How do you use cavalry?

[Didz]

Not even the best cavalry such as life guards can actually hurt enemy line infantry, quite ridiculous!

Not really ridiculous, in fact its historically accurate.

If used historically against broken and disrupted formations cavalry are quite deadly to infantry in ETW, the only really problem I have with the game is that the AI infantry doesn't react properly to the presence of cavalry.

Not only does it not panic enough when charged in line, but I've even had the AI target my cavalry deliberately with its infantry which is really annoying. Historically, only the British at Minden actually advanced on formed cavalry in line, and even then it was considered suicidal. At Minden the British had the discipline to hold their formation even when charged, and even though eyewitness accounts report that the French horse did manage to penetrate between the intervals of the Regiments on several occassions the men stood their ground and stayed in formation leaving the second line to deal with them.

There really isnt that much point in chasing down routers in ETW - I find that most of the time the defeated army is totally destroyed without chasing down routers, so there's no longer the need to minimise the size of a surviving stack that there was in previous TW games. Also, no selling prisoners any more.

I still do it though, as I discovered early on that the AI uses 'Routing' as a deception to extract units from awkward situations. The unit claims to be 'Routing' until it gets clear and then you see its status change to 'Running' and finally it turns and comes right back at you when and where you least expect it. Sending a cavalry unit to chase a 'Routing' unit down is usually enough to disperse it and make sure it doesn't reform.