Charge Bonus

[cugel]

I happened to be reading some articles on the Shogun Academy site: http://shogun-academy.tripod.com/dojo.html and I saw a notice that said that if you are charging, your unit only gets the charge bonus against the unit you target (double click on). If your unit is intercepted (runs into) another enemy unit before it hits the targeted unit or if you don't directly target the unit, you don't get the charge bonus I wanted to know if that is true for MTW as well as Shogun. I never knew this. I sometimes would target a unit behind another enemy unit, because I noticed that my charging unit would often stop charging and start meleeing with the target unit, while if I target a unit just beyond or behind the first enemy unit, my men would sometimes penetrate deep into the enemy lines, thus disrupting his formation before they started to melee. Sometimes you can even break his line by riding through it. I never thought I was losing the advantage of the charge bonus though.

Alternatively, you may have noticed that sometimes cavalry can shear off a portion of the enemy line by charging off center to the enemy unit (i.e. riding straight over the end of the enemy line. When the enemy troops get intermingled with your charging cavalry they die quickly and your cavalry need not get heavily engaged with spearmen or other heavy infantry units that would carve them up. You can only do this however, if you don't target the enemy unit though. If you double-click on the enemy unit you men charge straight for the center of that unit (which may not be a very good idea if they are spear or pikemen).

I might have to rethink some tactics if this is true about losing the charge bonus however.

I'd like to hear what others think. Do you ever use similar tactics?

[bosdur]

I think it's still true, for example last nite i was playing a game. My opponent has a hospitallier knight parked nicely. But I have 1 alan mercenary on 1 rank deep (string line) coming from the knight's flank, my opponent turned and charged when the alan was close. The knight lost in less than 1 sec thus my opponent claimed. If the knight got charge bonus, it should have killed my alan with the same rate and it wouldnt have routed.