Quote Originally Posted by Caledonian Rhyfelwyr
I'm surprised at the support for pikemen, from my experience they are abysmal. All they can do is kill cavalry that charge them head on, against infantry they can barely beat peasants. And they drop like flies under ranged attacks. And they are slow moving.

I want to like pikemen, I really do. I want to have them forming the backbone of my late period armies with artillery, gunmen, and heavy cavalry in support. But they could lose to an army created in the first 10 turns.

They may be cheap, but so are peasants, doesn't make them worthwhile.
All good points, but I like them nonetheless. There's just something so satisfying about watching some idiotic nobleman with more money than sense commit suicide against a line of pikes. Watching a pack of knights crushing a line of town militia just doesn't give me the same buzz. Maybe it's the repressed lefty in me.

I have of course modded my game so that pikemen and guns make medieval weapons utterly obsolete, but I agree that in vanilla they are all but worthless. If I was trying to answer which unit type I find most effective, I wouldn't want to tie myself down to one type; combined arms is generally better than spam and every type is weak in some situation.