Cavalry chasing routers take casualties

I have noticed that i sometimes lose up to 10 men in a cavalry unit after the enemy army has routed. It's not due to stakes. I have observed that cavalry that charges into a routing unit that is close to a stone wall or similar obstacle is extremely prone to biting the dust, other times I've just found several dead horses lying around somewhere where there was no fighting.
You could lose a guy or two when chasing routers in MTW too and that's fine, but when it's close to 15-20% of the unit, it starts to become dumb, imho. They're fleeing, there's no need to hurl yourself at them with such abandon that your horse kills itself on the stone wall they're climbing over, just hack them down with that sword of yours?

I never noticed but will pay more attention in the future. Maybe they fall out of the saddle reaching over to whale away at some dude? J/K.

Interesting.
I haven't really had that problem but I've noticed that when cavalry approaches a group of routers the rear few will turn & attempt to make a rear-guard defense.
Haven't noticed any loss of my own cavalry but its certainly a nice touch.

The MTW losses were because routing units counted as charging (but with no follow up attack) so they had potential to mow down guys that blocked their escape.
I actually wish they'd bring that back because you should need to be wary of getting between a desperately fleeing foe & their escape path.

A little off-topic question but are routers, if you chase them down, considered dead(a la RTW style) or are they considered prisoners(a la MTW2 style)?

I ask this cause I don't have ETW yet and like to know more about it before I buy it.

Dead, like RTW dead. ;)

Yeah, I've also noticed the rear-guard thing... I don't think it's those that inflict that many casualties, but I will pay more attention. Maybe also try to charge for example a unit in cover from behind and see if that also results in a lot of dead horses. Or a unit standing on both sides of an obstacle, so to say.

I have also noticed the cavalry thing. I'm not sure if it is the rear guard, I know one time I sent several units of horse after one last unit and took a lot of casualties so I'm thinking they may get in each others way, try using just a single unit of horse per routing enemy see if that helps.

I've had this happen to my general. The idea about routers having charge bonus sounds plausible, IIRC he was intercepting a routing unit rather than chasing it from behind.

Well I've been watching my cav chasing routed units & I've definitely seen a bunch of my cav guys kill themselves on walls.
Ones I've seen were trying to cross on quite a fine angle.

I actually like it really, represents horses going lame after jumping or refusing to jump & tossing their riders on their heads.
If that was the case though, you should also get some casualties when just moving units around too, not just on the chase
Though in the chase is when a cavalryman is going to be much more likely to stuffup a jump so arguably they just stopped being careful on the chase?

I suspect that making sure that your cav is crossing at near right angle to the wall will help reduce this casualty rate.

I've also noticed a couple of times that troops on foot chasing a routing unit can take casualties from their own cavalry.
I had a full unit of line infantry - 160 men - chasing some routing pirates. Sending 2 units of non-missile cavalry to join in and speed things up resulted in about 30 foot soldiers being killed as the cavalry passed through them - at least that seemed to be the only reason for their demise - unlike RTW where anyone being flattened by a 'friendly' elephant merely picked themselves up, dusted themselves off and carried on regardless.

Yeah, you REALLY should not charge horse through your own men in ETW.

I noticed the chasing thing and it seems really bad to loose so many soldiers if you are chasing men down....wel generaly cavalary seems really weak to me, they die fast....

Calvary dieing while jumping over walls? This cant be WAD. Probably a bug or at least something that needs tweaking.

Routers taking out pursuing men isn't unrealistic when you think about it. I know if I was legging it and some bloke on a horse came after me I'd try to take him out rather than letting mysef be run down. :laugh4:

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Originally Posted by Sir Beane

Routers taking out pursuing men isn't unrealistic when you think about it. I know if I was legging it and some bloke on a horse came after me I'd try to take him out rather than letting mysef be run down. :laugh4:

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It makes sense but given that cavalry have been demoted to a lesser role than in other TW games, it seems like a needless nerf to one of their best remaining uses. Especially since units that rout from the field take losses regardless. So not only do cavalry take losses from running down broken units, those units often would be destroyed outright if you did nothing at all.

