Lame cav tactic being employed

[Wishazu]

ive noticed something thats very worrying this last week. More and more players online seem to be employing this lame cav spam rush army. whenever i host a game i allways set the denari limit to 10k per player, so in a 2v2 thats 20k per team. in a few games ive played 1 enemy player has picked an army consisting purely of cav, now this wouldnt really bother me if they were playing as Scythia, parthia or armenia, proper cav civs, but people are doing it with any civ. often they group the whole army into 1 mass wedge by deploying their units on top of each other. they then simply charge. ive seen how this lame tactic can destroy an army, however me and a clanmate spent a few hours online practicing to defeat it and im happy to say weve never been beaten by a player using this tactic. Im just worried that this seems to be the trend at the moment, will rome total war just become mass rushing? has anyone else encountered this?

[Swoosh So]

Older totalwar games gave unit penalties for being stcked on top of each other rome actually encourages it, its also possible to merge your phalanx into 1 solid wall no gaps whatsoever... btw beware certain clans that say 5max then take the factions where its still possible to get cav spam aries even with 5max lmao, and they say before game 5 max to avoid cav spam ;)

[Swoosh So]

amp said to me ages ago in sp campaigns he was just cav spamming the ai and winning no problem spam 1 unit spam the next rinse repeat... how sad it is that this was allowed to happen, i think units in previous totalwar games got morale penalties for being all jumbled up or at least combat penalties.

[jerby]

a morale penalty shoudl be logical for being pushed at each other. like happened at cannae, almost no romans could lift up their sword to strike, people were dying straigth up: there's was no room to fall to the ground!

[Beefy]

yeh it can be annoying, i gave it a go though and it does work. there needs to be something stopping it especially with cav, infantry isnt such a problem.

You need to tell me that Tactic Wish! put it on the Tn forums, Ta

[Dutch_guy]

god I hate that tactic, especially if it consist of cataphracts, I really hate that
it's so disapointing when you try to built a BALANCED army, and then get f***** by an all cavalry army...

[Orda Khan]

You could always just pull the plug on the battle, maybe they will get the message

.....Orda

[Lord Preston]

yup, i just leave or kick/end the game...

i have a no all cav armies rule in my games

if i wanted to see loads of horses i'd go to a horse race... not a battle field.

[Shambles]

Now a good palyer would beat them in to the ground give em back there horse shoes and tell em, thats a dumb tactick Go think about Why it sux, and come back when you can command a real army.

But a poor looser who cant play would plug and whine about not being able to defeat a simple army of horses.

personaly i cant see cavalry running up hill in to a wall of spikes whilst big ass catapults rain rocks down on them and with arrows pinging in to there eye balls.

[AquaLurker]

Yep that is the trend now, some clan games rules about max five or four actually means max 4 of the units choice (eg. max 4 cataphracts, but still can take another 4 companions or other cav) not type, but there are some clan who are wise enough to state the maximum 'type' of units eg. cav, inf(rarely) or archers that you are allowed to bring into the game. But how should horse archers be catogorised?

Best way to play this game in a way where everyone can enjoy it is by stating the rules clearly and agree upon them first before you start the game.
So far, most of the clans I had played with are very clear on stating their game rules. Bad mannered players and sore losers (especially obnoxious cocky kids) are the ones that we need to worry about lol.

Personnally I like games without onagers because it is unrealistic and the damage effect on field battle is over powered. But that's me.

[1dread1lahll]

Lol

[Crandaeolon]

Yeah, those cav spam blobs are quite common these days. Not very difficult to defeat, even though they're better now than equivalent tactics in MTW, which suffered from the "sandwiched" penalty. Using the blobs takes very little skill for its relative effectiveness, but OTOH the spammer can't get much "better" at the spam tactic either, so the spammer's performance will hit a ceiling sooner rather than later.

And onagers... they're an uncertain gamble at best and an utter waste of denarii at worst if you're playing at sensible denarii levels (around 10k.)

[Rodion Romanovich]

Cavalry spam is easily defeated. Just put 3 phalanx unit next to each other and take the charge, or put two phalanx units behind each other. Then try to send in own cav and infs to enemy's flank. Besides, the more densely they pack their cavs, the more of them you get in each onager shot, if you've brought onagers (which I almost always do unless it's a no art server). I used to pack my cavs densely before, but often it's more effective to not do that, as you're more easily surrounded this way.

But I'm also disappointed that there's no penalty for packing units - this way they ALL get the charge bonus, instead of, more realistically, only giving charge bonus to the first unit.

[Aelwyn]

Now a good palyer would beat them in to the ground give em back there horse shoes and tell em, thats a dumb tactick Go think about Why it sux, and come back when you can command a real army.

