Will someone please explain how I am losing here.

**Budwise** · 09-14-2005, 09:46

Sometimes, I truly believe I have lost battles that I clearly should have won. After debating this for some time, I decided to post this picture and ask for others to tell me what happened.

I'm talking about ALL THOSE BILLMEN fighting that F. Knight. (Substitute the "F" for whatever word you want, I am pissed about this.) My Billmen were getting slaughered there and all I managed to do was kill 3 of the four knights. THE FOURTH ONE RAN AWAY. My Billmen were LOSING BADLY THE ENTIRE TIME. To add this, I charged the Knights, they didn't charge at me. Also, count the flags, I'm no expert but I can see 3 as the valor. Yes, I also see that other flag, thats how I beat them, by sending in the VERY SMALL unit of Billmen to scare them off. I am refering to one of the two bigger units. If you also notice, they all have at least a medium armor upgrade.

Now, I am no expert, but aren't BILLMEN SUPPOSED TO CHEW UP CALV. Plus, I had a height advantage and I am sure the Billmen aren't just a new unit.

**EatYerGreens** · 09-14-2005, 10:30

Hi Budwise,

If you've not done so already, next game session, go into the Options menu before you load your campaign and tick the box which says 'Battle logfile'. This generates a user-readable txt file in C:\.....MTW\Logfiles

If you have a log for this particular battle, check out the before and after valour on thise knights. The flags indicate the valour of the unit but this is an average score for the men within it. The 'unkillable' one may have been valour 8 or something and his companions were v1 or v2.

It looks like your general is giving a valour boost of +1 to all units and the base valour for your billmen was something like 2? In some ways, this can be bad because, for every v2 billman he kills, that transfers more and more 'points' to him, driving his personal valour up all that more rapidly, to the point where he does become near unkillable.

In the battle logs, you can see how many enemy an individual man killed and how much this has boosted his personal valour level. It often doesn't correlate at all. Killing dozens of valour-0 enemy can result in no valour boost at all and sometimes you can see someone with just one kill but their valour jumped up two levels, probably because it was a highly valoured opponent. This is what I call 'valour transference'.

Another aspect is that if you put a unit of 120 up against just 4 enemy, it ends up being just 4 men vs 4, really. You can see this from your screenshot. Instead of swarming around the knights, the bulk of your unit is holding formation and not participating in the fight.

If they'd been up against a cav unit 20 men wide and four ranks deep, then it would be 20 vs 20 and you'd see a faster rate of cav-chopping.

Hold formation is good for when you want to stop them from breaking through your main battle line but, to get the 'wrap around' effect and get all the men in your unit attacking at once, I wonder if switching to 'engage at will' would help?

One for the experts, perhaps?

**Del Arroyo** · 09-14-2005, 10:59

Cavalry in MTW, especially when controlled by the AI, is simply off the hook. Inexplicable. I've just accepted it.

DA

**Del Arroyo** · 09-14-2005, 11:03

Of course this beats STW, where Yari Samurai chewed through Cav like Uzis and stuck to them like glue...

**Ghost of Rom** · 09-14-2005, 11:16

From the picture it looks like they are on hold formation. Engage at will gets more men attacking at once.

The best bonus's in the game come from charging from the flank or behind. Most of my battles are won with heavy cav crashing a flank and rolling it up.

Some leaders are what you call "jedi", Super high valor really tough to kill guys. Play against the vikings and you will see alot of them.

**Budwise** · 09-14-2005, 11:25

Originally Posted by Rom

From the picture it looks like they are on hold formation. Engage at will gets more men attacking at once.

The best bonus's in the game come from charging from the flank or behind. Most of my battles are won with heavy cav crashing a flank and rolling it up.

Some leaders are what you call "jedi", Super high valor really tough to kill guys. Play against the vikings and you will see alot of them.

I thought of that right off the bat - no, they are Engage At Will I swear on that. Like I said, that was the very first thought that I thought of when I saw this going down. I guess their isn't enough knights to "wrap around"

Also, another topic, can someone please explain how my valor 2 Chiv Knights break even to low level Royal Knights.

I understand the Jedi factor and I believe it contributed to this, but his three companions had the same strenght - I highly doubt it. Plus, would I still be LOSING BADLY. I mean come on.

**Del Arroyo** · 09-14-2005, 12:08

If there were only 4 men, then 1 would be carrying the unit standard and there would only be 3 left to carry valour indicators. So theoretically they all could have been Valour 5 kajillion, for all you know.

DA