Cav Bow spam, plus cav spam

Hello,

At this moment there is nothing that can help against a spam of Arc cav, backed up properly with strong cav, handled by a good player. Even if You setup in a forest, in large formation, having 2 Monks Bows, they will kill You just by arrows, if they are good and keep shooting and escaping back when your archer fire, to avoid losses. And at the end will comes out with the musk cav, to finish the rest.
The regular horse archers has been capped to 3 units, but was not considered the introdution of another bow cav, the Samurais. So actually people can come in battle with 3 horse bow, plus 3-4 or more bow cav samurai, with a set of 7-8 horse archers at least.

And another problem is that upped cavalry (specially Katana) is too strong and can win even into a forest camping with spears, unless you come up in game with at least 6-8 spears, but using 6-8 spears will result as a bad setup against swords. The game is actually broken in this.

To be better balance, the fact the arc cav is not hitten by arrows when escaping must be removed or reduced. Or the cover bonus in the forest must be increased.
Also the melee factor in forest for the cav must be penalized more.

I can accept a cavalry setup winning on flat ground, but is unacceptable they win on forest.
As right now it's an automatical win on open ground, and high chance win even versus forest defender, for a cavalry player, versus a balanced army.

I hope this will be addressed and corrected soon.

I posted this also on Totalwar.com :

http://forums.totalwar.com/showthrea...e-bow-cav-spam

RAPAX Brutus

They are annoying ill give you that, you either have to take lots of fast cavalry yourself, or forest camp. The latter takes forever as they kite a lot for hours if need be.

One tactic I find always works is to hide in a forest with some guns you just walk the guns round (so they arnt seen) to whatever side they are attacking and surprise fire be sure to have protective spears nearby though as they will try and take them out with charges., I always dismount my gen and sit a nag att on him to try and minimize casualties and set swords to hold formation mode, dismounting cav in balanced armies also.

Hi Spoon,

Is not only a matter of annoying , but also that even forest camping does not help. I had a match with a good player, he just spammed 3ha, 3-4samurai cav bow, 1 hero cav bow, 1 general bow, and 4 yari cav, plus a musk cav.
I camped in a forest, large formation, I had 2 Bows, 1 Monk and 1 Daikyu, and about 4-5 spears (1 Monk and 4-5 Nagi attendants).
I protected well my bows, infact I finished arrows with my Monk, almost same with Daykio.
Anyway he killed my Bows with arrows, when close to run away a whirstling arrow from his general was doing the job. Then he killed my General, then the rest, He did not had to use any of the Yari cav, and at the end he was still shooting. I was all the time in the forest. I also had 4 cav, but since he used the retainer to reduce my cav speed, they were completely useless.

This I cannot accept, not being in a forest in large formation with 2 excellent bows.
I can of course create a specific setup to handle better, infact I just added 2 Nagi Sam to my army just for this, but I am not sure yet if will be enough, and anyway, now my balanced formation is more unbalanced versus a Swords rush.

The point: a cav army versus a forest defender should be an automatic loss. It is not. As by now in open ground is an automatic win, and is almost a win in forest, even with just upped melee cav, unless the defender brings a lot of spears (I always use 4-6 and they are not enough, main of them are Nagi att, 1 is always a monk or a Nagi Sam, before was 1-2 Ashi).

To me the cavalry is actually overpowered.

We need a cap to ha (but just for avoid neverending games, nothing else), and an increased effect of forest bonus to infantry, or a reduced power of cav. Other suggestions are welcome.

Rapax Brutus

This could be easily fixed with control points. Just as you have one in a castle. Don't defend it, lose the castle. You can see the timer ticking down on you.

Same thing here. If you put CP's out there, could take the form of little villages, they could even provide some advantage to the units who hold it. But no matter how you set it up, the basic principle is the same, make camping and kiting more difficult bordering on impossible by providing a winning condition that counters standing off.

You just need better designed MP. CA could learn a thing or three from valve here. ;) They've churned out hundreds of variations of CP maps at this point for TF2. It may be in a cartoon format, but that's just the skin. Given that CTF has been around since quake 2, it's not like this is a terribly original idea, so you'd of thought it would of maybe dawned on CA at some point this might be at least a variant of MP they should include.

Disclaimer: all the above remarks are based on just about no familiarity w/ MP in S2, I play it reluctantly at best, not a fan, for the reasons you mention and a dozen more than destroy any enjoyment I could ever take from playing it, so feel free to ignore if this sound utterly off base. All I know is, other developers have made simple yet incredibly compelling MP games, the ideas are out in the marketplace free for the poaching and incorporation....