Romans limited cavalry?

[bones58]

Why do the games descriptions of factions ie"Gauls:strong close combat troops etc"Then why say that the romans have limited cavalry when clearly they dont.

[KiOwA]

That may be because the Romans are strictly limited to horse-based troops for calvary, whereas other factions get chariots, chariot archers, horse archers, elephants, etc. All Roman calvary are melee-only. A unit of praetorian calvary is fundamentally no different from a unit of equites, only with better stats/morale

[Red Harvest]

I think it is more a description of how it should be, but not what is reflected in the game. The cav upkeep and availability are way out of balance. The Romans do get mounted javelins, as do some other factions, and they have many other special units.

[KiOwA]

That's true, I totally forgot about the calvary auxilia. Perhaps if you limit the Romans to legionary calvary as their top unit...?

[Sinner]

I suspect that the flavour text was written a long time ago with the content detailing how the factions should have been, but over time playtesting showed that the Roman cavalry was too weak for the current game engine and rather than revamp that (ie. lots of work) they just tweaked the Roman cavalry stats (ie. a quick fix).

[Husar]

I don´t really understand that as well, especially because the greeks´ cavalry is crap compared to the roman cavalry(no, I don´t mean macedonians, I am talking about the city states ) If the bug that prevents generals from being upgraded would be fixed, the greek cities would at least have good generals, but as it is now, the romans do have their praetorian cavalry which is a pretty good heavy cavalry unit, not really what I expected "weak cavalry" to be, I´d say take the praetorians away and give the greeks some greek heavy cav.

[The_Emperor]

This has been discussed before, and historically even the Greeks had better Cavalry than the Pre-Marius Romans...

Equites should really, really suck. Sadly they don't.

At any rate the Europa Barbarorum MOD for RTW will address this.

[Sinner]

Praetorian Cavalry is powerful, but as a tier 5 unit it takes a lot of resources and time to build up to and then is also expensive and slow to recruit. Comparable heavy cavalry in other factions only requires tier 3 or 4.

Given that the later Roman heavy cavalry was very reliant on Germanic recruits, I think the Praetorian Cavalry compares well with Gothic Cavalry, the sort of elite German horsemen you'd expect to find their way into the Praetorians.

[derF]

An answer to the first post:

Personally i dont think that the Romans have limited cavilry. However i think i reason for this "limitation" could be as someone explained earlier: That essentially the actual HORSE used for Equites, Roman Cav, Legion Cav and Praetorian Cav does not change. I dont see any difference in the amount of armour the horse wears or how the horse looks.

[Sinner]

The Roman horses are unarmoured, but so are those used by most other factions since they all use the same mount models... it's only the few cataphract units, available to the Armenians, Parthians and Seleucids, that have armoured horses.

There are some differences between the Roman cavalry types: Cavalry Auxlia use light horses while Legionary Cavalry use heavy, while the others all use medium.

[Red Harvest]

The cav armour is not changing, but the horses are of course. Equites/Roman Cavalry are on "medium horse", cav auxilia on "light horse" (as befits missile skirmishers), legionary/praetorian/general's cavalry are on heavy horse.

[the tokai]

If you don't count legionary cavalry as pre-marian cavalry (and it shouldn't be) then roman cavalry is actually quite limited. Not nearly as limited as greek cavalry put equites aren't that powerfull and although the auxillia cav can be usefull, it isn't that strong either. Not much more powerfull than the jav cav of the greeks but with much higher requirements.

Post-marian cavalry on the other hand is way to powerfull, not only for roman cavalry, because it is simply to powerfull for any faction of that time to have.

[Sinner]

Compare Praetorian Cavalry with Gothic Cavalry, Scythian Nobles, Sacred Band Cavalry, Cataphracts, Cappadocian Cavalry, Companion Cavalry and Sarmatian Mercenaries - they all have comparable stats.

[bones58]

Personnaly i thought preatorion (spelling?) cavalry were far to overpowered maybe reduced the roman calvery to equties,roman cavalry and auxilla.

[Mikeus Caesar]

especially because the greeks´ cavalry is crap compared to the roman cavalry

Fool!! You do not know the power of just 2 units of greek cavalry when it is flanking!!! Thanks to greek cavalry, i have won many a battle....

[the tokai]

Yeah but roman cavalry can do that too, and most of them even better. Greek cavalry is still effective because all cavalry is overpowered. Some are just more overpowered than others.

[Oaty]

Was Roman cavalry weak in the terms of numbers or performance? The Romans never relied on high amounts of cavalry too often.

An easy way to reflect this is to have a CAVALRY POPULATION.

Not only do you have to have enough men but you also need enough horses. Now all that would be needed is a good base number for each territory and the horse/stable class buildings can increase there production rate just like farms can. I think this would actually be a good implementation into the game. This would also prevent running into 15 units of Macedonian cavalry.

I think this needs a thread of it's own and with luck we'll see it in a patch

[drone]

An easy way to reflect this is to have a CAVALRY POPULATION.

Not only do you have to have enough men but you also need enough horses. Now all that would be needed is a good base number for each territory and the horse/stable class buildings can increase there production rate just like farms can. I think this would actually be a good implementation into the game. This would also prevent running into 15 units of Macedonian cavalry.

Maybe a scheme similar to the mercenary availabilty? Some territories with the ability to generate lots of cav (spain, scythia), some with very little. I like this idea.

[Warspite]

All cavalry in the game strikes me as packing far too much a punch for the stuff of pre-stirrup days. However, from a gameplay perspective realism in this respect would probably result in players coming to the same conclusion that militaries of the day did: cavalry is of limited use relative to its high costs. If scouting and other more utilitarian concerns were a part of the game, players might still feel motivated to invest in cavalry units. But, as they aren't, the impact of cavalry in the game has been upgraded to more medieval-like levels to make cav units more desirable in combat. Combat is much more dynamic as a result, if less realistic. (Of course, where realism's concerned these armies of 3,000 men should run at least ten times that size, so strict realism isn't in the offing anyway.)

Archery seems a bit impressive for Roman times, as well. So far as I can tell, Archery Auxilia with foundry-level weapons might as well be carrying English longbows. It isn't particularly realistic, but it certainly makes those AI sieges more survivable without massive garrisons.

--Warspite

[Kraxis]

Was Roman cavalry weak in the terms of numbers or performance? The Romans never relied on high amounts of cavalry too often.

You have got it... The Equites were neither bad warriors nor were they badly equiped. But considering that there were 300 of them to a legion there would only be 1200 to a full consular army. Hardly a force to fear if you had a more regular ancient army. The romans knew it so they only intended the equites to keep up for long enough to let the infantry win.
When the equites fought, they fought bravely, hard and with great determination (they were after all the most roman of all, and thus had to be that much more stoic in battle, social conventions demanded it). They were dashing and with great flair but simply too few and employed by amateurs and people who generally didn't know what to do with them (romans were infantrymen even when commanding the equites). When there were commanders who knew how to use cavalry the equites didn't let them down.