The same thing was in M2TW. You would loose a horseman now and then to routers.

These guys are less armored so a couple or three is ok…but some times it seems like you loose quite a few.

I have noticed this. I observed this with my Swedish Heavy Calvary. I noticed something wrong with my unit count for my Regiment Calvary when trying to kill routing troops after I got the End Battle / Continue option during campaign but I did not see it directly.

Yea sometimes you get phantom casaulties for no reason even if a unnit wasnt engaged for the whole battle.

It also seems, to me anyway, that cavalry are rather poor at chasing routers in ETW, since it seems like they have to actually stop, do their attack animation, then go chase after enemies again. Since cavalry now seem to have an 'acceleration' period before they get up to speed, this means that it can take several seconds to kill one guy, during which time the rest of the crowd has moved on.

This also happened in M2TW a lot because of friendly fire. Missile units continue to shoot at routing units instead of switching to the next non-routing target, or simply stopping to shoot (as was the case in MTW), so when the routers are chased, the missiles also hit the cavalry. Basically, once the enemy is routing try telling all your missile units to cease fire and see if you still take excessive losses.

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Originally Posted by Dead Guy

I have noticed that i sometimes lose up to 10 men in a cavalry unit after the enemy army has routed. It's not due to stakes. I have observed that cavalry that charges into a routing unit that is close to a stone wall or similar obstacle is extremely prone to biting the dust, other times I've just found several dead horses lying around somewhere where there was no fighting.
You could lose a guy or two when chasing routers in MTW too and that's fine, but when it's close to 15-20% of the unit, it starts to become dumb, imho. They're fleeing, there's no need to hurl yourself at them with such abandon that your horse kills itself on the stone wall they're climbing over, just hack them down with that sword of yours?

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Well, this 'feature' has been around for a while. As you noticed, even in MTW we were losing men to routers... It was funny in a sense, a unit of bodyguards would charge peasants, not losing a man make them rout and then lose 10% of the unit while chasing the routers.

Anyway, at lest in MTW and RTW you had to be extra careful about your missile units on 'fire at will' having an explicit fondness for shooting the backs of routers: regardless of the fact that any friendly units were nearby... So, if you had some missile units standing nearby a big fight you were likely to lose more men to friendly missile fire right at the moment when the enemy broke than during the whole preceding fight...

I suspect, this is even worse in ETW. Missiles have much longer range...

If I'm not mistaken, this was a problem in Shogun and the first Medieval that was, for the most part, addressed in a patch. As someone said above, the problem with Shogun was that the routing units were getting some sort of bonus.

This is definetly not a friendly fire issue, though soldiers still seem to have very little regard for their countrymens lives. And the range of projectiles in ETW is MUCH shorter than in Medieval.

To clarify, my main gripe isn't losing a guy or two (or even five) because I do the hammer and the anvil on a fleeing unit (stupid), but because cavalry catching up with a fleeing unit close to obstacles like walls will take horrible casualties sometimes. Seemingly dying upon hitting the wall while "running in melee". The wall is a stationary object, it doesn't seem hard to anticipate that it will still be there as you're chasing that other guy?

While I agree with a lot of points people have about micro management, and that taking some micro away is bad because it would remove your part in the battle, microing mopping up to the extent of telling your cavalry not to ride down your own infantry who happen to be in the way on their way to the unit you told them to chase, seems to me a little bit over the top. Sort of like cannons emptying their barrels into the cannon next to them when you tell them to cease fire? :damnmate: /facepalm

Well well, it's war, people are bound to die :p I understand that it's hard to make units follow orders "intelligently", because then they might end up not doing what you told them to do. I do wish that fire at will would have som kind of proximity shut down close to your own troops though...

