Quote Originally Posted by fey
About cavalry it seems that many people's perception is based on playing the Julii versus the Gauls. The Gauls' warbands, which is the majority of what you meet, are lightly armored and don't have high morale. A flank cavalry charge WILL route them.

Thus the tactics against the Gauls basically involve (a) letting enemy melee make contact, either with hastati or, much better, with the doggies :-) and (b) immediately flank charge them with equites. The enemy unit will rout almost immediately. Rinse, lather, repeat.

I don't have many problems with barbarian cavalry charging my ranks because a deep line of hastati will survive a frontal charge and because any time enemy cav is charging my melee/missiles there's usually a unit of my light cav (equites) charging THEIR flank.

However it seems that:

(1) Cavalry dies on the pikes real easy. There's a rumor that the spear anti-cav bonus isn't working (a bug), so presumably once it's fixed spears will do as well.

(2) As you go up in tech tree, the cavalry effectiveness seems to diminish a great deal.

(3) Cavalry is considerably less effective against armored melee (which Gauls are not).

So hopefully the dominance of cavalry in the early Julii campaign will get reasonable in a bit.

One difference from MTW that I noticed is that it's much easier to extricate the cavalry from an engagement and have them regroup and charge again. In MTW it was almost impossible, in RTW my equites have little problems disengaging from combat with enemy melee.

Fey
Excellent post, and I completely agree.

As for your last point, its because your cavalry is usually in a deeper formation hence many unengaged units are milling around. If you use them in two deep formation they are usually quite difficult to disengage, and when they do they usually take heavy casualties.