than balance. There's no point having a game called Medieval: Total War that bares no resemblance whatsoever to medieval warfare. If I just wanted raw stats, I'd play with a graphing calculator.
You think that this game is historical accurate then...
I'm not "against" balance. There’s no unbridgeable dichotomy between game balance and history. I want both.
What I am against is making the entire game to boil down to a game of rock/paper/spearmen that could be mastered in a weekend by a blind monkey because all possible tactics are laid out on the character detail screen.
I've NEVER had a problem dealing with charges. Massed charges already have limits. They’re dictated by terrain, unit cohesion, and luck, a fact everyone complains about but nobody seems to be taking into account. Position yourself well, and you’ll never see one. On the rare occasions in which I am hit by one, I have no problem killing most of the knights that don’t fall with the initial charge with nearby units and the scattered survivors, all before they can withdraw, in the rare cases when they aren't bogged down in an unwinnable melee with the rest of my forces.
Pikemen and high level spearmen should be death for horses, true, but the idea that your average Joe off the filthy medieval streets could stand up to thousands of pounds of steel and stallion charging him down just because he has a pointy rock tied to a stick is silly. If that were anything even approaching reality, we'd all thrill to the legendary exploits of King Arthur and his Spear Infantry of the Round Table.
The real problem with spearmen is not that they’re ineffective against cavalry, it’s that they’re ineffective against everything else in the entire game, and are all you have in the early game, making it kind of a dull slog until you get swordsmen.
General Zhukov
01-17-2007, 14:43
European armies lacking any decent anti-cavalry options until reaching pikes, on the other hand, are left with no viable tactic against cavalry.
It's important to dispel the idea that Catholic factions are helpless against knights. Temujin said it best:
Medieval tactics didn't follow simple RPS mechanics; the counter for cavalry, at least in the early period, was your own cavalry.
Right. The surefire counter is not a 300 florin, free upkeep unit that can be recruited from any city with a second tier barracks, it's other knights! It's historically accurate, and it's gameplay balanced. OTOH, muslims use mobility tactics to defeat knights, and those tactics are very effective.
Now i like the balance that the shield fix brings, in combination with some changes i've made(increased mass of horses but reduced charge bonus). Mailed Knights will beat Town Militia, Spear Militia, Sergeant Spearmen etc., but will struggle against Armoured Sergeants their dismounted equivalent. They will also wipe out any unit without a shield easily, and will do pretty well against Dismounted Feudal Knights. Armoured Sergeants will be beaten by the better later heavy cav, which will also beat units like Dismounted Chivalric Knights, but they themselves will be beaten by Pikemen. I think its a nice balance, makes for good gameplay and is fairly historical.
FrauGloer
01-17-2007, 15:22
Now i like the balance that the shield fix brings, in combination with some changes i've made(increased mass of horses but reduced charge bonus). Mailed Knights will beat Town Militia, Spear Militia, Sergeant Spearmen etc., but will struggle against Armoured Sergeants their dismounted equivalent. They will also wipe out any unit without a shield easily, and will do pretty well against Dismounted Feudal Knights. Armoured Sergeants will be beaten by the better later heavy cav, which will also beat units like Dismounted Chivalric Knights, but they themselves will be beaten by Pikemen. I think its a nice balance, makes for good gameplay and is fairly historical.
Seconded. If it really works this way, I'm all for it. :yes:
I'd still like polearm troops to get a bonus vs non-charging cavalry, though... (I know, quite off-topic, but still... :sweatdrop: )
pike master
01-17-2007, 15:35
about mtw 1 making it hard for knights to take on spearmen.
in the original release of mtw1 before the patches knights would demolish spearmen and fuedal seargeants but they tuned it down in the later patches. but even then basic spearmen never did very well against knight units but the fuedal did a lot better. and of course armored spearmen, chivilaric*, and order foot soldiers did a very good job of stopping them.
if i remember knights were pretty tough in the original release thats why some people kept playing it even after vi came out because they didnt like the tuned down cavalry.
Now i like the balance that the shield fix brings, in combination with some changes i've made(increased mass of horses but reduced charge bonus). Mailed Knights will beat Town Militia, Spear Militia, Sergeant Spearmen etc., but will struggle against Armoured Sergeants their dismounted equivalent. They will also wipe out any unit without a shield easily, and will do pretty well against Dismounted Feudal Knights. Armoured Sergeants will be beaten by the better later heavy cav, which will also beat units like Dismounted Chivalric Knights, but they themselves will be beaten by Pikemen. I think its a nice balance, makes for good gameplay and is fairly historical.
Lusted,
Presumably you've now incorporated the shield to armour fix?
How did you rebalance afterwards, particularly with reference to the 2-handed axe and sword units?
Edit: And missile units for that matter!
Many points raised that I want to reply to. First however I’d like to link to another of Foz's posts elsewhere that details the exact effects of applying the shield fix.
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showpost.php?p=1389690&postcount=285
Foz does raise a good point about the way the shield fix throws a few units out, and thus asks what CA really intended, however I tend to go with the "spears of a given era should beat cav of the same era" argument purely because that’s what all the in game help text implies should happen.
With that point aside you should now get an idea of how unit balance has been flipped about for me, and it's worth remembering that when I talk of preferring the balance with the shield fix in place.
Now onto other points:
First I’d like to raise the point that Foz, Econ21, and Dopp have raised. Namely that of professional vs. non-professional spearmen and their resistance to cav charges. I agree 100% that non-professional troops should get swept aside by cav charges and even that professional troops where rare back then in reality.
The problem is, this isn't true in game as such. Most units in game are professional soldiers, or part-time soldiers with sufficient training to be weak professional soldiers.
The only units that are peasants with weapons and minimal training are the peasant units and Town Militia. The rest of the units, (including Spear Militia), represent someone who is much better equipped and trained than that. In reality CA have badly misused the militia term IMO. The combination of unit descriptions, their level of discipline and training, (as listed in the stats file, namely the same as most dismounted knights), and their close similarity, (even identical in some cases), to levy spearmen and a number of eastern tribal spearmen, and the fact that Town Militia already fulfil the peasants with proper weapons role, has always led me to believe that Militia Spearmen, (as represented in game), where more than simple presents with weapons and minimal training. In reality I view them as part time professional solders, (a bit of an oxymoron I know). Individuals who have been given decent equipment and training semi-regularly in how to use it. They WILL have been taught how to brace properly and the basics of how to use their weapons in general melee. As a result, whilst a professional soldier will beat them, (because they have been trained in the more advanced general melee techniques, have some actual battlefield experience, and have slightly better equipment), they aren’t actually unprofessional soldiers that would fall apart when charged by cav.
They are in effect portrayed as semi decent fighters with ok equipment and training who will be called upon to supplement the main standing army on campaign. as apposed to being simple local defence militia with littlie training and substandard equipment.
DISCLAMER: Before someone mentions it, I’m sure that in reality Militia of the type represented by Militia Spearmen as I’ve just described them where pretty rare. I'm mealy pointing out that they don't, (in game), really fall into the type of unit that Dopp or Econ21 or myself would expect cav to ride over with few losses. CA have however seemingly chosen a unit that, historically speaking, would be expected to be able to beat cav as they have sufficient training and equipment for the job. The un-historical part being merely the numbers you can field.
Second, some people, (Dopp did it best), have expressed worries about early era fights degenerating into spear vs. spear with cav running down the missile units. I shouldn't worry about that, their are 3 things to remember.
1: Spears hate flank and rear charges. You can wipe out 90% of a unit, (as you do in vanilla with frontal charges), if you do that.
2: Cav above a certain power will simply sweep through a unit of spears causing 90% losses to said spears with less than 10% losses to themselves. Thus, in general the cav reliant factions aren’t as badly hit as you might think as their unique, high power knights usually can get away with frontal charges. Only really Papal Guard, (and maybe one or two equivalent eastern spear units), can take frontal charges in normal formation from units like Chivalric/Noble Knights.
3: Whilst point 2 CAN be overcome by using multiple Schiltrom formations together, (butting the edges up against each other with a bit of inter-mingling), said formations are not fast moving and the sheer number of men packed together so tightly means even peasant archers could get better than 100 kills against them with short range volleys of fire arrows. To say nothing of what proper archers could do...
An example of the Schiltrom formations I’m talking of below:
https://img105.imageshack.us/img105/466/pavsschiltromcq0.th.jpg (https://img105.imageshack.us/my.php?image=pavsschiltromcq0.jpg)
Third, Some people have asked what’s the point of cav if spears beat them, why include cav. Well first, early spears should never beat late cav except in the case of factions that are supposed to have really powerful early spears.
Fourth, some people are worried this will produce factions that are all alike. I shouldn’t worry about this if I where you. The Turks, (as an example), would STILL have their focus on cav and HA, but they'd need to use at least some infantry in their armies now. The HA would still be numerous and would still kill large numbers of enemy, the main difference is that instead of just charging the remnants down with your heavies, you now have to bring up your own infantry (even cheap peasants will do), and let them pin the enemy while your run your cav round the rear and actually wipe the enemy out. Your cav and HA are still your primary troops and do the real killing. But the rest of your roster is no longer pointless.
@ This Post (https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showpost.php?p=1390006&postcount=38):
Whilst I don't doubt you are reporting what you’ve read correctly and that it's a genuine historical source. I don't remotely believe it. If you've ever watched Horse racing you'll be familiar with what happens when a horse runs into a hedge or a fallen rider. The Horse and Rider go flying all over the place 9 times out of 10. If those cav where charging at full speed into those shield walls I can guarantee the effects of striking the formation would result in a lot of tripped horses and thrown riders, to mention nothing of the way the spearmen would get knocked down too and probably hit by both horses rolling around and flying riders.
Of course if the cav trotted up to the spearmen and started hacking then yes you'd get the effect described, (few losses on either side), but once those horses actually start getting surrounded by the spears in a general melee your going to get a lot of dead horses, purely because spears are basically very well designed for getting deep enough into a horse to cause damage, they just have to get through the horses armour, (if any). If however the spears and Cav keep perfect formation, then it's going to be impossible for the spears to do a lot of damage as they don't have the reach when attacking horses from the front, and the riders can't really get blows past an effective shield-wall.
As I say, I don't disbelieve you, but I think it's more a case of good evidence that they didn't do full gallop high speed charges into formed up men as the number of horses and men alike that should have gone flying all over the place at this point would have been notable and devastating.
Another point to remember is that even with the shield fix, unless the spears are stationery, in good formation, properly facing their opponents, and braced they will get swept aside committer how good they are. It takes a lot of planning and preparation to get the spears in the right place in time.
but the idea that your average Joe off the filthy medieval streets could stand up to thousands of pounds of steel and stallion charging him down just because he has a pointy rock tied to a stick is silly. If that were anything even approaching reality, we'd all thrill to the legendary exploits of King Arthur and his Spear Infantry of the Round Table.
As I noted a littlie further up this post, the only units that fit your description in this game are Town Militia. Everything else is represented as being professional/semi-professional.
Right. The surefire counter is not a 300 florin, free upkeep unit that can be recruited from any city with a second tier barracks, it's other knights!
So tell me, what is the purpose of that 300 florin free upkeep unit then? Why is it in the game and why does it cost so much if a 300 florin unit of light cav can walk all over it. Indeed why are any spearmen in the game at all if the game should be a case of cav beats everything. Indeed what’s the point of any infantry that aren’t archers than? Why don't we make them all special units built on the sieges screen? Since it’s the only time they’d be remotely useful, and if you could Dismount Knights, not even then
It's important to dispel the idea that Catholic factions are helpless against knights. Temujin said it best:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Temujin
Medieval tactics didn't follow simple RPS mechanics; the counter for cavalry, at least in the early period, was your own cavalry.
AND
It's historically accurate, and it's gameplay balanced.
1: It's not even remotely balanced as those factions with the best knights prior to anyone getting pikes will be the factions that beat anyone else until pikes show up. And even the manoeuvrability of pikes, (or rather lack of), will ensure those with the best Knights still win. Muskets being the only possible equaliser.
2: I think those of you who prefer Historical accuracy need to calm down. No matter how often you state your case, CA isn't going to listen to you IMHO, they have always marketed the TW series as RTS's set in interesting time periods, they have never marketed, and I believe never intended to imply that they are accurate historical simulators. They are aimed at the RTS gaming market in general, not those of who want an historical simulators. So as much as you'd like cav to dominate everything bar pikes and muskets. I doubt it's actually going to happen. Getting wound up is only going to get those of us arguing for balance wound up and I don't want a slagging match.
3: In relation to point 2, DoW:WA had a similar balance to the Cav owns all in that it's late era units beat everything else of all unit classes. The majority of gamers got very bored with that play style very quickly, it's my own experience of this game that made me decide balance has to trump history for me. the formulae of choose best unit and build as many as possible was just too boring for me and I wouldn't want to play M2TW if the game was Like that. That’s why I got RTW, because it seemed in the demo to be a lot more balanced, I assumed M2TW would be the same.
4: As I noted further up, modern Horse Racing shows quite clearly what happens when a galloping Horse hits something solid, so I honestly think that a lot of the Historical Accounts of cav sweeping aside trained troops with few losses are widely exaggerated IMHO. Take a look at accounts of Longbows, (DON’T you DARE comment Lord_Crapalot, I’ve run out of patience with you), from both the enemy and English sides. The English accounts are always far better sounding and make it sound better than a modern rifle. The enemy accounts are probably a bit under the actual performance too, so the reality will be somewhere in the middle.
Refer to original MTW, where the spearmen got a bonus to DEFENSE rather than attack vs cavalry. This made them good at holding the line defensively until something else intervened (missiles, swords or their own cavalry) but they were not exceptionally good at killing anything themselves.
That’s an interesting piece of info Dopp, I suspect CA changed it because of how Formed charges currently work. They've upped cav power and mobility now according to most people, (I’ve never played MTW), so they probably decided to do the same for spears.
Would that be better though? Based on How Sword and shield units with really high defence perform vs. cav ATM, I’d say no. At least without same serious reduction in cav charging power as if the knight doesn't die on impact with someone he will usually just keep going and kill more swordsmen, unless said swordsmen has a really high defence score, (I’m talking mailed knights against defence 24 units here). The kind of bonuses high level spearmen would need under these circumstances is scary, something like +20 defence vs. mounted. That’s probably why they got the reflect charge and attack bonuses. It gives them the chance to kill charging enemy knights on contact, which seems to be the only way to hold a knight charge without really high defence values.
Now i like the balance that the shield fix brings, in combination with some changes i've made(increased mass of horses but reduced charge bonus). Mailed Knights will beat Town Militia, Spear Militia, Sergeant Spearmen etc., but will struggle against Armoured Sergeants their dismounted equivalent. They will also wipe out any unit without a shield easily, and will do pretty well against Dismounted Feudal Knights. Armoured Sergeants will be beaten by the better later heavy cav, which will also beat units like Dismounted Chivalric Knights, but they themselves will be beaten by Pikemen. I think its a nice balance, makes for good gameplay and is fairly historical.
I'm not sure I like that from a balance point of view. Only a handful of factions get Armoured Sergeants. Most have to rely on spear Militia and/or Armoured spearmen to take on cav prior to Pikes. And nearly everyone gets Mailed/Feudal Knights before they get Armoured Sear gents. That’s a total show stopper Lusted, as it effectively means armies without good cav early on are much weaker than the rest. It also messes up MP balance in early era something horrible.
About MP balance: Whilst this ISN'T the MP forum, it's important to realise that those that play MP will be effected by any changes we push CA into making. Price can partly offset things, but theirs a limit to how far that goes. If Mailed knights start having to cost 1000-1500florins in MP because theirs nothing of the same era that’s not cav that can beat them, you can bet that the MP community will have our heads and really make their displeasure vocal.
At that I’ll call it a day for now.
R'as al Ghul
01-17-2007, 16:11
I don't get the idea that Cav should be countered by Cav.
I'm concentrating on the units at hand, included in the game. The idea of a Total War game, for me, is to have a number of units at my disposal that each have their counter units in the enemy army.
To play good is to make successful unit matchups that cummulate into victory. This also includes that if Cav can't beat Spears frontally, you have to use the higher mobility of the Cav to charge them in the flank or rear or search for a better matchup.
If one unit does not have a counter unit, making it an über-unit because no unit can stand against them, why take any other unit? If Cav can only be beaten by Cav then why buy infantry or Archers?
Let's say Archers were the über-unit and not Cav, would you all be satisfied with the fact that only Archers can beat Archers? I think not. But since we're talking knights, the heroes of our childhoods, that's perfectly okay?
For a game like this, we need a counter unit for cav.
I would expect from the spear units to be good defense units against cav:
if the Spears could resist a charge by knights and hold them long enough for a second unit to flank the CAV without killing many of the Knights themselves, that would be a start. I think Shiltrom or Shield_wall can be used for this if the shield bug is fixed.
If the spears are caught on the march, they should not have this defensive bonus but be destroyed quickly. Same as with late pikes, have them in Phalanx and they can deal with the charge, have them marching and they die.
I'm playing with my own shield fix, where I've just zeroed the shield value without changing the other values. With this fix applied, Shiltrom is an effective anti-cav formation that is costly and unwise to charge into with knights, just as the advisor tells us. The fix is not perfect but maybe shows what was intended.
The power of the charge may not be too strong, perhaps even the change in the charge of 1.1 patch wasn't nessecary if they had fixed the shield bug before.
I believe that the knight units should be able to exploit opportunities and mistakes of your enemy. If he marches his spears and doesn't pay attention to your Cav you can destroy them, but if the spears brace you'll hardly kill many of them but instead risk your worthy unit of Cav.
The applied anti_cav bonus ranges between 2 and 12 points.
Atm, only a 4 and 8 points bonus is applied. There's much room to spread out the spear units between these values. Town Militia could have 2 or 0 and Swiss Pike or Papal Guard could have the max 12.
I would appreciate it most if CA could just fix the game in the way they intended. I've the feeling that they've had some good intentions that have gone wrong. The in-game battle field advisor's speeches are pretty much what I'd expect from the units, only that the game diverges from it.
Aquitaine
01-17-2007, 16:34
The difficult thing about the historical context (and I'm the type that would put history above balance, at least for SP) is that SP and MP are such different games.
Historically, a frontal charge from heavy knights would run right over, as Zhukov said, anything other than braced pikes. A spear wall (not pikes) would get mowed down, though they'd cause a lot of casualties. A good general would never have his knights charge a spear wall, because even if he could take them down, you'd be an idiot to throw away your finest knights like that. A hundred knights were worth more than a thousand peasants in *most* medieval armies (making the obvious exception for English ones, though I'd hardly call yeomen peasants).
In SP, knights being so expensive, you are going to use them 'properly' -- i.e. not charging anything that's going to Hurt A Lot unless you absolutely have to, because you have more battles after the one you're in now to fight.
In MP, your entire existence depends on one battle, so you're going to do what it takes to win. The question then becomes: How much do you re-jigger the knights/spearman balance to be fair in MP?
I usually play MP with the same guy (who got his masters in history and is a big crusades nerd) and he likes throwing lots of cavalry at me as either the French or the Mongols - always has. I knew this, so the first battle we fought in M2TW was Mongols (him) v. English (me) on an open field. I set up a bazillion stakes with a lot of armored sergeants as support and massacred him, though even so, his heavy cavalry charges that went around my stakes still did a number on my spearman, as I think they should have.
seneschal.the
01-17-2007, 17:05
Many points raised that I want to reply to.
<SNIPPED lots of good stuff>
2: I think those of you who prefer Historical accuracy need to calm down. No matter how often you state your case, CA isn't going to listen to you IMHO, they have always marketed the TW series as RTS's set in interesting time periods, they have never marketed, and I believe never intended to imply that they are accurate historical simulators.
<SNIP more good stuff>
At that I’ll call it a day for now.
Amen.
QFT, ++, etc.
A very loudmouthed minority has always tried to make TW games go for more "history" (as in "units behaving like _I_ want them too, or believe they did") and less actual game balance (that makes the game playable). CA has never listened, never will, and M2TW is just more proof of that.
Thankfully Carl (and many others!) take the time to stand on the battlements, voicing the opinion of many who do not, in any way, want an unbalanced game because someone who watchs the history channel demands that this and that unit should dominate, "because it did so in reality".
The way I see, it's balance and fun first, historical accuracy second. However, usually historical accuracy isn't that far off equalling balance and fun anyway.
My gut instinct on this effectiveness of spearmen debate is not one of spears beating cav or vice versa, but rather that a player charging a cav unit into spears should be prepared to lose a good proportion of the cav unit at the same time as causing big casualties to the spears. It should be an expensive decision to charge spears with cav. Cav charging swordsmen is completely different. There's a massive difference charging a solider with a comparatively short weapon than charging a braced spear. However, like I said, a fully armed and heavily armoured knight charging anything is going to cause damage to the front row whether the knight lives or not...
but rather that a player charging a cav unit into spears should be prepared to lose a good proportion of the cav unit at the same time as causing big casualties to the spears.
Which is largely what happens if the spears are of the same era as the Knights doing the charging. Once you Fix the Sheild Bug that is BTW.) The problem I have is with people who belive Kinghts of the same era as spearmen should just be able to roll right over the spearmen with only small losses.
The way I see, it's balance and fun first, historical accuracy second. However, usually historical accuracy isn't that far off equalling balance and fun anyway.
I agree 100% here too. I love my History, but not at the expense of balance. genrally the Historical stuff is well balanced. Cav are the real exception and I think that comes more from distorted accounts of Cav charges. In this situation i'm willing to accept that History has to take the backseat though and that cav should be beatable by somthing thats avalibile as early as the cav, and it should be somthing thats eithier avalibile to all factions. Or it should be somthing diffrent for diffrent factions. Or a mix of the two, but n matter what all factions should have a counter to anything any other faction might throw at them at any point in the tech tree. This counter should also occupy the same point in the tech tree as what it's countering.
