Billmen Vs Halbardiers ???????????????

[Procrustes]

Their lower armor negates armor piercing, while higher attack will offset for the lower defence against billmen and AP kills vanilla halbs.

Hi,

I've always been a little confused by that - my understanding is that the armor peircing bonus won't apply against non-armored units, but that doesn't mean you get a penalty for attacking a non-armored unit with an armor-piercing unit. Do you understand differently?

Best,

(As an aside, this discussion is making me wonder whether polearms the most effective unit to use against other polearms. Seems that the strength of polearms is against cav, and that swords would be better at taking out polearms. Hmm.... I'm seeing some testing coming up tonight.)

[sir_schwick]

A true story*:

I am playing a game as the English/Early/Hard. It is 1202 and I own North Africa, Iberia, Britain, Western Europe, Northern Italy, Germany and Scandinavia. Sharing borders with Papacy, Polish, Byzantines. In the year 1205 the French resurge in Ile de France with 6k men, all Chivalric knights, Halbeards, Crossbows, Chivalric Sargeants, etc. All I can respond with is 3k of some okay to l337 troops out of Burgundy. Anyway, the first wave is 2 chivalric knights, the RK, 6 Halbeards, and the rest Crossbows or Chivlaric Sargeants or CMAA. My longbows are not doing much to the Halbeards and I charge knowing I will end up retreating. AFter about two seconds of having swamped the Halbeards, they all ran. I quickly regrouped and hit the remaining army hard, causing them to run. The whole rebellion is crushed and my finally gets his Specialist Defender virtue. Morale of the story, the best way to deal with Halbeards is to attack from all sides and hard. If it had been Billmen or Swiss Halbeards, they would have chopped up a bunch of my horses(funny charge huh?) and infantry first.

Billmen and Swiss Halbeards cannot go into arrow storms, but they can be used as flankers or against spearwalls. The lower defence and armour is actually good in the desert and against anti-armour troops. I would not recommend letting either of these units handle heavy cavalry charges head on. They can, but its like sending HC straight into the enemy 'ala King Arthur.

*from my mother's sister's roomate's mailman's veterinarian's client's baby's mama's lawyer's associate's defence contractor buddy's wife's manicurists's liscenser's mother's estranged gay son's husband who knows an editor at some computer games magazine

[Procrustes]

hey,

well I went home and tried a few custom battles. I couldn't find swiss halbs in the custom battle OOB's, but I was able to crash some halbs and billmen into each other. Bottom line - vanilla billmen beat vanilla halbs every time. The low moral of the halbs really hurts them - they start waivering after loosing a dozen men and things go down hill fter that. Billmen will loose up to half their men by the time the last 10 or 15 halbs flee. Halbs will win if you give them a couple more moral points - so build those churches! I think that billmen would benefit most from an armorer. Another thing I noticed is that the halbs do better if you start charging them a little before they would have on their own. Seems they don't get up enough speed otherwise.

Both halbs and billmen ate CMAA like candy.

[Ironside]

Both halbs and billmen ate CMAA like candy.

Oddly enough is Militia sergs the best counter, cost-wise to regular halbs (they loose 1 vs 1 but are much cheaper), thanks to the ap bonus.

[Procrustes]

Oddly enough is Militia sergs the best counter, cost-wise to regular halbs (they loose 1 vs 1 but are much cheaper), thanks to the ap bonus.

Wow - thanks! I tested this a bit before work this morning and the results were suprising. Vanilla militia sgts can almost match vanilla halbs. Actually, the halbs loose a lot more men for most of the fight, but after they loose about a dozen men the MS will suddenly start to waver and then the tide turns. (The effects of lower moral, I guess.) This ought to be a really cheap way to deal w/ halbs - set some MS on them to chew them up while you get anything else to charge their flank - should break them pretty quickly.

As an aside, I also paired halbs and billmen up against vikings, and got a great demonstration of the value of valor. Vanilla vikings get chewed up, but add one valor point and they will take halbs or billmen each time.

[Zarax]

MS are so cost effective that they are almost a cheat, now after some modding i made them a very reasonable unit by changing their availability.
BTW, try v1 MS and they will beat any v0 halb except JHI for less money.

[Ironside]

MS are so cost effective that they are almost a cheat, now after some modding i made them a very reasonable unit by changing their availability.
BTW, try v1 MS and they will beat any v0 halb except JHI for less money.

They should actually, considering that they aren't as good vs cav. But they truely are a great unit cost-wise.

