Escorting the enemy to safety

[ptolemyauletes]

I have not played the newer versions of Total War, so this may well be a moot post, but one of the things that drives me nuts about RTW and its versions is when I send my cavalry to mop up fleeing enemy soldiers. The cavalry will always quickly kill most of the the fleers, but once it gets down to the last few the cavalry seem to get confused and just wander along, escorting the fleers for quite a distance. This is annoying for many reasons, one of which is obviously that I want to kill all the buggers then get my cavalry back to use elsewhere. Even more annoying is when the fleeing enemies split up a bit, and the cavalry become confused, running back and forth between a few dozen fugitives, but accomplishing nothing. I can't help but think that 60 or 80 cavalrymen should be able to massacre a handful of fleeing, weaponless enemey soldiers pretty quickly, yet I have often watched as they escort them to safety off the map. Any thoughts? Have newer versions of Total WAr sorted this out?

[Gabeed]

The key is to tell the cavalry go elsewhere, and then immediately tell them to charge the fleeing foe. Usually the cavalry will begin slaughtering the cowards again.

[Macilrille]

Exactly, which is why you should micromanage your pursuits.

[bobbin]

If anything I'd say this problem is worse in M2TW as cavalry has a tendency to spread out in weird directions when chasing routers.

[Macilrille]

I found that in both games the best way is to see what way the routers are running, then order the cavalry to run through them and towards that destination. On the way the cav will kill and capture some, and as they have overtaken the routers and now block the escape route the latter will go, "oh no, our escape route is blocked, we are cut off. Let us run another way!" (often the opposite), there you can catch them with the infantry as well sometimes and between them and the rechharging cavalry you can slaughter them all. If you herd them right this can lead to totally annihilated enemy armies.

The only problem as Sweboz is the low rate of cavalry and the enemy's propensity to rout as soon as you spring your ambush of scary fellas.

[Conqueror]

It can help to put your chasing cavalry unit into a loose-ordered and narrow (deep) formation. This way your horsemen will cover more ground.

[Cute Wolf]

That was delibrately done By CA as the RTW version 1.0 had cavalry who kill everyone on their path.....

[Elzeda]

Cavalry escorts often occurred to me when the ennemy was getting seperated, ie that one a them falls instead of gets killed. Obviously once he gets back up he's way behind, and the cavalry, who's supposed to stay in the middle of the pack, keeps running in the middle, only now the middle is between the lead pack and those lagging behind.

But yeah, telling the cav to go ahead of the pack, then attack the pack once it's in (or a head) will usually score kills, like they said.

[Grade_A_Beef]

The fact that you can completely demolish enemy armies is absurd in my view. Most fleeing enemies would fight if pursuers get to them, as they know they'll be dead anyways. I preferred routing units in the original Shogun Total War, where fleeing enemies individually engage pursuers that both buys time for the others to escape and preserves at least a portion of the army.

That and they do a number to my horse archers and light cavalry every time I try and chase down pikemen...I'd love for this to happen in EBII, but it's likely hardcoded.