I'm not sure I like that from a balance point of view. Only a handful of factions get Armoured Sergeants. Most have to rely on spear Militia and/or Armoured spearmen to take on cav prior to Pikes. And nearly everyone gets Mailed/Feudal Knights before they get Armoured Sear gents. That’s a total show stopper Lusted, as it effectively means armies without good cav early on are much weaker than the rest. It also messes up MP balance in early era something horrible.
But the lower level spear units can still hold cav even if they lose 1 v 1, so another unit can come in and take out the cav whilst its engaged. and Armoured Sergeants can hold all cav units long enough(barely though with the highest level cav) for a second unit to engage the cav. when i first tested it i hadn't removed the +2 to mass i have in LTC, and that made spearmen too powerful against cav i felt. So Mailed Knights might beat Spear Militia or Sergeant Spearmen in a 1v1, but the spears can hold them long enough for another unit to enage them. So i think its nicely balanced.
Lusted,
Presumably you've now incorporated the shield to armour fix?
How did you rebalance afterwards, particularly with reference to the 2-handed axe and sword units?
Edit: And missile units for that matter!
Well im using a 2 handed bug workaround in LTc so i just upped the attack of those units slightly. 2 handed sword units i gave the ap ability and +2 attack. I have not looked at missile units yet. Sword units are pretty well balanced anyway with the fix.
@Lusted: Fair enough. I tend to find that No spear unit thats holds actually losses to cav so you where worrying me.
I would add i'm still slightly concerned as whilst having to use supporting units might be okay in the campaign (larger armies, stupid Ai and multipiule Stacks on 1 enemy stack), it worries me from an MP perspective as with a decent Human Opponnent, and equal sized armies the guy with spears shouldn't have a supporting unit to throw in becuase the rest are occuppied by the rest of the enemy army.
Genrally if a game is balanced in MP it needs only minor tweaks to be balanced in SP. On the other hand a game balanced in SP first and foremost isn't allways balanced in MP. Thus I tend to worry a lot asbout MP balance, even though i never play MP in games.
i'll wait and see how things go before making final judgments though.
MP balance isn't really a worry for mods Carl, nobody really uses mods in MP
Vinsitor
01-17-2007, 18:56
1: Spears hate flank and rear charges. You can wipe out 90% of a unit, (as you do in vanilla with frontal charges), if you do that.
2: Cav above a certain power will simply sweep through a unit of spears causing 90% losses to said spears with less than 10% losses to themselves. Thus, in general the cav reliant factions aren’t as badly hit as you might think as their unique, high power knights usually can get away with frontal charges. Only really Papal Guard, (and maybe one or two equivalent eastern spear units), can take frontal charges in normal formation from units like Chivalric/Noble Knights.
1: I think 32 knights can't wipe out 68 men (the double!) with a charge. How they could do it, to kill instantly an AVERAGE of 2 men per knight?
They have to lower the morale and cause the unit to root, why do you want it to disappear with a charge? I don't understand.
2: I personally don't agree, as I have explained in other posts on this topic.
It seems that you are describing the vanilla game, no need to balance it then.
For MP the most important element is cost. Any unit not worth the money you pay for it will not be used. One could easily have a game were cavalry is very strong v spears but it will fall apart if spears cost too much and players have too much money so they can get too many high quality cav units.
CBR
MP balance isn't really a worry for mods Carl, nobody really uses mods in MP
But where not talking about mods Musashi. Where talking about the main vanillia game and how we, the posters in this thread, feel cav should perform vs. spears.
@Vistor: The bit you quoted was a description of what happens when you apply the sheild fix. NOT vanillia. In Vanillia even mailed knights WILl sweep through spears causing 90% kills for no more losses to themselves than if they where charging 2-Handers and did the same. When I said a unit of spears, i meant a much weaker unit of spears. Spear Militia will get swept away by Chivalric Knights. But Papal uard will win with about 30% of their men remaning. The better the spear, the better the Cav unit has to be before it can sweep them aside with no real losses). Also, if even militia spears killed a lot of Chivalric Knights if charged by them they would be unblanced as the Spears can reform pretty quick and are just too cheap compared to the knights. Militia can beat Mailed Knights with the fix without any upgrades. the Spears cost 80% the price of the knights though so it's balanced.
@CBR: What you say is mostly true. But if the Historians have their way, Chivalric Knights would have to be in the 3000+Florins price range to be balanced vs infantry in MP. Can you see most MP players putting up with that? I doubt they will myself.
General Zhukov
01-17-2007, 19:18
It's not even remotely balanced as those factions with the best knights prior to anyone getting pikes will be the factions that beat anyone else until pikes show up. And even the manoeuvrability of pikes, (or rather lack of), will ensure those with the best Knights still win.
Most Catholic factions have knights that are roughly equal in power, and that are available at about the same time. In the early game, most of these factions can field Mailed Knights, or Norman Knights, or Feudal Knights, all of which are roughly equal (give or take a few points of armor). These troops will attrite each other on the battlefield, i.e. cancel each other out. There is no faction to my knowledge that opens the early period with a knight that can run roughshod over all the other knights of Europe. Therefore, if you can keep roughly an equal amount of heavy horse in the field as your opponent, you have your cavalry counter. Historically, knights sought out knights on the field, and samurai sought out samurai. They knew they were the creme de la creme on the medieval battlefield, and that is was they who would decide most battles. Of course, a clever commander will back up his knights with good spearmen or swordsman, so that any melees that erupt can be tipped in favor of his own knights.
I think those of you who prefer Historical accuracy need to calm down. No matter how often you state your case, CA isn't going to listen to you IMHO... So as much as you'd like cav to dominate everything bar pikes and muskets. I doubt it's actually going to happen.
You're right, I don't need to keep stating my case. Because CA has already taken my position. M2TW presents knights as almost unstoppable freight trains when charging all foot troops except pikes. So unless one mods it to be different, the game is taking the historical position on this issue.
You're right, I don't need to keep stating my case. Because CA has already taken my position. M2TW presents knights as almost unstoppable freight trains when charging all foot troops except pikes. So unless one mods it to be different, the game is taking the historical position on this issue.
YOUR WRONG.
Deal with the sheild bug and they do NOT do thast, CA have taken the exact opposite postion. The advisor text only proves that still furthar.
Let me also add that lusted has revealed that CA where planning on downpowering cav and are going to try some of his anti-cav measures on top. I think thats points to CA beliving cav are too good ATM.
Most Catholic factions have knights that are roughly equal in power, and that are available at about the same time. In the early game, most of these factions can field Mailed Knights, or Norman Knights, or Feudal Knights, all of which are roughly equal (give or take a few points of armor).
Give or take 3 points of attacka and a few points of armour. actually, and units with better attack/defence trump those with worse attack defence, so those without fuedal Knights or with Knights better than Fuedals will bat the others.
Well arent spears pretty bugged against cav right now? Maybe a 3K florin price is acceptable to make up for the bugs :clown:
If spears were like MTW I would say the current prices are fine...
CBR
Well arent spears pretty bugged against cav right now? Maybe a 3K florin price is acceptable to make up for the bugs
Yeah, the sheild bug kills em badly. And LOL@ the price point. Your right in that it would probably be balanced, but it wouldn't really be fair if the high end knights where tottally unusable in most games. And since some game limits can prevent the use of low end knights iot effectivly removes knights from MP.
If spears were like MTW I would say the current prices are fine...
I agree and furthar points to Knights being more powerful than was intended. A unit hose sole purpose is to tackle cav (which is what spears are), should easilly be able to beat m,ounted units of a similar price and beatm, (with difficulty), moderatly more expensive ones. Right now even cav the same price go through them like a hot knife through butter.
Zenicetus
01-17-2007, 19:41
Fourth, some people are worried this will produce factions that are all alike. I shouldn’t worry about this if I where you. The Turks, (as an example), would STILL have their focus on cav and HA, but they'd need to use at least some infantry in their armies now.
The Turks already have to use some infantry for sieges
The HA would still be numerous and would still kill large numbers of enemy, the main difference is that instead of just charging the remnants down with your heavies, you now have to bring up your own infantry (even cheap peasants will do), and let them pin the enemy while your run your cav round the rear and actually wipe the enemy out. Your cav and HA are still your primary troops and do the real killing. But the rest of your roster is no longer pointless.
In other words, the Turks would then fight more like the other factions? That doesn't sound like much fun to me.
2: I think those of you who prefer Historical accuracy need to calm down. No matter how often you state your case, CA isn't going to listen to you IMHO, they have always marketed the TW series as RTS's set in interesting time periods, they have never marketed, and I believe never intended to imply that they are accurate historical simulators. They are aimed at the RTS gaming market in general, not those of who want an historical simulators. So as much as you'd like cav to dominate everything bar pikes and muskets. I doubt it's actually going to happen. Getting wound up is only going to get those of us arguing for balance wound up and I don't want a slagging match.
Nobody is getting wound up. The discussion so far has been polite, as far as I can tell. Some of us disagree with your take on the game, and prefer a different type of game, which is a different thing than getting "wound up." It's okay for us to have different opinions on these things, and I've found the discussion interesting, so far.
As for CA's intentions... yes, they're a RTS company, but Warcraft (and a few others) showed that this type of game can go beyond simple rock/paper/scissors balance with all units alike, only dressed up with different skins. And that's the model CA has used; with units that don't necessarily always balance 1 v. 1 against a corresponding unit. It keeps the game interesting, and it allows at least a degree of respect for historical accuracy. I imagine CA will probably keep it that way with the upcoming patch, including not forcing Turks (for example) into an a-historical reliance on infantry.
For those who don't like it, there will be mods. And of course that goes both ways. Some of us may need to look at modding the game if CA goes too far in leveling out the different units for 1 v. 1 "balance" without taking into account mixed units in an army, or historical accuracy.
Nobody is getting wound up.
It seemed to me that some of you, (not all of you), where expecting that if you went on enough that that’s what would happen. Nothing about the balancing in RTW or what the Adviser/in-game hints tells you should happen leads me to believe that CA intended anything other than the RPS balance. The effects of modding out the various bugs only seems to reinforce this.
In other words, the Turks would then fight more like the other factions? That doesn't sound like much fun to me.
You have to understand that the Turks aren’t intended to fight as an ALL HA/Cav army. Just as the English aren’t intended to fight as an all Foot Archer/2-Hander Force Or the French an all Melee Cav Force, or the Scots and all Pike force.
Everyone was expected to use a mix of foot archers, melee cav, melee foot and possible HA's. The differences where always in my mind intended to be the type of melee cav/melee foot/foot archers/HA used, and the quantity in which they where used. Turks and Byzantine both strike me as unit rosters that where meant to use large amounts of HA/Melee cav in combination with small numbers of melee foot, and foot archer forces. With Byzantine having a slightly greater focus on infantry, particularly in the late game.
The Scots where always intended to use large numbers of heavily armoured Pikemen, backed up by good Sword and Shield units and Composite infantry. With Minor cav and missile forces alongside.
NO army IMHO was intended to get by without at least SOME foot melee, foot missile, and mounted melee units. The defining points where meant to be the types and quantities in which they where used.