But a poor looser who cant play would plug and whine about not being able to defeat a simple army of horses.

personaly i cant see cavalry running up hill in to a wall of spikes whilst big ass catapults rain rocks down on them and with arrows pinging in to there eye balls.

Put this type of cav spam army in the hands of a good player, and I don't care what army you have, you are at a disadvantage. I have some friends that I'll admit play with armies such as this. They take a max of 5 usually, but end up taking about 15 cavs, all of which are combat-worthy. Then, line them up in about 4 ranks deep, 3 rows all tight together, and just demolish one part of the enemy after another, barely losing any cavs.

The reason this works so well imo is the new dynamic of RTW. If you rush cavs at cavs, and both units survive the initial charge, then they move back and forth against each other, in and out. They don't just stand there and fight like they would in MTW. So, if you mass cavs together, these 'gaps' that units would end up moving through...and thus surviving, are all closed up. So since the charge bonus on many cavs is so high, a solid block of cavs filling with no gaps for units to 'survive' in will completely wipe out units just on the charge. The 3-4 men that survive will run, and the cav block is on to its next target.

I hate that its basically come to that. But honestly I've done some things similar to avoid getting frustrated and quitting. What I'll do is just take maybe 6 heavy cavs, and move them all as one group, not necessarily on top of each other, but in a line. If I am playing at a high enough level, I can block this cav mass long enough with those 6 cavs to flank it and hopefully destroy some units before my 6 cavs rout.

Its pretty sad that it has to work that way though. And, if you don't have good allies, and you get doubled (or in my case a few times tripled) with 2 cav spam armies, you have no chance whatsoever. I pointed this out on the NET, in a thread, but I think it went unnoticed.

[Shambles]

I really beleve that you can defeat them qute easily with correct usage of your people,
And i understand how it can be frustrating,

But the only way you can get them to stop using this type of attack is to show them that its easily beaten and they shoud try using some skill instead,

I doubt a good player would Be happy to use such under handed tacktics,
but having said that, I doubt that its much difrent to the way the mongolians worked,

[Red Harvest]

So MP finally discovered the cav snowball rush? The AI taught it to me... Didn't take me long to figure out how to do the same...and then some. The vanilla game has some major balance problems. Many of the previous subtleties of the TW engines just aren't there.

It is not good if you have to use equally lame infantry tactics to beat the cav spamming. Better to set "house rules" to limit cav.

The problems with the cav charge are becoming more apparent now...the charging unit's defense is as important if not more important than its base attack and charge values. And the key to cav is not 1vs1 matchups, but the 2 vs 1 or 3 vs. 1 that fast cavalry can produce.

Hope CA eventually addresses this.

[Puzz3D]

Don't bank on it being addressed Red. All of the refinements in the MTW battle engine were made by LongJohn. Have you seen him around in the last nine months? I haven't.

[1dread1lahll]

The absence of developers that care about the game as a realistic tactical simulation and its end users in multi-player says it all. No attention to playability at all, this is why i've tossed my disk.

[Shambles]

Shogun Shogun shogun :).

[Craterus]

i'm about to start playing RTW online so thanks for the tip about these cav spammers...

how do i start to play online... i don't know where to find the program
do you have to pay to play online?

[Dutch_guy]

i'm about to start playing RTW online so thanks for the tip about these cav spammers...

how do i start to play online... i don't know where to find the program
do you have to pay to play online?

you can use gamespy arcade , although you can play perfectley well without that, just enter your cd key and chose a name , and you can start multiplayer
no special programms are required and it's all free, no money involved.

[Loinnreach]

People, mod RTW vanilla...

[Crandaeolon]

I've had little problems defeating cav blobs with quite normal tactics... phalanx inf are a decent means to stop the blob, so are chariots if you want a more mobile solution. (Though chariots tend to rout quite fast if they hit the blob head-on...) Once the blob has stopped, hitting it from all sides with cav should make it rout and / or fight to the death (they get the "surrounded" morale penalty), with very few losses to the surrounding force. Timing this is not the easiest thing in the world, but it's doable consistently with a little practice.

Quality of cav is of course important... if there are 10 praetorian cavs in the blob, you'll need something like 2 units of chariots and 5-6 units of good cav to rout them - but it's actually considerably less than you'd need in a "normal" cav battle against a similar force.

The actual problem here is that cavs, in particular the elite ones, are just too good for their price. Elite cav (and inf) units are more cost-effective than lesser units, meaning that you'll get more raw combat points per denarii spent if you invest on elites. That's a SP design decision bleeding over to the MP side - in SP, elite units are "balanced" by the time and cost of climbing the tech tree, and once the player manages to make the necessary investments, he'll get a good bang for the buck out of the elite units. But in MP there are no such things as tech trees or upkeep costs...

[Cheetah]

One problem of course is the cost, yes, elite cavs are underpriced for MP, especially pretorians.

