Hobilars > Armoured Sergeants

[Kraxis]

Its true...

In a standup even fight Hobilars win against Armoured Sergeants.
Naturally you need to pull the the Hobilars out after each charge, but three charges seem to be enough to kill an entire unit of Armoured Sergeants.

Hobilars people... Hobilars. They have stats like mounted Peasants, and their charge is negliable. Yet they can defeat Armoured Sergeants easily (I averaged out at 22 losses for around 105 kills). 5:1 killrate with arguably the weakest cavalry against the strongest unit that is specifically meant to counter cavalry... I fail to see the reason in this.

The charge is way overpowered as I have feared for a while now. Hobilars shouldn't have a chance at all. They should become red paint on the Sergeants' shields if they decide to charge them head on if they are braced.

So Hobilars can do this... no wonder that heavy cavalry can crush anything it meets, if it gets off a nice charge. Spearmen = useless against cavalry that pulls back.

Given that Hobilars can crush spearmen with so apparent ease, I thought it might be the spearmen who were lacking in particular. So I ran two tests against two ofthe strongest infantry in the game, Dismounted Gothic Knights and JHI.
Well, my Hobilars ended up taking about 30 losses for a complete destruction of both. It was easy... Very easy in fact. Just pull out at once and you can crush any infantry with light cavalry.

Now that Hobilar has proven themselves as the master of all infantry, I tohught about giving horse archers a chance to prove thmselves in melee.

Well, after my Khazaks (weakest horse archers I could think off along with Turkish, but Turks must be on the same team) destroyed a unit of JHI with three charges (no skirmish and no FAW, would be unfair if my men used their bows), granted they took 40 losses, but I left them in melee when there were only 4 JHI left and they cut down 6-7 of them. I considered my point made.

ANY CAVLARY CAN DEFEAT ANY INFANTRY WITH CHARGES!

[EDIT] Ok, it seems the Armoured Sergeatns did put up a stronger defense against the Khazaks. The first was a loss, but mainly because my general got killed and I couldn't do anything while the little cutscene was on. Then I won fairly easily with 35 losses, then lost again, but this time becasue the enemy general died right after impact, and again the Khazaks got stuck. But then I won again with relative ease. Both the times I lost the Armoured Sergeants were don't to ca 40 men of their 112 original, and I had ca 35 remaining when my generals died. And again three charges seemed to be the norm for killing them.

Also mind you, that in none of my tests did I pull out into two rows. Started out in default, then after the first charge into four rows and finally three rows to keep an approximate of the original frontline.

To be honest it felt rather fun in an ironic way to see Armoured Spearmen come flying off the ground when the Khazaks charged. Apparently the Khazak charge was so powerful that even a specialist infantry unit, and large one at it couldn't do anything.

Unfortunately there is little we can do about this with modding it seems. We can't just lower the chargevalue for Hobilars and light horse archers like the Khazaks, they are already very low (3 and 2 if I remember correctly). Yet despite their very low value these units have just about the same impact on infantry as heavy cavalry has... so it has to do with cavalry itself.

[Herkus]

Hobilars are also effective against Scottish pikemens. After three charges Scots started to run away.
Almost defeated Swiss pikemens too - after many charges only 3 remaining hobilars were left to run away, on Swiss side only 22 pikemens were alive!!

[Kraxis]

I was actually hoping that Pikemen of various sorts would be able to contain cavalrycharges... if only to an extent.
In fact I expected it,that was why I didn't use them. I guess I better jump off to try Halberds and pikes then.

[FactionHeir]

Missile cav charges are weak (or bugged?) They never ever killed more than 2 people from the charge itself for me. Actual melee cav all have pretty powerful charges. The charge strength number doesn't seem to affect that.

[Kraxis]

Trust me... if you set up the enemy infantry properly and get the full charge off, missile cavalry has a charge that is similar to heavy cavalry. Men flying everywhere and horses that end up on the far side of the unit. I suggest you try it out in Custom Battle sometime.

Anyway, I tested the Khazaks against Militia Halberd, Militia Pike and Landsknechts. They just barely won against the Halberds, and lost to both the pike units, however they kill around 50 in both units. And I think part of the defeats comes from the fact that the pikemen's generals died in the first charge every time. That meant the Khazaks stayed for far too long and got reduced to less than 30 men in all the piketests. Had I been able to extract them at once I doubt they woul have lost that many men initially, and I could perhaps have gotten them to kill more (though I doubt they could defeat them).

[Malachus]

I agree -- although a head on cavalry charge should be strong, I think a formed charged in MTW2 is too powerful, especially against spear/pike units.

However, I don't think it's necessarily the charge bonus that is to blame. IIRC, the collision impact is set to be very high so that when the cavalry do charge, they really lay waste...

It could be this, or maybe the spears/pikes in the game just don't have enough of a bonus when fighting cavalry.