Generally if a unit is in a game and it's not being used their are 2 reasons for it:
1. The army in question was never intended to need such a units, and thus it's inclusion was an error of judgment.
2. They where meant to HAVE to use it to at least some degree, but the game's balance is out and thus the player is not being made to use it as he should be.
As Turks with the fixes, 75% of your forces will still be cav/cav archers, and 90% of the kills will belong to them. However, you will no longer be able to field armies composed 100% of cav/HA.
Zenicetus
01-17-2007, 20:29
As Turks with the fixes, 75% of your forces will still be cav/cav archers, and 90% of the kills will belong to them. However, you will no longer be able to field armies composed 100% of cav/HA.
If someone wants to mod the game that way, more power to 'em. But I'd be very surprised if CA moves in that direction for the upcoming vanilla patch. I guess we'll find out in a month or two.
As for CA's intentions... yes, they're a RTS company, but Warcraft (and a few others) showed that this type of game can go beyond simple rock/paper/scissors balance with all units alike, only dressed up with different skins. And that's the model CA has used; with units that don't necessarily always balance 1 v. 1 against a corresponding unit. It keeps the game interesting, and it allows at least a degree of respect for historical accuracy. I imagine CA will probably keep it that way with the upcoming patch, including not forcing Turks (for example) into an a-historical reliance on infantry.
Actually after talking to Pala i dont think CA intended for spears to be so weak against cav, or for ca to be all powerful. They do want more of a rock, paper scissor balance like that me and Carl have been talking about.
Thanks Lusted for tha titbit.
@Zenicitus: Well what DO you want then? Clearly with an RPS balance you can't have a faction that rellies tottaly on mounted units so what do you actually want? Besides, you don't think you where given the best muskets and 2nd best 2-handers in the game (Jassinary Musketeers and JHI), for no good reasoj do you. And yes I know they are late units, i'm just pointing out that you have been given some really good infantry, so I can't see any reason why you arn't meant to use it.
Besides, i'm not modding the game that way. That IS how the game REALLY plays out after bug fixes. Admitedly the sheild fix nuters HA even more than it really should, (sheilds don't work right against missiles eithier BTW), so they will be a bit more powerful again once sheilds are really working. However, neithier they nor Cav where ever intended to be viabile without infanry support based on the effects of bug fixing IMHO.
p.s. Turks arn't going to rely on infantry, they just ARE going to have to use it. relying on it means having to use it to do all their fighting. which they won't it will be the cav doing all the killing. Not your infantry. you just need the infantry for the cav to be ABLE to do the killing.
Lusted just bassiclly confirmed it IMO.
I haven't seen any evidence that shields aren't working properly against missiles, only your insistence that AP missiles shouldn't work against shields, which I still believe is silly, since shields are armor.
General Zhukov
01-17-2007, 20:56
Actually after talking to Pala i dont think CA intended for spears to be so weak against cav, or for ca to be all powerful. They do want more of a rock, paper scissor balance like that me and Carl have been talking about.
So, what did he say that led you to draw those conclusions?
So, what did he say that led you to draw those conclusions?
He was talking about ways he was trying to reduce cav power, and asked me how i had made spearmen better against cav in my LTC mod.
I haven't seen any evidence that shields aren't working properly against missiles, only your insistence that AP missiles shouldn't work against shields, which I still believe is silly, since shields are armor.
I won't go throught the AP argument again. but here are some tests that show archers are doing more damage aainst sheild units than against units with the sheild in armopur. in the one of mine I'm linking to they where defintly shooting head on at the enemy, so the sheild should have been in effect.
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showpost.php?p=1384726&postcount=115
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showpost.php?p=1384761&postcount=118
General Zhukov
01-17-2007, 21:16
He was talking about ways he was trying to reduce cav power, and asked me how i had made spearmen better against cav in my LTC mod.
Cool, thanks. Plans may indeed be in motion to pare back heavy cavalry.
While I was mulling these issues, another thought occured: if spearmen are strengthened to the point that they can repel charges and defeat knights without support, why even bother building pikes? Why have pikes in the game at all?
While I was mulling these issues, another thought occured: if spearmen are strengthened to the point that they can repel charges and defeat knights without support, why even bother building pikes? Why have pikes in the game at all?
Ah they wont be that strong, no spear unit would be able to stand up to the later heavy cavalry like gendarmes, lancers, or even chivalric knights. So you would need pikes against them.
Blademun
01-17-2007, 21:44
I'm not going to go real indepth here. I want to point out another aspect of the "spearman". The spear is one of the most ancient weapon's used in medieval warfare.They were common long before such things as mounted cavalry were invented. You keep referring to spearman as "A unit solely intended to counter Cavalry" but thats not true. Spearman are "A unit that is cheap to equip because spears are easy to make, easy to use and provide some minor protection from horses."
If spearman were so potent at stopping cavalry, why are they mostly ignored in historical references to medieval battles? Because they were considered to be little more then fodder. If you weren't wielding either a halberd or billhook, you were considered cheap and inneffective. Most games, and almost all historical references, make spearman out to be what they are...a outdated unit that poor nations trained so they had some warm bodys in the way of the enemy.
I personally feel that Spearman are fine the way they are now, but they need to cost about half as much. The same goes for every other spear wielding unit. The whole idea of spear units are that they cost less to equip and are easy to train = Cheap. Right now, a Spearman costs 2/3rd that of DFK's. Thats nuts, it should be less then half. Either that, or all the high-end units should have their price increased significantly.
While I was mulling these issues, another thought occured: if spearmen are strengthened to the point that they can repel charges and defeat knights without support, why even bother building pikes? Why have pikes in the game at all?
What lusted said, allthough I would point out that with the sheild fix and nothing else, Papal Guard can beat the best Knights avalibile. but they ARE the best s[pearmen around and no one else with acess to pikes gets spearmen that good.
Also it's best to remeber that working Pikes tend to destroy anything you put in front of them. i've had 40-1 kill rates from them in bridge battles before, (1000 dead enemy for 25 dead pikes). They are however, VERY vulnrable to a flank or rear attack from even very basic infantry.
spearman were so potent at stopping cavalry, why are they mostly ignored in historical references to medieval battles?
probably because their wern't many pro spear troops around back then. The harsh fact is that they probably wouldn't stand their ground when the cav came running towards them. pro troops would. And as I pointed out with examples from modern Horse Racing. If a galloping horse hits anything solid it's likliy to go flying along with the rider. Frankly I can't see how any galloping charge could have sucseeded against discaplined infantry who held formation.
The problem with your idea of cheap trash, (which is what they where in most cases), is two fold. 1. theirs no point including it in the game as it serves no purpose. 2. that isn't what most spear units in the game represenmt anyway. they represent the ones who would hold their ground in fromation and thus decimate knights in reality.
I will however admit that (as with the knights themselves), these units are a lot more common in game than they where historiclly.
I won't go throught the AP argument again. but here are some tests that show archers are doing more damage aainst sheild units than against units with the sheild in armopur. in the one of mine I'm linking to they where defintly shooting head on at the enemy, so the sheild should have been in effect.
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showpost.php?p=1384726&postcount=115
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showpost.php?p=1384761&postcount=118
Yet testing shows that shielded units do better than unshielded units... Why are you assuming that shield value should have an equal effect to armor value?
CA's intentions are easy enough to read in this case. Knights are not meant for flanking and casing down routers. Why spend thousands on something that cheap light cavalry can do far better? They didn't design a whole new charge system just to use after the battle is essentially won, and knights in a game based on the age of chivalry aren't going to be used mainly for hitting people from behind.
There’s nothing subtle about what CA was trying to do, here. Knights are your fist, and massed charges are how you drive it into the enemy's face. Simple.
So, why should they fall in droves to the weakest, cheapest units in the game?
Just checked those results. If you check the second set they show what i was talking about but the first set disagrees. odd???
And I assume they are the same because thats how it's SUPPOSED to work.
I'll run some more sheild vs. armour tests later and see what happens this time. Maybe i got fluky results in mine...
So, why should they fall in droves to the weakest, cheapest units in the game?
For the last time, because thats how it SUPPOSED to work. Pav's comments to lusted, the effects of the bug fixing and the in game advisor text ALL say that spears should beat cav but be beaten by everything else except maybe some missile units and peasents. it's the only thing they do in the game at all.
Cool, thanks. Plans may indeed be in motion to pare back heavy cavalry.
While I was mulling these issues, another thought occured: if spearmen are strengthened to the point that they can repel charges and defeat knights without support, why even bother building pikes? Why have pikes in the game at all?
The obvious reason is that Pikes in fact do not perform ONLY that role in an army. Pikes when working correctly (i.e. not behaving as they do in vanilla as pansies with swords) are a formidable foe to almost any unit that exists in the game, making especially good center-of-the-line troops. Whatever it is that's in front of the pike unit, two things are for certain: it is getting poked full of holes, and it it not typically getting close to the pikes. The same cannot even remotely be said of spears, which are intentionally neutered in combat against infantry of all sorts in order to represent their narrow band of usefulness on the battlefield. Thus pikemen are in no way undermined by having spear units function as decent cavalry stoppers. Your suggestion that no one should trade in spear units for pikes is in fact like saying you already have a cheap paring knife so you find no use for a swiss army knife. In reality, the swiss army knife is far more useful as it is multi-functional, and likely to also be a better knife than your cheap paring knife. So it is with spears and pikes.
How do you know it's supposed to work that way. Perhaps armor and shield values are applied in different ways.
Because they are ALL contrbuters to the DEFENCE value against attacks. thats all thats considered in the calculations as far as we know. defence vs attack. so if the defence is the same via sheild+armour as armour alone it should produce EXACTLY the same results as it's exactly the same numbers going into the calculation.
We don't know that for certain however.
While I was mulling these issues, another thought occured: if spearmen are strengthened to the point that they can repel charges and defeat knights without support, why even bother building pikes? Why have pikes in the game at all?
For the same reason as why you want better missile or cavalry units in the game. They will be doing their job even better.
Pike units in the game should reflect not only having a longer weapon but also the fact that such troops in general had better training. They should defeat spear units and cause lots of trouble even against high quality non spear units.
Early 14th century Flemish and Swiss infantry could defeat cavalry although they didnt use the long pikes that we see being used in late 15th century.
Italian city militias could also defeat cavalry charges and they didnt use long pikes.
Throughout the middleages getting good quality infantry and getting enough of them was not easy. And its the main reason why we see English or French armies using their men-at-arms both mounted and dismounted.
But anyway...
Not only are spears too weak but cavalry might also be too easy to recruit. It doesnt seem like its that difficult to build up large armies of high quality cavalry. The recruitment system of M2TW seems like it could use a tweak or two IMO.
CBR
Yep CBR, like possibly removing the ease at which one can recruit top quality units from just the castle wall upgrades and instead making them recruitable only from the barracks or stables buildings.
What happens if pikes are given a mass of 3, 4, or 5 instead of 1.2? Could that help them retain their formation better without having to remove their secondary weapon altogether? I'm loathe to remove the secondary weapon since it just appears to make them uber units in only the hands of the human...
