cavalry in EB

[Mad Guitar Murphy]

Well, the cataphracts never charged Romans or anyone head on without the horse archers weakining them up a lot first. To do other wise would be crazy. And the horse archers mainly won Carrhae. What the cataphracts did, and I'm sure "Surena" knew this, was force the Romans closer together. They couldn't just spread out, they were forced to bunch together to present easy targets to the horse archers. This was a very common tactic, a false charge from the heavy horse to make the infantry bunch and then have the horse archers decimate them when their all together, and then when the infantry spread out again, send in the heavy cavalry... And so on.

Well, then Parthia has a problem since the AI doesnt have a closed order / open order dilemma. Is is overall quite difficult to kill any heavy infantry with horse archers when not shooting them in the back anyway. But anyway, I'll just to try to concentrate my horse archer fire on a few units in the center. Then I'll hope they'll go into loose formation so I haven't wasted a ton of arrows and then I'll charge them. Doest that sound right? IMO cataphracts should be capable of breaking heavy infantry with repeated charges. Sassanian cavalry was known for being capable of doing so and did so in many battles. They didn't have stirrups at this time or any other maior differences with Parthian cataphracts. It can even be argued that they had much less horse archers.

[Conqueror]

The thing with charging skirmisher units is that they are running away from the cavalry and the game won't recognize it as a charge. If you hover the mouse cursor over a cavalry unit that's about to catch retreating skirmishers, you'll notice that it says "chasing" rather than "charging". They simply don't move fast enough (compared to the skirmishers) to be granted a charge bonus on impact.

What happens then is that one of the horsemen touches one of the skirmishers, which causes the skirmisher unit to stop fleeing and your cavalry unit to stop chasing them. The both units then get into "fighting" mode.

Sometimes things get even more screwed when the skirmisher unit, upon the first contact with the cavalry unit, turns around and charges the cavalry unit! When this happens, it is the skirmisher unit that will enjoy inflicting it's charge bonus while the cavalry is simply set to normal fighting mode