First impressions thread

[Doug-Thompson]

Foot archers actually seem to skirmish well now. This means they should work much more effectively with spears and other melee infantry, making a much better combo. In the past, at least against the AI, I was always able to either charge foot archers before melee units could rescue them, or simply keep the foot archers moving. They can't fire on the move, so the practical effect was to remove them as an effective unit.

Notably, there are no missile cavalry that are armed with javelins. Also, there are no true "double duty" missile cavalry that can melee well. Missile cavalry will have to work with melee units now in close coordination. I don't mean to give the impression that bow cavalry have been "nerfed." That's not true at all. An unsupported melee infantry unit will still melt in front of good bow cavalry. It's just that missile cavalry is no longer as untouchable as it was in M2TW.


Very importantly, light cavalry are faster than bow cavalry now. This should give light cavalry a much more useful role than they ever had in M2TW. Earlier, much of the best missile cavalry was at least as fast as light cav. Also, many of the slower missile cavalry units could melee more effectively than light cav.

In Medieval, either a light cavalry unit would never catch a missile cavalry unit and get shot to pieces while trying, or they'd catch the unit only to lose the fight. You might as well build heavy cav because they were almost as good at chasing away horse archers or pursuit and better at everything else. That's apparently not true in Shogun 2.