What happens if pikes are given a mass of 3, 4, or 5 instead of 1.2?
Just a small chip-in:
In my experience, it's always better to reduce the mass of mounts than to increase the mass of infantry. I realize that you probably had pikes vs. infantry situations in mind here as well, but in that case I think it's also better to not make the mass of infantry too high and work on other solutions.
Btw, increasing the mass of infantry brings to mind the scenes from Asterix comics, when the Gauls storm through the Roman legions and the legionnaires are being flung in the air by their charge... ~D
General Zhukov
01-18-2007, 00:53
No argument for the effectiveness of pikes should rely on using a modded version of said unit. If buffed spearmen are able to resist charges and thrash knights all by themselves, it will be pointless to upgrade to vanilla pikemen, since vanilla pikemen are really only good at breaking cavalry charges. Which is of course what makes pikes unique among foot troops. I think a lot of this stuff is about certain folks wanting a really good infantry counter for cav, but not wanting to wait and get it in the proper unit that is already designed for the purpose. I don't want to see McPikemen running around in the early periods.
@Zurkov: it isn't people wanting a good counter to cav early on. It's them wanting ANY counter early on. Right now one dosen't exist that isn't other cav. It's also worth noting that High End Knights will still kill more than half a spear unit even if they lose. Pikes lose almost no-one if you don't cheat. (Somthing else the Pike fix deals with BTW).
Zenicetus
01-18-2007, 02:20
No argument for the effectiveness of pikes should rely on using a modded version of said unit. If buffed spearmen are able to resist charges and thrash knights all by themselves, it will be pointless to upgrade to vanilla pikemen, since vanilla pikemen are really only good at breaking cavalry charges. Which is of course what makes pikes unique among foot troops. I think a lot of this stuff is about certain folks wanting a really good infantry counter for cav, but not wanting to wait and get it in the proper unit that is already designed for the purpose. I don't want to see McPikemen running around in the early periods.
Bingo! I see a lot of this discussion happening in a vacuum; comparing units abstracted in custom battles that have nothing to do with the progression in which these units are actually available in the long campaign game. I think spears are supposed to be crappy in the early game, and you're forced to work with that. It's the classic "stick with it, you'll get better stuff later on" dynamic that applies to most game types... all the way from FPS games (better guns) to RPG's (better player stats) to RTS and strategy games (better units in the late game).
I've played several full campaigns with different factions now, all around the map, and I've never lost the campaign game because I couldn't handle the early spear units I had available. The way some people talk about cheap/early spear units here, it's like you can't win the game at all, if you use them... that they're just pure cav fodder. That's not been my experience, playing the actual campaign game instead of running endless 1 v. 1 unit matchups in custom battles.
In addition, any "fix" that means you can't use a 100% horse army for a faction where that's historically appropriate, is taking a lot of fun out of the game. At least in my personal opinion (as always... I know people have different views on this).
No argument for the effectiveness of pikes should rely on using a modded version of said unit. If buffed spearmen are able to resist charges and thrash knights all by themselves, it will be pointless to upgrade to vanilla pikemen, since vanilla pikemen are really only good at breaking cavalry charges. Which is of course what makes pikes unique among foot troops. I think a lot of this stuff is about certain folks wanting a really good infantry counter for cav, but not wanting to wait and get it in the proper unit that is already designed for the purpose. I don't want to see McPikemen running around in the early periods.
No argument should rely on using the modded version of the unit? Sure it should. The reason is that pikemen in the vanilla game are clearly dysfunctional in every sense of the word, and on top of that are nothing even REMOTELY like pikemen in real actual history. In the computer's hands, or those of a player that doesn't know to take them off guard mode, they are not even effective at beating cavalry, which leaves them utterly useless by default. Zhukov, even you with no training at all could be given a pike and use it better than vanilla pikemen do - therefore to have any useful discussion of pikemen at all in this game, it is vitally necessary to assume that they are supposed to be better than spears against cavalry and other units as well, as they historically are.
It is an utterly obvious fact that the horribly borked vanilla pikemen might as well not be in the game, regardless of whether or not spears can be used in an anti-cavalry capacity, and to refuse to discuss the unit in a sense of how it SHOULD be working is to say that it is and should remain worthless. Since it is included in the game, I am forced to assume that it should in fact be good for something, and so will ignore your flawed logic regarding fixes to make the unit work.
It is additionally worth noting that I haven't heard anyone yet denounce the pikemen fix as doing anything horrible or historically inaccurate, including you Zhukov - therefore it seems that everyone agrees it is good for the game in both senses, and given that kind of consensus it is actually wrong to talk about pikeman in any light other than what people typically agree they should be in the game. The fact that everyone wants pikemen to be fixed and largely has fixed them makes your position irrelevant, as I'm sure even you will not suggest that pikemen should exist in the game as they are in vanilla, and therefore it is absolutely pointless to continue acting like vanilla pikemen are in any way important to any discussions.
Vinsitor
01-18-2007, 09:36
Ah they wont be that strong, no spear unit would be able to stand up to the later heavy cavalry like gendarmes, lancers, or even chivalric knights. So you would need pikes against them.
Did you talk about melee or about charge? I hope charge will be reduced in any case, 'cause it's really really too strong at the moment. I think that no 32 cav unit can completely destroy (=kill, not route) a 76 men unit with a single charge. I hope this is going to be fixed for late heavy cav too.
Blademun
01-18-2007, 09:37
it isn't people wanting a good counter to cav early on. It's them wanting ANY counter early on. Right now one dosen't exist that isn't other cav.
And whats wrong with using cav as a early form of prevention against cav? I hate to say it yet again but thats the way they did it in the good ole real world. Every western nation in the game gets at least mailed knights, even scotland.
Best early game tactic is to 'catch' a enemy unit of cav with yours, even if yours is inferior, and then march a unit of spears into the melee. Two inferior units gank and defeat the expensive unit of knights pretty quickly, and move on to beat other things.
Later on, you have your Pikes, Halberds and whatnot to repulse charges. I love the way this game accurately reflects warfare in each epoch of the middle ages.
Vinsitor
01-18-2007, 09:54
@Vistor: The bit you quoted was a description of what happens when you apply the sheild fix. NOT vanillia. In Vanillia even mailed knights WILl sweep through spears causing 90% kills for no more losses to themselves than if they where charging 2-Handers and did the same. When I said a unit of spears, i meant a much weaker unit of spears. Spear Militia will get swept away by Chivalric Knights.
I don't like this to happen also in the shield-fixed game. I understand your point, but I think that no cav unit has to instantly kill THE DOUBLE of the men (even if they are peasants) with A CHARGE. Even Gothic Knights during a flank charge.
IMO charge has to first lower morale and break unit's formation, then to kill 32/N men knight have charged into, not 32xN.
Oh I agree cav charges are OTT ATM Vistor. I was just saying that it is different in the shield fix game to unfixed.
And whats wrong with using cav as a early form of prevention against cav?
2 reasons:
1. MP balance, we might not play it but others do and it would be totally unfair not to consider them. They are limited to just one stack and sometimes play with limits that prevent them getting better than spear militia. This means that you WOULDN'T be ABLE to have support spears to back up your inferior cav. this becomes an even bigger issue later on when spears start to disappear and are replaced by Pikes. You still need to do the same to stop the enemy running round the rear of your Pikes and rear charging you, yet many MP armies now won't have much in the way of spears, (some only have Pikes and Spear Militia), and will be even more outclassed than before.
2. Fun, I and many others play this as a game and as such do so for fun. where not interested in an historical simulator. I've played a game in which all you had to do to win was spam your best units (knights in your case), it wasn't really that fun and I actually spent more time learning modding on it than playing. I aren’t interested in a game like that, and most RTS players aren’t judging by their reactions to it.
3. It isn't even historically accurate as you claim. NO, I’m not saying knights didn't dominate when faced with undisciplined infantry who wouldn't stand their ground when they saw knights charging towards them. They did. However, on the rare occasions they encountered disciplined enemy infantry who would hold their ground and formation when charged. They would have lost badly, I’ve even shown you what happens when a modern horse hits something a solid as an ordinary human in simple padding. People forming a shield wall, wearing armour and equipped with a long pointy stick, (~;p), would have had an even worse effect. And that’s the key point here, CA has included virtually no units that aren’t disciplined and trained enough to hold their ground under a charge. They've actually made cav more powerful than they where historically in allowing them to beat any units in the game that do hold their ground.
DISCLAMER: I admit that in history the knights would have outnumbered the disciplined infantry quite heavily. That isn't how things are in game however, and expecting knights to run roughshod over disciplined infantry is both boring, IMBA, and un-historical.
Did you talk about melee or about charge? I hope charge will be reduced in any case, 'cause it's really really too strong at the moment. I think that no 32 cav unit can completely destroy (=kill, not route) a 76 men unit with a single charge. I hope this is going to be fixed for late heavy cav too.
Well with the shield fix they will not wipe out units in one go, but they will take out a lot and then kill the rest in the melee.
Vinsitor
01-18-2007, 13:43
Well with the shield fix they will not wipe out units in one go, but they will take out a lot and then kill the rest in the melee.
To be honest I tried the game with the shield fix, but with or without it, in the first charge Mailed Knights (the AI) drop the Billmen (me) down to 10 men remainig (then 32 knigts killed almost 90% of the army with one charge - I repeat 2 men killed per knight in a flash -).
I agree with Carl the charge is odd in this game and has to be seriously fixed (tweaking unit's mass I don't know how), this is why I'm saying you to underline this to the devs :help:
It HAS to be spear units. 2-handers get mullered by cav, with or without the fix. Thats they way the game is balanced ATM. Try armoured Seargents vs. fuedal knights with the fix, it's fairly decisive.
p.s. bills are NOT considered to be spears by the game BTW.
Billmen have a defense of 1 or something, they are a very weak unit in terms of defending against a cav charge. They will lose a lot to the charge.
Vinsitor
01-18-2007, 13:55
I remenber they have def 3. BTW they are not naked and a charge simply can't be so powerfull IMO, as if EVERY knight of 32 have pierced an average of 2 men in a time like a skewer (and if someone have pierced one man, someone else have pierced 3 men then).
Thats one of the ways the game is balanced(with shield fix and even with reduced charge values in my mod). 2 handers like billmen will be hit hard by charges, spearmen can hold cav and sometimes beat them, swordsmen can hold cav but will lose.
I agree it's OTT, but remeber, charging Mailed Knights have 16 attack. As I say, try thm vs. spearmen, or Dimouunted Fuedals and it changes things a LOT. You need at least 15 defence/spears to slow down Mailed Knights. 3 is nowhere near enough. ANd a sheild (regardless of the actual defence of the unit), sems to help a lot too.
Also what Lusted said.
Vinsitor
01-18-2007, 14:07
I agree and I'm happy that fixes and balancing are making things going in the right direction.
I only underlined that cav charge doesn't respect logic, but I'm very happy if this is going to be seriously nerfed.
To be honest I tried the game with the shield fix, but with or without it, in the first charge Mailed Knights (the AI) drop the Billmen (me) down to 10 men remainig (then 32 knigts killed almost 90% of the army with one charge - I repeat 2 men killed per knight in a flash -).
If you decrease the mass of the mounts, you don't need to lower the charge values, and therefore you can keep the diversity of charge values intact for the whole spectrum of cavalry units instead of making one look too much like the other. Put the mass of the mounts around 2.5 - 3 and see if this works for you to blunt the charge to a satisfying level - for me, it does just that.
I don't think it's over the top at all. Billmen might have been good against cavalry historically, but I doubt it would have been when standing up to a full frontal charge. Maybe more likely if cavalry were caught up in a more prolonged melee with the billmen and that is already the case in M2TW. Plus, heavy billmen are an altogether different prospect.
Vinsitor
01-18-2007, 15:13
If you decrease the mass of the mounts, you don't need to lower the charge values, and therefore you can keep the diversity of charge values intact for the whole spectrum of cavalry units instead of making one look too much like the other. Put the mass of the mounts around 2.5 - 3 and see if this works for you to blunt the charge to a satisfying level - for me, it does just that.
Tnx for the tip I'll try :yes:
pike master
01-18-2007, 16:31
superimpose multiple spearmen on top of each other for single player and make them cheaper for multiplayer so you can upgrade them more. problem solved.
I remenber they have def 3. BTW they are not naked and a charge simply can't be so powerfull IMO, as if EVERY knight of 32 have pierced an average of 2 men in a time like a skewer (and if someone have pierced one man, someone else have pierced 3 men then).
I don't think this actually represents multiple people being skewered on any given lance. Rather, it is supposed to simulate the combined effects of the charge. Men being trampled by horses, thrown into the next rank by the force of the impact, hit with high-speed horses and riders that have died during the charge. People die from a great deal more than simply lances during a full-on heavy cavalry charge.
Vinsitor
01-18-2007, 17:25
I don't think this actually represents multiple people being skewered on any given lance. Rather, it is supposed to simulate the combined effects of the charge. Men being trampled by horses, thrown into the next rank by the force of the impact, hit with high-speed horses and riders that have died during the charge. People die from a great deal more than simply lances during a full-on heavy cavalry charge.
Horses aren't stones. They can be hurt, theyr legs can be broken, knights can be thrown away after the impact and die. If so at least half the cav unit must die in the game.
I think that the effect of a charge isn't the one you explained, or at least not so wide to cause the instant death to 60 men by 32 knights (still alive). IMO that's not logic.
Blademun
01-18-2007, 19:09
However, on the rare occasions they encountered disciplined enemy infantry who would hold their ground and formation when charged. They would have lost badly
What are you talking about? I was talking about the fact that in the dark ages after the fall of rome, the best unit to stop a mounted knight with was another mounted knight. There were no professional armys in the dark ages. ..don't you understand that?? The only nations that had anything close to professional army in 1100AD were Byzantium(and it wasn't a spear based army either), maybe egypt, and england was begining to develop their yeomanry.
I know this changes later on with the formation of true nation-states. However I feel that the early militia units should stay as they are;trash.
but I'm very happy if this is going to be seriously nerfed.
Thanks, we love you too. At least your brave enough to come out in the open and state your real feelings.
If they do 'nerf' cavalry in the upcoming patch, I believe it would be in order to have a boycott of it.
btw, just to clarify, the term nerf means; A overreaction to a aspect of a game thats considered 'too strong' which turns said aspect into something that is generally useless. IE, going from one extreme to the other.
EDIT: While not the most verifiable source, I did some reading on the Wikipedia regarding medieval warfare at this link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_warfare. It seems to indicate that it was a combination of massed pikes and good archers that countered knights. No mention of 'spearmen' anywhere.
btw, just to clarify, the term nerf means; A overreaction to a aspect of a game thats considered 'too strong' which turns said aspect into something that is generally useless. IE, going from one extreme to the other.
Actually i use the term nerf to mean "reducing the power of something that is overpowered to something more balanced".
What are you talking about? I was talking about the fact that in the dark ages after the fall of rome, the best unit to stop a mounted knight with was another mounted knight. There were no professional armys in the dark ages. ..don't you understand that?? The only nations that had anything close to professional army in 1100AD were Byzantium(and it wasn't a spear based army either), maybe egypt, and england was begining to develop their yeomanry.
pleases re-read the disclaimer at the bottom of my post.
I actually stated that in reality their would be few professional foots troops, (what where Huscarls anyway, if not pro infantry, their was SOME, but not much), but those that their where COULD beat knights.
However, this ISN'T how CA have made it in M2TW. Let me emphasise the meaning of this:
THE ONLY CHEAP TRASH UNITS IN THE GAME ARE TOWN MILITIA. EVERYTHING FROM SPEAR MILITIA UP REPRESENTS GOOD QUALITY TROOPS.
Yes good quality troops didn't really exist outside household bodyguards and a few other instances back then. But that NOT HOW IT IS IN GAME. In game EVERYTHING is good quality troops with the exception of Town Militia and Peasant units.
As to your Pike question. It's pretty easy, pikes where better than spears, so people never used spears when they had pikes. Also, in REALITY, professional spear units where nearly non-existent for most of the period M2TW represents, (as far as I know).
HOWEVER, the game IS NOT REALITY. In game ALL spears units are PROFESSIONAL or SEMI-PROFESSIONAL troops who in the rare cases they turned up in real history, WOULD have taken cav charges successfully.
Now that that’s out of the way, (p.s. I was using caps for emphasis, not shouting), I want to ask you a question:
Do YOU honestly believe a unit in history that DID hold ground and formation against a cav charge would not have killed most of the knights, even if it was simply because the knights horses tripped and fell upon running into them?
Because if you honestly believe that charging knights could historically smash through shield walls then we have much bigger problems than what you think is historical vs. what I think the game represents.
Simply put if a horse TODAY in REAL LIFE can trip and fatally injure itself and rider on a fallen rider lying on the ground, I can see no way the same wouldn't have happened if they tried to charge home at high speed into shield walls. heirs more of the shield wall to trip over as it where.
EDIT: No offence intended with this, just getting a bit frustrated.
Vinsitor
01-18-2007, 21:11
Actually i use the term nerf to mean "reducing the power of something that is overpowered to something more balanced".
Exactly tnx Lusted
Horses aren't stones. They can be hurt, theyr legs can be broken, knights can be thrown away after the impact and die. If so at least half the cav unit must die in the game.
I think that the effect of a charge isn't the one you explained, or at least not so wide to cause the instant death to 60 men by 32 knights (still alive). IMO that's not logic.
Agreed. I didn't actually mean to argue that the knights should be able to completely destroy a unit with a charge, or that they should charge with impunity. I was only trying to dispel the idea that the deaths were due just to getting skewered on lances. I actually feel that if the knights follow through and charge into braced spears, what you said should be the case: half the cav fall over dead. But likewise a rank or 2 of spears should mostly drop over dead from lances/horses/bodies and what-have-you. This is exactly the reason I've always felt charges into braced spears should cause MAD for the involved combatants. You'd have to be nuts in real life to do this, and so you should pay for deciding to do it in the game.
Thats waht i've been trying to say too Foz TBH.
Militia spearmen should be the first professional spear unit, and function however effectively we think such a unit should function.
They should not be a rabble of peasants with no training and bad equipment, we already have such a unit: they are called peasants.
They should not be a rabble of peasants with no training and bad equipment, we already have such a unit: they are called peasants.
Actually it's Town Militia Ulstan. However, yes, that’s been my point all along. Spear Militia represent semi-pro spears. The thing is they really didn't exist historically and thus a lot of the history buffs are treating them as cheap trash peasants with spears. When in fact they represent something else entirely that was rarer than gold dust in real history, but is quite common in game. (It's this commonness that leads many to label them as cheap trash units I think, they don't expect pro solders to be numerous, especially that early on in the timeline, when in fact they actually are).
pike master
01-18-2007, 22:58
i might be mistaken but i thought i remember someone who tested spearmen in loose formation and were taking on knights better. i think it had something to do with the knights not getting that initial busting up the first ranks bonus.it was somewhere in the forum but i cant remember where.
to be truthful i dont know what to do about except something from the past. in mtw knight units had 40/ halberdiers and sword axe units 60/ and spearmen and pikemen 100.
maybe thats the trick maybe ca can increase the number of spearmen and pikemen to 100 like in the original.maybe that was a figure they didnt add in when they were developing the units someone didnt give them the larger number.
60 is as big as it gets and you can't get much smaller than current cav units. he sizes are at the biggest extremes they;ll go to. But yes, if it was 100 sopearmen oper unit vs 40 knights things would work a lot better.
Also, the loose formation thing is the stupidest thing about formed charges IMHO. Theirs no way it should help if the charge was historiclly accurrate.
Actually it's Town Militia Ulstan. However, yes, that’s been my point all along. Spear Militia represent semi-pro spears.
I don't know why you keep saying this, Carl. If you look at the stats and the position in the tech tree, the only reasonable interpretation is that town militia and spear militia are the same thing - low grade militia. The only functional difference is one has a longer spear. I gather you are a Warhammer player, yes? Well, to put it in GW terms - you seem to be too swayed by the "fluff" (the unit descriptions); all that matters from a game design point of view are the cold hard stats (and animations, in the case of M2TW, of course!)
The spear sergeants, mercenary sergeants and armoured sergeants are the "semi-pro spears".
Actually it's Town Militia Ulstan. However, yes, that’s been my point all along. Spear Militia represent semi-pro spears. The thing is they really didn't exist historically and thus a lot of the history buffs are treating them as cheap trash peasants with spears.
I agree. They get hung up on the term 'militia'. I don't deny that it's a poor label, but think about it:
We have a unit to represent rabble peasants with no training: peasants.
We have a unit to represent rabble peasants with spears and a bit of training: town militia
Spear militia then, should not be considered yet *another* example of rabble peasants.
To compare to MTW - I consider spear militia to be the spearmen of MTW. The first 'regular' spear unit you can build.
@Econ: I don't agree with you. The descriptions to m,e represent what CA intended. Compare them to a lot of the Eastern Sopears with similar stats. Would you really call tribesmen cheap trash?
Unlike GW, CA writes the background based on their veiw of what the unit is which will be based on what they decide it ahould be like, which will be based on their veiw of history. With GW the background and stats have so littile relation to each other that the background is meaningless.
Miltia is applied to a lot of units that i would not consider militia, it just seems to be CAs way of differentiating them and indicating they are city produced units that can have free upkeep. None of the militia units after town militia really qualify for the "peasent with wepaons" term.
General Zhukov
01-19-2007, 00:17
Spear militia. Who knew they were the great unsung heroes of the Middle Ages?
The worst example of the militia title is italian Spear militia. Their background says they are CONSCRIPTS that serve full time for a YEAR or MORE. I don't call people who serve as full time soildiers, (even for just a year), Militia.
@Zurkov: I get the sarcasam, but like I said, the reality is that units similar to what Spear Militia Represent where EXTREMLY RARE in REAL history. In game however they are very common. The reality is that their might be 10 units of Knigts to 1 unit of Spear Militia equivilents in the real world. However, thats not haw CA has done it in game.
