chain routing causes

[danfda]

I had something like this happen to me yesterday. I have an XL campaign with the Knights Hospitaller, late/hard, and I was in posession of Egypt. My heir was in charge of a mostly full stack of arbalesters, order foot, and mounted x-bows, which, most of which had an armor+2 upgrade.

The Eggies attacked with a slight numerical advantage and an army comprised of mostly saharan cav and mameluk cav, with a unit of Mongol heavy cav (hehe), desert archers, and a couple of nubian spearmen. A few turns prior I had annihilated an Egyptian army of mostly the same composition in the same territory, so I thought the battle would be no big thing. Boy was I wrong.

The cav charged my line of arbs, who got off some salvos but did not do as much damage as I wanted. One unit got caught by the Mameluks before it could retreat behind my order foot, and routed almost immediately. So when the MHC hit a perfect unit of order foot, they too routed almost immediately even after taking hardly any casualties. Next, my whole line routed, except for my two Knights Hospitaller and one unit of order foot, which almost carried the day, killing the MHC, the mameluks, the spearmen, just about everyone. Every other unit routed and was butchered almost to a man, with most running off, rallying, and routing again before they even got back to the Egyptians. The mameluks and the saharans made short work of them, to my dismay.

My general fought valiantly, but died a short while later when the reserve mameluk cav hit his ragtag line. It was sluaghter. I did, however, kill more of them than they killed of me, but it was a close thing, and that was only because of my heir's heroism.

Now, the chain route, I believe, was due to my heir. He had the gluttony vice, which carried a -6 morale penalty (I think). This hadn't been a problem before, but I think that it was when combined with the desert--the armor made my guys tired from just standing there...

You would think I learned my lesson, but the very next turn I took Egypt back from its rightful owners with a large invasion, consisting mostly of Knights Hospitaller, order foot, and arbs...