Weak cavalry?

[Cheetah]

First of all there is a big diference between SP and MP not just in the oposition you have but in the effectiveness, exactly because of the oposition.

In SP you can play whatever style you prefer as long as you want. In most cases you wont recognize the weakness of your style simply because the AI is not that good to exploit it. Thus you can play infantry heavy, cav heavy, archer heavy styles forever, and accordingly you might be complaianing that cavs, infs, archers are weak/strong etc.

However, in MP your opponents will quickly show the weakness of your style (simply because of the competitve nature of MP) and thus you will be forced to change, unless you are prepared to lose all the time, which none of us prefers. All in all in MP you will be quickly chanelled to play the most efficient style with the most efficient armies (add a small variation here and there).

For the above reasons I am a bit sceptical about gamebalance suggestions coming from SP, simply because there is no way to know whether your style is efficient/unefficient in SP. On the otherhand, MP is a much better measure of game balance as even the smallest expliots will be found and used/abused very quickly.

Thus, as far as the above statement concered that cavs were weak in MTW, it is safe to say that it is not likely to be true. Almost half of the armies in MP consisted cavs, most notably heavy cavs (chiv knights) and in the light of the above argument it is not likely that people would take them if they were that weak. For example a tipical MP army was 3 pavies x-bows, 5 MAA and 8 Chiv knight (or it is equivalent: Hospitaller knights, Teutonic knights, Templars, upgraded feudal knights, etc). Would anyone deploy such an army if cavs were that weak? No way.

The very problem of MP was that spears were not good enough or to be precise were to costly. There were spears that could hold cav charges, like v2 orderfoot, but they were even costlier than the cavs and even costlier than the MAA that could beat them. IMHO a small change in cost could have changed things, as if lets say v2 orderfoot would have been the same cost as v3w1 FMAA then I am sure some people would have used at least 1 or 2; and if v2 orderfoot would have been cheaper than v3w1 FMAA, let say around 700 florins, then I am sure it would have been a standard addition to MP armies.

Anyway, it was not and cav was a dominant force in MTW (except the early days before the 1.1 patch).