History part (completely unrelated to actual gameplay): The real ratio might have been even lower than that, since anyone decent enough to be semi-professional would often be mounted himself. Only the rich could afford to fight in the Middle Ages, and the rich preferred to ride (merchant cavalry militia). The entire feudal and manorial system was devoted to feeding and equipping the small fighting class of men-at-arms and knights, most of whom at least rode to battle even if they fought dismounted. Massed infantry armies require a revival of urban life or centralized control and taxation, which is why only the Italians, Byzantines and English get large numbers professional infantry to start with in the game. The knights didn't ride down the infantry just because they were 1337, they rode them down because the only fighting men that could have resisted them on foot were often riding horses themselves.
A CA developer working on the original MTW made a remark on cavalry charges which I rather agree with. He claimed that it didn't really matter what weapons the infantry were armed with as long as they stood their ground in the face of charging cavalry. Saxons with shields and axes, legionnaires with short swords or javelins, pikemen, spearmen, halberds, 2handers, musketeers with bayonets; all proved able to resist the cavalry of their time. The real battle is moral and not physical. Spearmen that break and run before the charge hits are just as likely to get massacred as swordsmen who break and run. Swordsmen who stand firm are just as likely to spook the cavalry into aborting the charge as spearmen. A horse that hits a man flattens him, but no horse charges at an impenetrable obstacle like a wall of men, even allowing for specific battle training to 'charge home'. Cavalry charges that succeed usually do so because most of the enemy unit has already run off before they hit, so it becomes a matter of bowling over or by-passing a few die-hards and then running down the more cowardly ones. Similarly, a few horsemen might nerve themselves to charge in against a steady unit of infantry and cause great damage doing so, but the remainer of the unit will pull up short and wade in like sensible people, or split up and gallop around to get at the flanks.
If you think simply standing your ground is too easy a way of defeating cavalry, then perhaps you underestimate the difficulties involved in getting soldiers just to stick around in battle. Even modern armies with small-unit cohesion, medals, patriotism, battle police and other tools of coercion and enticement, are hard pressed to get a majority of their soldiers to fight once the rounds start flying. In any computer game, players get soldiers that operate like automatons and only run away when their morale hits zero. In real life, it's an uphill battle just to get them to fight and men are constantly running away, freaking out, hanging back, getting confused or finding places to hide.
Game stuff: With the astounding discovery of the shield bug, I would suggest that the vanilla game is more balanced than people give it credit for (ie CA did a good job balancing it) except that a few major bugs are skewing everything inside out. I've decided to wait for the shield issue to be patched before tweaking cavalry charges, spear bonuses, 2hand attack values etc.
I agree with most people who want spears to be at least competitive against cavalry, even if the cavalry wins in the end. I do not agree with uber hedghogs of death, because this would make cavalry only good for chasing routers and archers. There should also be a distinction between the different types of cavalry. Light cavalry should suffer against even swordsmen if they are foolish enough to tackle them head on, while heavy cavalry should prove a tough challenge for anything short of pikes. It's not completely historical (light cavalry just meant less armor, they could charge and kill just as well if they had lances) but it makes for better gameplay.
Spear bonus is uniformly fixed at 4 for spears and halberds and 8 for pikes. The only major exception (that I have come across) is the Muslim spear units getting a bonus of 8 as well. Must be the hidden naptha projectors built into the shaft.
Spears in MTW fought in two ranks if stationary, but now their longer weapons only give them a bonus against cavalry. Pikes fought in four ranks but now only in two. This is possibly a good move, since more fighting ranks usually means you need more men in the unit to have the same frontage compared to a unit that only fought in one rank. I remember that in MTW pikemen were actually considered weaker than spears because they needed to stay in about 6 ranks to fight well (4 fighting ranks plus a replacement rank or two) while the spearmen could get away with 4 and thus overlap the pikemen. Swordsmen could of course deploy in two ranks and overlap everyone. That was how they beat spears and pikes in MTW, not because they got some uber +10 attack from their swords vs spears. And of course they were usually better trained and armored in general.
Vinsitor
01-19-2007, 06:51
The real battle is moral and not physical. Spearmen that break and run before the charge hits are just as likely to get massacred as swordsmen who break and run. Swordsmen who stand firm are just as likely to spook the cavalry into aborting the charge as spearmen. A horse that hits a man flattens him, but no horse charges at an impenetrable obstacle like a wall of men, even allowing for specific battle training to 'charge home'. Cavalry charges that succeed usually do so because most of the enemy unit has already run off before they hit, so it becomes a matter of bowling over or by-passing a few die-hards and then running down the more cowardly ones. Similarly, a few horsemen might nerve themselves to charge in against a steady unit of infantry and cause great damage doing so, but the remainer of the unit will pull up short and wade in like sensible people, or split up and gallop around to get at the flanks.
Agreed 100%
This is the historical point of view I tried to explain :yes: charge is linked to morale and unit cohesion, no matter the tipe of the weapon (that matters melee and training instead).
The big difference for the cav is the mobility and capability to flank.
Heavy cav deatly charge over infantry has been idealized in the middle age.
And to put this point in the gameplay, you have to absolutely nerf the cavalry charge (maybe tweaking cavalry mass as people suggested) and look to morale and cohesion a charge has to lower.
Oleander Ardens
01-19-2007, 09:11
I may add to your excellent summary about The real battle is moral and not physical that good equipment and long weapons help for sure to raise the moral. If I'm clad in a decent suit of armour, protected by a big shield and wield a long spear I'm more confident to stand up to the in charging cavalry..
Cheers
OA
Vinsitor
01-19-2007, 09:44
Talking about game balance, IMO you may add to shields a bonus against charge (or simply subtract the shield value to the charge value) and to spears a bonus in melee against cav, so cav vs trained spears that hold the formation can be not very usefull and lose many expensive knights, but knights can easily route less trained troops with a good charge (without killing 90% of the unit of corse).
To compare to MTW - I consider spear militia to be the spearmen of MTW. The first 'regular' spear unit you can build.
I agree that "MTW spear militia/lvey = MTW spearmen", but MTW spearmen were of "poor" quality. This was explicit in the file that CA produced an excel file showing how the stats were derived.
Historically, I think this means that they were usually not "regulars" in the modern sense. They are men that a feudal lord or a city would put together to fight should a war break out. They might have some training and carry out some guard duties, but they would be part time soldiers. That's what I understand the term militia to mean. They are not the "semi-professionals" in the sense of men who make living as fighters, either as permanent retainers of a lord and/or fighting as mercenaries. They would have less training and have personal characteristics less suited to combat.
In MTW, the "feudal sergeants" are the "average" quality spearmen. In M2TW, you have armoured sergeants, mercenary sergeants and spearmen sergeants that correspond to these.
Some militias may be of "average" quality too, able to be match the semi-professionals - the Italians being an example of this.
In game terms, I would like to see low quality spearmen often crumble in the face of a charge by knights. They should not be relied upon to hold. Average quality spearmen should be able to hold them off frontally, at a cost to both.
@ECON21: plenty of good points, however I would like to raise a few points myself.
First, the Italian stuff isn't really militia at all, it's a full time army really, it's just given the militia titles.
Second, to me CA have represented Spear Militia as ABOVE Town Militia (who are weak useless spears), and BELOW Armoured Sergeants. I place them as roughly the equivalent of Greek Militia, (historically). i.e. commoners who have been drafted into a militia and are a kind of standing militia that lives and works as ordinary citizens, but also trains part time, and is thus reasonably well disciplined and trained, without being anywhere near as good as a full time solider. To help you out here's my progression of where spear units sit in my mind:
Town Militia: Trash Peasants with short spears and a few days training in how to use them.
Spear Militia: Semi-Pro Militia units, they're a standing militia as apposed to something drafted from peasants and train a littlie in their spare time. Decent units, able to fight well an effectively. But still a long way of a full time soldier.
Italian Militia: Conscript soldiers who are effectively full time pro-spear units. However, since they only serve short term (a year or so according to the description), they lack the vetrancy and experience of the long term solders, and thus aren’t quite as good in spite of full time training and very good equipment.
Armoured Sergeants: Full time long term pro-spear units, they have the equipment, full time training, and experience to be really good spears and can hold medium cav easily, whilst giving heavy cav a stiff challenge.
Papal Guard: The Crème De La Crème of the pro-spear units, they possess the best equipment, training, and experience possible and are quite capable of equalling most pike units when faced with enemy cav.
DISCLAIMER: I'm pretty sure the representation of spear militia I believe CA has given is A-Historical. I very much doubt most countries DID have a standing militia back then. Indeed I’ve always been led to believe that historically the units in an army where normally all full times soldiers or recently drafted peasants. However, as noted, I don't believe this game is remotely historical it simply uses the time period and the units of the setting as a basis, not as hard fast facts.
Third point, Balance. Okay I understand you history buffs don't like this, and I understand that, but even though I only play SP, I have the decency to think of the people who mostly play MP. The game HAS to be balanced for them or where being selfish. (Please don't take that last lot offensively, that’s not intended, I’m just pointing things out). Spear Militia, both in MP and SP are the earliest available unit that is marked as anti-cav and that comes out around the same time as/just before mailed knights. Armoured Sergeants won't be along for a while in SP, thus they are all you have to beat them with in SP for at least a short while. In MP some armies only get spear militia and pikes. Pikes alone can't stop flanking cav, (too slow), something else is needed here. For some factions the only option is earthier other cav or Spear Militia. Spear Militia thus really need to be able to stop mailed, (and preferably), Feudal Knights. Knights that are better than this are so expensive that the enemy either has to sacrifice infantry/foot archers to get them, or take less cav. This helps balance it out nicely.
@dopp: I agree 100% with what you said and it was actually what I was trying to say all along. their is a minor error in your post though. All units with the Spear attribute get Spear_Bounus_8. This includes Spear militia, Armoured Sergeants, Papal Guard, Italian Militia, Italian Spear Militia, and a few others besides.
Remember that I also run a shield fix ATM and thus have an idea of how the mechanics work with Militia Spears able to challenge Mailed Knights, (they don’t quite beat them if you use the vanilla fix, but they do okay).
pike master
01-19-2007, 15:41
i did test against papal guard with heavy cavalry they bowled them over without having to mount a second charge. its funny when you spread spearmen out it takes knights 3 charges to win but thats if they survive.
some of it too is that i did one test where i kept the generals out of the fight and the spearmen fared a lot better against heavy cavalry. i will try to do this with spearmen in schiltrom to see if this helps schiltrom. maybe the general in the cavalry unit makes it fight better or stay in melee longer without routing or his own contribution since mounted generals do a lot better than foot generals.
heard a guy do this when testing infantry on .com.
The gen has a big effect and has actually won a LOT of fights for some cav units in 1 v 1 tests on me as he adds extra formed charge kills, keeps them from rounting and fights as well as 5 or 6 ordinary horsemen vs. spears.
Well part of all of this needs to hinge on the relationship between Peasants and spearmen.