In my campaign my cavalry usually take quite a few casualties when chasing down fleeing men, which I beleive to be realistic, in the heat of a chase the gentleman rider (used to teh thrill of the hunt) would often loose his head and break formation. Cavalry, no matter whom or where they are fighting, loose all effectiveness and fighting capability once out of a tight formation.

It would seem plausible that a group of fleeing infantry might look back to find that their persuers have spread out, that only two are chasing after them now, turn around with bayonets fixed, perhaps muskets still loaded and easily overcome the cumbersome horsemen.

In terms of the ability to fight, I would always put my money on infantry, what those men had to endure would, if it did not break them, turn them into supreme soldiers. Nothing could compare to the skill or bravery needed to survive the cold steel of a bayonet charge or the hail of a mucket volley.

Cavalry are in almost all aspects inferior fighters.

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Originally Posted by Bopa the Magyar

the cumbersome horsemen.

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The guy on the horse is the cumbersome one? The light cavalry in E:TW wear no armor and are armed only with a sword, which would be less than three pounds in weight. The infantryman has musket, easily ten pounds, bayonet, and ammunition, plus he's been hoofing it off the battlefield. The man on foot has to put out much more stamina to get away from the horseman than the horseman has to put out to catch him.

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In terms of the ability to fight, I would always put my money on infantry, what those men had to endure would, if it did not break them, turn them into supreme soldiers. Nothing could compare to the skill or bravery needed to survive the cold steel of a bayonet charge or the hail of a mucket volley.

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(There's no skill involved in surviving a musket volley, just luck.) Even supposing infantry became these supreme soldiers, cavalry, especially heavy cavalry, were expected to charge these men and break them up. It worked at least as often as it failed(at Waterloo, the British heavy cavalry broke up both cavalry and infantry, but couldn't be controlled, so they were hit quite hard by a counter charge. The French cavalry failed against an organized square formation). Assuming cavaliers survived fighting these "supreme soldiers," they should have been even better, no?

It happened in Rome Total War too.

It only occurs when they have bayonets/pikemen, as lets say a horse is coming towards you and you are going to die, up goes the pike.

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Originally Posted by TiberiusBeskar

It only occurs when they have bayonets/pikemen, as lets say a horse is coming towards you and you are going to die, up goes the pike.

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I've seen it happen with all kinds of troops, though troops with bayonets and such kill more cavalry than skirmishers.

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Originally Posted by Feanaro

The guy on the horse is the cumbersome one? The light cavalry in E:TW wear no armor and are armed only with a sword, which would be less than three pounds in weight. The infantryman has musket, easily ten pounds, bayonet, and ammunition, plus he's been hoofing it off the battlefield. The man on foot has to put out much more stamina to get away from the horseman than the horseman has to put out to catch him.



(There's no skill involved in surviving a musket volley, just luck.) Even supposing infantry became these supreme soldiers, cavalry, especially heavy cavalry, were expected to charge these men and break them up. It worked at least as often as it failed(at Waterloo, the British heavy cavalry broke up both cavalry and infantry, but couldn't be controlled, so they were hit quite hard by a counter charge. The French cavalry failed against an organized square formation). Assuming cavaliers survived fighting these "supreme soldiers," they should have been even better, no?

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A horse in a melee is cumbersome, if the five infantry you are riding after turn around and start to fight back, you are dead, in fact if its only three I'd expect nothing moe than a sharp stop to that horseman's life. In the middle ages, running down most infantry was a simple ride through the park, most were ill trained and of little quality. Those infantry whom were fighting in the protracted wars of the 18th century were of the highest quality the world had yet seen, cavalry however, were often made up of young gentlemen who lacked discipline. Thus the chase had become far more dangerous, you were no longer fighting peasants, you were fighting men whom could fight through and survive a battle line. They knew how to fight better than you did, cavalry were no longer the fighting elite, so much as the social elite.

Oh and by the by, to survive a battle line you had to be able to reload and shoot properly for an extended period of time, to be sure chance could take you down in a second, but only you and your fellows could make sure that the line kept fighting. It took skill and bravery, more so than a cavalry melee.