The other problem, and IMHO the bigger one, is with the game engine: that it allows you to squize your entire army into a room of one unit, and all the units can fight and all the units get the charge/pushing bonus. Thus you can have an "uberunit" with which you can rout any other "ordinary" unit one by one with ease.
Someone already said it in some of the previous posts: in MTW if you bunched up your cavs only the first 3/4 unit fought, the rest was just standing there contributing neither to the pushing nor to the fight. Thus it was possible to stop the rush with 4/5 units and flank with the rest. the bunched up units got morale penalties being flanked, end of story.
Here in RTW all units in the snowball are fighting and what is more important all units are pushing. Thus, this uberunit will knock down any "ordinary" unit with ease and by the time the flanker gets in position his first units already routed, which might start a chainrout on the flanker side, end of story.

Solution? IMHO there is no good solution, the problem is with the game engine: it is not a realistic physical simulation. In real life it is impossible to squize in so many cavs into so little room and that all of them fighting and that all of them pushing ...
That is why I am a bit sceptical about stats tweaking. It might be possible to give very (unrealsitically) high defense values to inf units so that they wont die when knocked over. However, (a) this might spoil the gameplay other ways, (b) this wont solve the problem itself (i.e. unrealistic game engine).

One simple, not perfect but still workable solution would be to play with relatively low denarii (10-12.5) and with a minimum of 8 melee inf rule.

[Louis de la Ferte Ste Colombe]

Low denarii... You mean like 5000 / 8000 per army Cheetah? 10000 / 12500 is the higher end

I have been spammed by equites and greek cavalry in 6000/ army game: it does not work as advertised here

Louis,

[Cheetah]

I said "relatively low"

I have to admit I prefer 12.5k. I have no problem with elite cavs as such. The problem is when someone tries to win only by means of cav spamming and as you said it is possible even at "real low" denarii levels.

That is why I think that the simplest solution would be to put a max on cavs, or somewhat equivalently, to put a min on combat inf.

I know, some might argue that that such a rule would hurt some factions bad, like parthia or scythia who has either very weak or practically no combat infantry. Well, as I said there is no perfect solution, but to balance the situation somewhat, these factions have the best cavs.

[Agravain of Orkney]

Well is this "snowball" tactic limited to just cavs? I don't think so. If you cap number of cavs, what's to stop someone from stacking infantry to create infantry spam? Since numbers of cavs are limited, you could just use your cavs to block their cavs to prevent their cavs from flanking your infantry blob. The answer it seems, is to fix the game engine, and barring that, then in educating the community in tactics needed to counter the spam blob, so that the tactic becomes useless (except against the uninformed). Kind of reminds me of the "cav swipe" in MTW .......

[Crandaeolon]

Infantry blobs are common too, but they're less effective than cav blobs; they're smaller in size and thus more easily surrounded, they can't avoid phalanx walls by going around them like cav can, and they're much slower than cav blobs. Inf blobs get tired more easily. They're easier targets for missile units than cav blobs.

It's useful to remember the numbers when dealing with blobs. If there are 10 units of Praetorian cav in a blob, that's still 10 units of Praetorian cav, no matter how much space they take. You just can't expect to defeat or even hold 10 of the best cav units in the game with a couple of units of lesser cavalry, just like you wouldn't be able to do in a more open cav battle. A blob is not a single unit, therefore it can't be defeated with a single unit.

Yes, it's unrealistic and annoying that blobs don't get penalties, but they don't get any magical "blobby bonuses" either. The blob is not greater than the sum of its parts, quite the contrary - it's rather easy to surround it and reap the benefits of flanking and surrounding, which is why it can actually be defeated with less effort than a comparable "open" army, given equal generalship skills.

Blobs get used because they're easy to setup and control, and it takes more skill to defeat them than it takes to use them. It's this skill disparity that makes them "unfair", but the whole thing eventually balances out: once one has learnt how to deal with blobs, a blobbyist can't win against that player any more unless he refines his tactics. He might bring an archer blob to cover his inf blob and deploy a cav blob on each wing, and that sounds much more like proper tactics. Eventually, he'll use an army like the rest of us.

Having said that, it _is_ most disappointing that these kinds of tactics aren't actively discouraged by the engine. That leaves only the option of purging these newbie tendencies with pointed demonstrations about how blobbies suck.

[Shambles]

it _is_ most disappointing that these kinds of tactics aren't actively discouraged by the engine. That leaves only the option of purging these newbie tendencies with pointed demonstrations about how blobbies suck.

Now your getting it .. thats the spirit

:)

[Orda Khan]

Regardless of whether it can be defeated and whether or not this is easy, I still say the best thing is to pull the game. At the end of the day why bother? Just say bye bye

........Orda