Light and Heavy Cavalary

[Sinner]

Cavalry


Light cav is faster in the game. In the files they are listed as "light_horse". These are typically skirmisher type cavalry with javelins are bows.

Med. cav is an "average" speed cav. riging "medium_horse". I believe "heavy_horse" is slightly slower. There may be fatigue effects as well. Higher end cavalry ride heavier horses and have higher stats. I'm not sure that the mount itself has much effect on the performance other than the aforementioned speed.

There are differences in "mass" listed, but I'm not sure how "mass" is being used by the game. The difference is very small for light vs. med/heavy.

Light horses are the only ones that have a different speed, being faster than medium, heavy and cataphract horses. While the 3 heavier mounts maybe were intended to have different speeds, they all use the same skeleton model and thus move the same.

I've played custom battles with one of each type of mount and ran 'races' back & forth acorss the field. The light cavalry always wins, while the others are equal, with results being random based based upon the slight variations when a unit obeys orders and starts running. As well as the speed being the same among the 3 heavies, I saw no difference in their fatigue rate, something that makes even less sense with cataphracts.

[Red Harvest]

Sinner,

I expected as much with the medium/heavy mounts. There is some difference in speed at times in the game with those mounts, but the cause is fatigue from what I can tell. Usually the heavy horse are carrying more armour and fatigue a little more rapidly. That was why I listed the difference as "slight"...I wasn't sure if there was any "real" difference, but put the extra armour on the unit that has the heavy horse, and it seems to slow down a bit sooner, producing some "effective" difference. Of course, you have to mod to make sure the stamina and stat_heat issues are not reversed or it might work backwards again!

[Oaty]

What I hate is when 1 of those suicide generals charges my elephants and walks away and since mass was brought up that could be why the elephants get slaughtered. I'm all for the elphants not reviving after battle but when those 21 paccy's came back I had no second thoughts on that one.

Another thing I'd like to see is horses running amok from camels and elephants, the only problem right now is when a unit goes amok they cannot be recovered. Elephants I can understand but horses should be able to recover.

As it is right now cavalry walks all over camels, I unserstand the slow part but the fact that horses can just walk up to them and slaughter em when horses would typically veer away.

[Red Harvest]

What I hate is when 1 of those suicide generals charges my elephants and walks away and since mass was brought up that could be why the elephants get slaughtered. I'm all for the elphants not reviving after battle but when those 21 paccy's came back I had no second thoughts on that one.

Another thing I'd like to see is horses running amok from camels and elephants, the only problem right now is when a unit goes amok they cannot be recovered. Elephants I can understand but horses should be able to recover.

As it is right now cavalry walks all over camels, I unserstand the slow part but the fact that horses can just walk up to them and slaughter em when horses would typically veer away.

Yes, the historical aversion of horses to camels and elephants is only weakly implemented. The way around this is to individually set the mount effect in each of the cavalry units. I've experimented with setting the mount effect to the negative sum of attack plus charge. If you set it to a single value across the board as CA has done, the heavy cav runs roughshod over everything. The values are set to the lowest common denominators: light cav.

Amok doesn't work that well. Amok elephants don't seem to cause much trouble for my own army. They should cause havoc. I don't even spike 'em. I just let them run wild until the battle is over.

Variants of amok for cav would work. Shying away and breaking for a time makes sense--out of human control until they rally. Becoming badly disordered from a repelled charge would also work. I think horses should only be able to charge and melee elephants if they have an approriate training level AND high morale at the time.

The reincarnated elephants are beyond explanation. Any unit with a scarce resource like elephants should not get them back...they shouldn't be replaced without retraining in an appropriate province. Camels might also fall under this heading unless the battle occurs in a camel province, although I could more easily accept the idea that the rider was killed/wounded/dismounted and the mount ran off...only to be recovered after the battle.

[Kraxis]

About Light and Heavy cavalry.
I don't seem to notice any difference in speed between the Equites and Roman Cavalry. Used both in a number of cavalry actions.

Perhaps camels should rout cavalry very fast, perhaps not instantly (giving the cavalry a chance to rout the cmales with a mighty charge). That should make camels powerful against horses. Right now it is only a rather weak combat bonus.

In all it seems that most heavy units could need a boost in mass (though I have not noticed any particular weakness in Cataphracts). But I think I will only strengthen the elephants in this department. Hate how cavalry can stop them when elephants were cavalry killers big time. But will this not result in the eles being able to break out of an encirclement of infantry? For the sake of balance I would not like for them to be able to break out.

[Red Harvest]

Kraxis,

The cataphract horses have a mass of 6 vs. 4.5 for the others. Makes sense as they were the heaviest horse around at the time, and were carrying a lot of weight as well.

I haven't tested my new elephants yet. But I'm taking a different slant on it. I want the elephants to be well capable of breaking containment and causing lots of disorder, but not necessarily kill everyone doing so, I want them to be vulnerable if they stay put and melee, and I want them to be vulnerable to missile attack. So I reduce their hit points as much as feasible, give them disruptive punch, but not so much killing power, and with luck make them vulnerable to missile attack. I also am going to cut the unit size in half. I really think I can do this with the current engine and get a realistic elephant attack. (I've been enjoying reading about the disruption of Pyrrhus elephants, Porus' and even the Roman elephants in a couple of battles. They badly disordered phalangites.) As a note, even forest elephants should have at least 4 times the mass of the heaviest horses in the game if not much more.

My radical idea at the moment is to adjust elephant armour vs. hit points with the goal of a single hit point elephant but with substantial "armour" but not so much that an archery barrage can't stop them. I will give them very, very high defensive skill so that cav and infantry, etc. have a tough time killing them. My reasoning is that CA went the wrong route with the elephants. They changed the combat engine to allow a huge range of attack and defense, but instead of using that for things like elephants, they used lots of hit points instead, which completely skews missile vulnerability. So I'm going to see what happens if I take the opposite course.

[Oaty]

Another problem with the elephants is that the mahouts(sp)/rider can't be killed but if I remember correctly in the demo you could kill the riders. What Scipio did to Hannibal at Zama was first creat channels for the elephants to run through. The elpephants ran in these channels and Scipio had archers in the rear just for this purpose. The archers shot at the riders kill most/all of them. What this did was caused the riderless elephants to run amok due to having noone controlling them. I do'nt think the arrow barrage was enough to kill any of them but it put them in pain and out of control. The other problem is if you kill 1 rider just that elephant alone ca'nt run amok, it's either the whole unit or not at all.