Could you reveal something about cav effectivnes? Almost ever mod seems to treat as a point of honour to reduce it "because cav was unimportant in this period as it was time of heavy inf". This made a rather strange situations when historicaly good cav was not able to break skirmishers. Another problem is speed setting as it seems to have huge impact on cav charge ability (if the game uses some phisics then it's obvious - slower moving means shorter charge). This problem reached peak in RTR 6 (they decreased unit speed to prolonge battles) when cav got problems chasing skirmishers and having problems to charge - especially kataphraktoi - such slowed that they were not entering charge if not running downhill. They tried to fix it with huge charge bonuses but the problem is that this is also limited.
I think the problem with cav was not it's power but rather very limited access to good horses. The best were probably Nissean (or maybe Iberian?), Thessalian/Macedonian, numidian and Gallic were good, stepe horses were also good. In other places horses had to be imported. This made them very expensive and rare, so only higher nobles were able to afford them. In tat time you were not able to "build" a force of cav fast, as you were not able to teach man to ride fast - to ride well without stirrups people had to be taughed from infancy or at least for many years. So you have to have many horses and this means big, deforestated plains and also significant trained population to use the horses.
Concluding, I think the horse units should be trained only in some areas - kind of hidden resource. Or maybe two of them - for one poor and another for good horses.
So, now the question - have you made sth like this or only reduce power of cav and increase it's cost? And what about speed problem, as I read that you are slowing units down?
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