Quote Originally Posted by Silence Hunter View Post
I second Maion and soup_alex. The easiest way to get used to things like these is playing the game. Cavarly isn't very hard to master. If you are playing a campaign with one of the eastern factions you will develop that "feeling" of distance to make a good charge quite fast. Just use your cavalry while fighting and after some time you will "feel" when it's ready to charge and the distance is right. Missile units are a bit trickier. The reason for that is that the range of the troops varies greatly. So in order to be able to measure the distance to get in range you need to know the range of each type of missile unit. That's quite a hard job to do. What I do is: read the unit description to get a rough idea how good it is, then try it on the battle field. Once again you will develop the "feeling" of entering the range. As an example, in my Hayasdan campaign in one army I had Caucasian, Scythian, Persian and Syrian archers. So all of them are quite different, but after playing for a while I started to "feel" when the enemy enters the range of one of my archers. Now I'm timing this perfectly.

Just practice.
Generally speaking, I try to limit my armies to including only one type of archer*, one type of slinger, etc., though this strategy gets thrown out of the window in the context of a rolling conquest with diverse local unit types.
For example, you play Baktria and move into Alexandria-Eschate. Congratulations, you now have access to Subeshi Archers, which far outstrip the Thanvare Payahdag and Nizagan-i Eranshahr you invaded with. Likewise, pushing towards Persepolis will give you the option of recruiting superior Armoured Persian Archers.
Then again, if playing as a faction (or even if it's just your style) that makes use of a single type of archer that really excels at putting holes in things from a distance, you needn't worry about getting used to specific ranges of individual units (most are roughly similar (+/-10m), anyway)


*actually, this is a lie: in the case of Baktria, at least, I like to mix in a few Archer-spearmen with my "real" archers, as they make a good buffer/pincushion for the units I actually expect to inflict casualties on the enemy. Really, they're just cheap cannon fodder/cavalry deterrent.