The question should be, lacking charge for either side, in a melee beat down what units should the first spear unit available be able to best?
Town Militia > Peasants, Peasant Archers, Peasant/Militia Crossbowmen, initial light cavalry. And equal to initial heavy cavalry (mailed knights).
However, given a good charge the mailed knights should probably be able to route them with minor losses, and with the Town Militia majority still alive (if running). A good charge on them by light cavalry should be a near stalemate when it's all over.
And it should be similar at each level of development.
And of course, good late pikemen should pretty much wreck any cav you throw at them, if they are braced from the right angle.
But my thinking has been that a successful charge maybe shouldn't kill as many people as it does now, but should really wreck the target's moral and route many units. The morale effect should be more like gunpowder really.
But the Town Militia should be able to best some units at the same approximate level in melee. And Peasants should really be good only for garrisons and missile sponges.
But these peasant level units should mostly be good at holding and slowing things down long enough for important units to do their jobs... dying in place of the more worthy. After all, being but peasants, they should feel honored to be allowed to die for their king. ~;)
Actually Town Militia should just evaporate under all but light cav charges IMHO, (Border horse, Hobladiers, HA e.t.c.), they represent a much weaker unit that Spear Militia and they, (Town Militia), don't get half the Anti-cav bounuses that Spear Militia do.
Not Town Militia, you mean Spear Militia I think. Town Militia are supposed to be horrible. Those are guys who signed up two days before the battle because the town is besieged and everyone is going to die anyway. Spear (and crossbow) militia are fellows who actually spend two weeks every year training together. Sword militia are the fellows in big towns that can afford better equipment and a semi-regular defense force, training on
Sundays with compensation, pensions and medicare. Pike and halberd militia are just one step below professionals (supposedly, although their stats are still pretty bad). The 'militia' just means they have free upkeep and is not strictly a measure of their fighting worth. Same with peasants, the country cousins of the militia, who are counted as half their value in keeping public order in towns and thus have the 'peasant' tag to their names. You're meant to raise peasants just for the battle and disband them afterwards, rather than expect them to garrison towns. The peasant status is not a reflection of their fighting prowess at all (although it usually means they sux). You can armor peasants in light mail, btw, so they can actually look pretty formidable.
pike master
01-19-2007, 18:27
yeah town militia should be fodder and since peasants can be trained in castles and have no shield but an effective weapon they should be superior to town militia but not to other units. the town militia would have a benefit of protection from arrows ie the shield but since the peasant has the longer weapon and more agility they should be able to take town militia down. but as far as spear militia they shouldnt have a chance.
and i have noticed that most units arnt routing from a cav charge until they are down to a few units and some dont at all just die. so horse dread isnt very high like it is in previous versions.
i think high end knights should be able to roll over spearmen. note i said high end knights the ones with 8 charge. but light cavalry and militia cavalry shouldnt have much of an effect against spearmen unless they later on give mounted seargents a longer lance. long lance cavalry should be able to crack spearmen but other cavalry such as light, merchant and horse archers shouldnt have a prayer of doing it.
the high end knights couldnt be stopped effectively until they started using pikes.
No peasants really should get trashed by Town Militia. Hands down. Town Militia is the entry level of trained melee units.
They have some training, and are equipped to a degree. Peasants? Those guys are grabbed from the field and told they have to fight.
And look at the price. You're saying a 110 fl unit should beat a 290 fl unit? Town Militia cost more than twice as much, almost 3 times as much. Part of that price is extra tricks, but still, in a straight up melee Town Militia should be the winners.
They, (Twon Militia vs. Peseants), actually are winning as they have Light_Spears and so don't suffer melee penalties vs. peseants. Spear Militia Is another matter entierly and I find buffing all sheild units defence skill by 2 points really has big knock on effects against 2-handers and cav charges, as well as peasents and other stuff. but even with vanillia sheild fixes they don't do bad IMHO.
I think you like spearmen too much if you want them winning vs. two handers...
I agree with most people who want spears to be at least competitive against cavalry, even if the cavalry wins in the end. I do not agree with uber hedghogs of death, because this would make cavalry only good for chasing routers and archers.
I agree. Knights *should* crush a single unit of unsupported spears. It might take time, it might take repeated charges, and the knights might take losses, but if nothing else, the knights could simply walk their horses up to the spear men and start hacking them down.
What should not happen is a single flying charge just wipes the spearmen off the face of the earth. I expect the spearmen to die, I just want it to take a little while :D
Part of the problem is we really don't have the 'men at arms' unit - Professional soldiers who were not knights, but were more than grunts with spears or swords.
I agree that "MTW spear militia/lvey = MTW spearmen", but MTW spearmen were of "poor" quality.
That's fine, but it seems like MTW spears were way better against cavalry than MTW2 spear militia. Of course, a lot of this might be the shield bug: absolutely no stat tweaking should be done till this is fixed.
Those are guys who signed up two days before the battle because the town is besieged and everyone is going to die anyway. Spear (and crossbow) militia are fellows who actually spend two weeks every year training together.
Actually, the first group is plain old peasants. The guys that are not regulars that train every now and then would be the town militia. Spear milita would be 'regular soldiers' the same way that spearmen in MTW were. The 'militia' title is misleading.
I think you like spearmen too much if you want them winning vs. two handers...
I never said that Musashi. What I meant, (wasn't clear I admit), was that it changes 2-handers from rippining through Sword and Sheild infantry with few losses, to rippining through them with a few losses, (less that 50% normally but still pretty good, about 30-40% depending on the units).
pike master
01-19-2007, 23:16
i think there was a mistake in the game as far as the lower end units. i think peasants were given the wrong name i believe they were to call them gladiators :P
town militia are cavalry fodder used to soak up a charge or stop bullets.:P
spear militia should not be able to stop a knight charge unsupported but armored spearmen and papal guard should. but of course none of the spear units are stopping them but just like its been mentioned if they could stop knights then no one would have started using pikes.
Well here's the question regarding cav vs spears... does the cav have lances? A cav charge with lances should wreck spears, but one with just swords and spears of their own shouldn't work out too well unless from a flank.
pike master
01-20-2007, 08:20
i agree with that. its pretty lame when you see mounted crossbowmen bowl over a unit of spearmen.
Personally I think the balance works. Spears are slightly better against Cavalry but can't handle a full knight charge. Pikes can (I've tested it. Even the cheapest scots pike militia can take out mailed knights charging with not even 50% losses - at less than 25% the cost!)
The entire medieval arms race was "how to stop knights?" Pikes was the answer. That's why the scots, who were too poor for cavalry had 14' long spears at Bannockburn (their first battle switching to proper pikes was a disaster as they were still untrained). If a 4-8' spear could cut it, they would have used them.
Seems fair to me BOTH for gaming and history.
MP - RPS - Pikes stop cav. Swords kill pikes. Cav kills swords.
SP - Play Scotland. They're the best nation in the game. Ha!! Better you never expected to hear that.....
If you don't get pikes, use your own cav (or HA).
Fair enough to put in the shield fix, but after that Spears are on their own. As the RTW quote says "sucks to be infantry"
Oh Flower of Scoooootlaaaand.....:laugh4:
Except thats not how it works in game. Cav can just go round the rear of pikes, and swords against fixed pikes can win, but not without heavy losses and not against the better types of pikes.
Forcing your enemy round the rear of your pikes IS a tactic and your dictating when and where the fight will take place which is really oood military doctarine. All this goes to waste however if you don't have an anti-cav unit that can turn quickly and absorb cav charges. Pies just can't do that in my expiriance. Thats a large part of why i feel spears should be able to stop cav of a similar era without upgrades. they don't quite manage it under the vanillia sheild fix. But they hurt the cav in doing so. It's my opinion they just don't quite perform well enough, but it's subjective at this stage.
If a 4-8' spear could cut it, they would have used them.
Peasents with knives would cut it if they stood their ground. the problem was that without a pike you could garuntee the unit reciving the charge would take heavy losses. Pikes on the other hand could inflict injury on the knights BEFORE they actually slammed into the formation.
In general the nature of this game absolutly requires an anti cav unit thats mobile enought to turn to gface flanking cav quickly and that ISN'T other cav, (as not everyone has equally good cav). Considering all the bounuses they get vs. cav and their utter uslessness at taking on anything else, spears look to be the unit for the job to me.
Except thats not how it works in game. Cav can just go round the rear of pikes, and swords against fixed pikes can win, but not without heavy losses and not against the better types of pikes.
Forcing your enemy round the rear of your pikes IS a tactic and your dictating when and where the fight will take place which is really oood military doctarine. All this goes to waste however if you don't have an anti-cav unit that can turn quickly and absorb cav charges. Pies just can't do that in my expiriance.
Erm. Sorry if I'm being really thick here but is that not accurate? Wielding 18' long sticks is unwieldy. If your enemy has cav then you need to use terrain etc to counter them. You try to catch them on your pikes, they try to avoid them (and lose when they don't - like Bannockburn. And win when they do - most of the others!)
If Pikes were mobile (or spears were as effective) then your 680 fl+ cav would get nixed by 150 fl pike/spearmen. Then you'd get the opposite problem but the same rants (it's broken etc).
As to Pikes being good in melee against swords - I thought they weren't? They switched to their swords and got slaughtered. So that's why there's a pike fix (which I'm using in my scottish game - courtesy of you! Ta!:2thumbsup: ) which stops them. So are they too good against inf now?
Not trying to be difficult, my head's just spinning here. :dizzy2: Are we not essentially talking personal bias here. If you're a pike fan - take pike fix. Cav/HA fan - ignore fixes. Inf fan - shield fix. Axe fan - 2h fix. Longbow fan - change ROF for longbows. :juggle2:
It seems to be (perhaps wrongly) that it just keeps going round in circles. That the pro-cav lobby argues aginst fixes, the pro-inf lobby for but noone can agree on "balance" because it always means some units are better than others. But it always will, won't it? :wall:
I don't see it that way... the spear on your flanks only has to live long enough for the nearest pike unit to turn... They don't have to win.
@Moah: Youll get an anwser, but it's probably going to take a while as i'm going to have to explain how I see various diffrent units interacting with each other and thus where everything sits in my mind.
Expect it in 20=40 minutes, and i even have an anwser for Musashi~;p.
pike master
01-20-2007, 21:19
pikemen who were immobile during the renaissance were not that way for themselves but because they found themselves needed more for protecting arquebusiers and musketeers but when a general advance was ordered they would form up and attack in their phalanxes.
the scots because they were of low training and could not use well ordered drills would use the pike schiltrom(love to see it in the game, suggest it on page 56 under special unit abilities of the instruction manual.)
the swiss and landsnechts were so well drilled and disciplined that it would have been suicide to attack them with cavalry from any direction.
so if
you use them as stationary protectors for your missile troops you need a loose formation in spearwall to aid in enmeshing them in the line.
but if you think they are more offensive which i believe than they need improvement and above all i think both can be achieved by a fix and make everyone happy. i think ca will tweak them some in the future.
It's taking longer than I though. the backing up's eatinga lot of time and patience ATM.
About 1/3rd through.
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