Ran some quick tests (does anyone know a really, really flat test map? some results are probably affected by this).
CMAA are better than billmen but slighly worse than halbs and much better than MS.
MS do better against halbs than towards CMMA, but still loose clearly ( half the price though).
Swiss halbs beats billmen, that in return beats halbs.
I think the halbs odd results (better than billmen vs CMAA, but loses to billmen) is because vs the CMAA they got a lot of staying power. When the staying power gets too strong, odd results occur. MS do better vs golden lancers than CS because the CS can't kill them, while the MS can due to better attack.

Swiss pikes and SAP:s are killers vs billmen took around 35 resp 18 losses for victory (out of 96).
CS are good vs halbs, billmen wins clearly with average around 50 men in losses.
All spear/pike units do great at the beginning and takes most losses in the middle of the battle when the formation looses it's effectivness somewhat.

So the conclution is that vs halbs, use ap units and vs polearms are spears quite good. Someone can run some better tests if they want to confirm this.

[Zarax]

Hi,

I've always been a little confused by that - my understanding is that the armor peircing bonus won't apply against non-armored units, but that doesn't mean you get a penalty for attacking a non-armored unit with an armor-piercing unit. Do you understand differently?

Best,

(As an aside, this discussion is making me wonder whether polearms the most effective unit to use against other polearms. Seems that the strength of polearms is against cav, and that swords would be better at taking out polearms. Hmm.... I'm seeing some testing coming up tonight.)

No, against armor lower than 3 you simply don't have the bonus.
Without AP you can only use the base attack (3 at best, only a few units like huscarles, VG and JHI can do better) and so you loose a good degree of effectiveness.
Swiss halbs still retains a good attack but the others are quite plain on melee without it.

The best counter against halbs?

Gallowglasses, Highlanders or Ghazis.
No armor = less damage taken, mounted crossbows also do wonders against vanilla halbs.

[sir_schwick]

Gallowglasses, Highlanders or Ghazis.
No armor = less damage taken, mounted crossbows also do wonders against vanilla halbs.

So your saying there is a useful purpose for Mounted Crossbows. ;)
Highlanders do not have AP ability, although they still kill well enough. I agree that in pure ability those units are better for anti-halb ops, however cost-benefit wise you Militia Sarges are much better. You want to use Gallowglasses and Ghazis against CMAA,Chiv Sarges, and pinned RK(if your halbs aren't already there).

[Zarax]

Well, we're discussing about a quite limited environment...
Highlanders will fare a bit worser but they are still reasonable since they're cheap as dirt...

Actually mounted crossbows are quite useful as long as there is no enemy cavalry and they can be trained in early IIRC.
Against armoured infantry mounted crossbows are much better than any mounted archer and are imho better for offensive purposes than their foot counterparts, especially against CMAA and Chiv sarges who are quite resilient to arrow fire.

[Procrustes]

Regarding mounted xbows, they can be built in early by the Italians and I forget who else - and the build requirements are quite low (basic farm). I think they are a real boon - I use them like light cav that can shoot a bit - do the skirmish thing early in the battle then switch to engage. If you combine the valored-up remnants you end up with some pretty decent cav for early.

[ajaxfetish]

On the armor-piercing issue I finally heard it explained recently in a way that made sense to me. Can't remember whose post it was, but they had a lot of hard statistics. The gyst of it was that the AP bonus never exceeds the protection of the armor. This means your unit will never be more vulnerable because it has more armor (except for fatigue effects). What Armor-piercing bonuses then give you is a unit that can still do effective damage to an armored unit, not one that can do mega-damage because of the armor. So an armor-piercing unit would do just as much or more damage to an un-armored enemy unit, it just wouldn't be using it to its full potential to get the ones that are hard to hurt. The one thing he was unsure about was the effect with armor-piercing missiles, so I'm not sure if the same applies to crossbows, etc., but I hope it does, because realistically having a naked chest won't protect you from axes or crossbow bolts more than a breastplate will.

[Zarax]

The unit guide says that AP gives +1 attack for every 2 points of armor starting at 3.
So, even with armor 5 units the best you can get is 2 points, if the unit gets armor upgrades they adds up but you get nothing spectacular unless the unit had an high attack to start with.
Missiles work a different way, bolts have a lower loss of effectiveness against armor and not a bonus, meaning they will have full effectiveness at armor 1 but lose it slower per armor point than arrows.