Quote Originally Posted by Lusted
Historical accuracy be damned, spearmen in this game are meant to be useful against cav, but in the default game they are completely useless.
Well, in my experience MASSED spears against cavalry work... Like 4/5 units of militia spearmen can actually take down an AI king's unit. Example, I would send a single militia spearmen unit against the aforementioned king and it would get decimated in no time. Send 4 units of the same crappy spearmen - and the king dies easily with actually few losses on the spearmen side...

It seems, for spears to be effective, they have to be in a VERY DEEP formation (if that can be called formation). So, maybe increasing the realative spear unit size would help? On the current setting, if spears are deployed in sufficiently deep formation, that invariably allows the cavalry to envelop them from flanks.

But then again, increasing spear relative unit size would outbalance them against other units (swords).