Bingo. All that maint. cost free full size heavy cav after some time makes the trainable heavy cav units obsolete and unbalances the camp. And if you keep them small the player can snipe them during battle as you say.Originally posted by Caravel
The approach also has it's downsides. It provides the player with lots of free heavy cavalry units that cost nothing to support. If you go one further and give them the full vanilla cavalry unit size (40) this makes those free units even more viable, especially if you leave dismounts in, and makes units such as feudal knights and chivalric knights almost obsolete. If you leave the units at 20, the AI still suffers as they make very easy targets. It's somewhat of a a dilemma and I doubt the perfect system exists.
Maybe, but it would work with smaller maint costson the campaign. I really wanted to keep the BGs in the mod full size for the Russ and teh Byz, but, the Byzs were really dragging themselves financially because of it. Once i dropped the BG to 20, the Byz played like a different faction; greatly balanced stacks, great economic development, using full roster, resisting and even beating back at times the Turkish onslaught and once every full moon even conquering Anatolia and the Middle East and resisting the Mongols. Hence, i stuck with the 20 men BGs for them and for the Russ. The Russ get the Boyars as a recruitable unit from v2.1 and onwards - the Boyars were too much of a stapple unit for them to make it small and non trainable - and they have unique BGs: Druzhina in early and Dvor (Royal Khazar Cav renamed and slightly more able) in high and late. The Byz on the other hand get the pron cavs for full size heavy cav, and so the kats can be their dedicated BG unit.Personally I think the Byzantine and Russian/Novgord BG units works better. It keeps the support and training costs, but gives a larger more worthwhile unit to the AI.
The alternative would be to still decrease the costs and keep them full size - but that also skews the early battles very much to their favor. In any case, once i made them 20man size, battles with and against the Byzantines became far more fun, balanced and challenging (because the AI produced better stacks and because as the Byz you couldn't just rely on the brute kata strength - you needed to use the rest of your army to beat the enemy).
I am only thinking to give the kata BG normal speed, as with less men, the slow speed makes them considerably more vulnerable to missiles and more likely to get caught for ransom or killed in routs. Or perhaps i should leave them thus as a sign of decadence of the Empire - proud and of great lineage but backward and awkward like their cavalry :)
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