Cav vs Inf

[Puzz3D]

Not if the person in the box has 8 arch and 12 inf as they don't have to worry about buying their own cav. So they'll have a severe numerical advantage even with equal inf/arch stats and price wise if cav didn't do anything much then u couldn't beat that against a good player.

The attacker shouldn't need cav to beat the box, and it doesn't make much sense that you would use cav to beat an anti-cav formation. The box should fail because the men in the box are packed closer together and will suffer higher casualty rate than the men on the outside who are shooting into the box and who can go into loose formation as well. The men inside can also be subjected to enfilade fire and rear fire. Low trajectory, high penetrating weapons such as xbows and guns should be especially dangerous for the box. In STW, a box is easily defeated since there are a lot of secondary hits (back kills) by guns on deep formations. As the shootout progresses, the box defender will loose melee strength, and eventually he won't be strong enough to win the melee. That kind of game mechanic can also be used effectively against corner campers.

The game designer can adjust the effectiveness of secondary hits, enfilade fire, rear fire and loose formation so that the attacker doesn't have to take as many shooters as the box defender. However, if the shooters are cheap and the cav expensive, it might be more effective to take the same number of shooters. In any case, with this game dynamic the box will disappear from play, and that will open up the game for cavalry. You can have this and still have an infantry unit in the game that's effective in stopping cavalry frontally. I know this because it works very well in Samurai Wars. The spear infantry can kill cav, but they are less mobile and that's an important factor favoring the cav when the gameplay opens up and gets away from static formations.

The problem I see with having cav defeat static formations is that the game will gravitate toward cavalry dominated armies. After all, the cav is going to be even more effective in an open game where mobility is important. We put a tremendous amount of work into balancing Samurai Wars so that cav didn't dominate the gameplay, and yet cav is highly effective. Players who take no cav are at a disadvantage due to lower mobility. Despite the apparent simplicity of only having 14 units in Samurai Wars, the gameplay is complex because there are three RPS systems functioning which have been balanced relative to one another.

These three RPS systems are not black and white like they are in many RTS games, but they are strong enough that spear inf can stop cav. The anti-cav bonus for the spear weapon is actually the only weapon type bonus used in Samurai Wars. We don't use the +1 combat bonus that swords get over spears in MTW/VI. That bonus is unnecessary since our swords beat spears, but they cost more. It's a more intuitive system because you can just look at the cost of the unit to ascertain which unit will win a particular matchup. The wraparound of the cheap spears and expensive cav occurs with the spear anti-cav bonus which is what stops cav from dominating the gameplay. That gives us a nice combined arms gameplay.

Thats just one tactic that if your weakened state of cav was implemented, would be able to decimate a *balanced* army.

I'm not advocating weak cav. I'm advocating an infantry unit that can stop cav and which is cheaper than the cav it stops by at least a factor of 2. The infantry unit has to be cheaper because it has less mobility than cav. You also want to leave some space in the cost system so that you can have some medium cost units that beat the unit that stops cav.

I'm not advocating that a balanced army should beat all other armies. Unbalanced armies can beat balanced armies, but there should exist counter armies to those unbalanced armies. That makes army purchasing interesting because you are trying to anticipate what kind of army your opponent is taking. If your opponent becomes predictable in his unbalanced army type, you can drive him away from choosing that army by taking a counter army. This will tend to drive the armies used back toward more balanced types, but not necessarily fully balanced. We see this in Samurai Wars all the time. Players skew their army to emphasize either swords or spears or shooters or cav depending on their style of play or what they think their opponent will take or the map terrain, but they have learned not to go too far with this because effective counter armies exist. Unfortunately, we have the tax on more than 4 of one type which limits what players can choose. We don't need this restriction in Samurai Wars. That the tax has reappeared in M2TW is a crutch designed to reduce the amount of effort put into play balancing.

BTW atm i've found a counter unit/units for every other unit except one, however that one unit can be easily beaten by basic tactics as a whole army.

That's promising. Unfortunately, the robust statistical battle engine of the earlier games has been gutted. The new 3d engine is not advanced enough to actually simulate combat. The older statistical engine does a better job.