Cantabrian Circle quirks

[Shahed]

After playing only catholic factions for a long time, and getting a bit bored with inquisicothics, I've been trying my hands at non-catholic factions, namely the Russians and (started 10 minutes ago) the Turkish. And their HAs are frustrating me to no end.

Seems to me, unless they have 50 miles of flat, clean, clear land around them, they just won't start circle firing. I tried everything I could think of. Disable skirmish. Order a symmetric, square box formation before turning the circle on. Tight of Loose formation. Setting HA units as far apart from each other as reasonable. They just won't do their indians-sacking-cowboy-chariots thing.

Any thoughts, hints, paving stones in the face 'cuz I'm too stupid to understand how it's supposed to work and be used ?

It works perfectly like this. Most of the following is standard procedure for me:

1. Turn OFF skirmish and fire at will.
2. Approach the target.
3. Hit F and click the target.

This formation is useful in the following cases:

1. Your horses are constantly moving reducing the enemy's ability to hit you by missile fire (also reduces you own missile accuracy ofc).
2. A unit in cantabrian circle tends to attract a charge, hence giving you a lure and bag option for the charging unit.

In order to circle around the enemy:
1. Turn OFF fire at will.
2. Waypoint a path around the enemy as close as you can get to the enemy.
3. RUN.
4. Enable fire at will when very close (to maximise accuracy) OR when far (to maximise early under fire morale penalty and early enemy formation disruption)

If you want to make this even more complex and awesome to watch:
1. Turn OFF fire at will.
2. Waypoint a 2 waypoint path around the enemy as close as you can get to the enemy.
3. RUN.
4. At waypoint 1 (as close as possible), missile attack the enemy and click F.
5. Waypoint another 2 point path.
6. At waypoint 1, missile attack the enemy and click F.
7. Repeat as a above, indefintely.

The 2nd waypoint is just in case you get intercepted at waypoint 1 /edit: then you already have a waypoint ready in case you don't want to catabrain you can just carry on running. /edit The above is hard to do but it's incredibly beautiful to watch the archers shooting while constantly moving.

/edit Pay attention though because to pull this off you have to ALWAYS have skirmish off, and you have to be very alert. There's a lot of micromanagement involved. IMO skirmish does'nt really work well, I mean even with experience 9 it seems some missile cav just can't see a charge coming even when it's staring them in the face on the tip of 40 large colorful tournament lances. I find I get better results by clicking myself. Specially in extremely close quarters. Be careful to watch your casualties against missile units, you have to make sure you are killing more than they are. I should say that I use cantabrian occasionally, but mostly I run across from side to side i.e from one flank to the other circling around the enemy army. If the opportunity presents itself I charge in. /edit

Some screenshots (still looking for some of catabrian they are somewhere here on my HD but anyway will post when I find them):

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: