The reason why cavalry are so damn effective

[Slaists]

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).

[Stoneface]

I have modified armored sergeants to have a collision mass of 5.2 instead 1.2 and tested them against hobilars and feudal knights. The sergeants won both battles. They formed schiltron and lost about 30 out of 75 men from the charge then they slaughtered the horsies. Oddly enough the fk did not do much batter then the hobilars.

[Lusted]

I've tested this all extensively for my Lands to Conquer mod. In the latest version of my edu i've removed all charge bonuses for light cavalry and cavalry secondary weapons, making it easier for infantry to hold cavalry, and easy for spearmen. Heavy cavalry have small charge bouses of 1 for the cheaper units and 2 for the more expensive ones. I've given all spearmen 2 more attack, and changed their collision mass to 3.

It works like a charm. Armoured Sergeants, the best spear unit in the game for catholic factions discounting pikemen, can stop all cavalry charges but will lose to elite cavalry. Heavy cavalry can still massacre sword infantry with ease, and light cavalry charges are much less effective. Spearmen get massacered by sword infantry.

Elite pikemen units can beat all cav, but get massacered by swords.

All in all i think it's quite a good balance, i've even sent my version of the edu off to CA for them to have a look at.

[dopp]

I've tested this all extensively for my Lands to Conquer mod. In the latest version of my edu i've removed all charge bonuses for light cavalry and cavalry secondary weapons, making it easier for infantry to hold cavalry, and easy for spearmen. Heavy cavalry have small charge bouses of 1 for the cheaper units and 2 for the more expensive ones. I've given all spearmen 2 more attack, and changed their collision mass to 3.

It works like a charm. Armoured Sergeants, the best spear unit in the game for catholic factions discounting pikemen, can stop all cavalry charges but will lose to elite cavalry. Heavy cavalry can still massacre sword infantry with ease, and light cavalry charges are much less effective. Spearmen get massacered by sword infantry.

Elite pikemen units can beat all cav, but get massacered by swords.

All in all i think it's quite a good balance, i've even sent my version of the edu off to CA for them to have a look at.

Removing all cavalry charge bonuses seems a bit draconian though, since it's a bit counter-inituitive for swordsmen to have a higher charge bonus than knights. Besides which, if I recall a dev post from RTW correctly, the charge bonus helps spears and pikes kill the charging horses (they get the bonus instead of the knights).

Giving spearmen higher attack sounds good, and would definitely make them more all-rounded defensive units (like they were in MTW) rather than specialized anti-cavalry units (RTW onwards), but greater mass sounds like a formation problem rather than the individual soldiers. I mean, should the formation open up or lose cohesion spearmen would then have unnaturally high mass.

I sort of wish pikemen were a bit better against swords as well, since their formation gets broken too easily and they are rather reluctant to use their pikes at other times.