if you have access to halberd militia, which are so much better, and available earlier (and thus can gain more experience)??
Am I missing something?
if you have access to halberd militia, which are so much better, and available earlier (and thus can gain more experience)??
Am I missing something?
yes the correct deployment and use of pikes, if used correctly in tandem with either archers or muskets and some heavy cav your armies take minimal losses while destroying the other army near to completion. if you have question there was a thread about the best pike unit and correct use of said units
Pikemen vs. Swordsmen - an analysis there is one it should help
Last edited by llewellyn; 06-04-2007 at 01:37.
Yes, but halberds also has long spears and all of the benefit of pikes PLUS they have AP and are available earlier.
So why pikes if you have halberds?
Halberds are a bit bugged. In the game, they are suckier than pikes. After much testing, I can say halberds lose sorely to cavalry due to the halberds relatively low attack and attack speed as well as weapon reach. They are quite effective against infantry but then pikemen can also accomplish the same thing even with no AP and are way cheaper.
So I would go pikemen instead only because thy are currently more effective.
Weird Facts I have contemplated![]()
-Thesaurus is not a species of dinosaur.
-Potassium is not found in potatoes.
-Its Naples, not Nipples.
-All roads certainly do not lead to Rome. Does your state highway link you to it?
- Dog is God spelled backwards but praying to dogs is a bit stupid.
- Fart is Hydrogen Sulfide with methane and oxygen and is indeed flammable.
- Igniting a fart is painful.
ummmmm yes they are available earlier if u are not the scots
halberbs=owned by pikes
Wait, what ?
Knocking pikes, I can understand, but knocking pikes in favor of halberds is a new one :)
Frankly, everything a halberd does, a pike does better.
They certainly can withhold a heavycav charge, when halberdiers will get cheesed*.
They can hold infantry long enough that a more anti-inf unit can flank, while halberds will die too fast.
They walk faster.
Pikes have much longer reach, meaning they can use more ranks (or rather, as madcat said in another post, two or three units of pikes can be deployed behind each other, in two ranks, and all units will fight, while the attacker can only fight with one.
And lastly, spearwall formation is just as useless/buggy for halberdiers than it is for pikemen - it'll hold a charge, but then you absolutely have to turn it off or they just won't fight.
Soooo...why would anyone buy a halberdier unit ? :)
(* : it's like being creamed, only worse)
Anything wrong ? Blame it on me. I'm the French.
Hmmm. This is not my experience. Playing as Sicily, halbs have easily outperformed pikes.
I did a few tests. In 5 tests of chivs vs halb/pike
chivs lost 5 times against the halbs (with an average number of survivors of 40 halbs)
chivs lost 4 of 5 against the pikes, (with an average number of survivors of 35 pikes) -- that is, I discarded the loss.
Pikes also lost 5/5 against halbs, averaging 40 survivors. What am I missing?
The fact that pikes are not designed to fight infantry ?
Pikes are meant to be moving stake walls, to protect your archers, your crossbows, your muskets, heck even your cannons against those big bad horsemen with the pointy sticks. The muskets/cannons/archers/xbow in turn protect the pikes against infantry that the pikes can hold but hardly kill. Together, and ideally (that is to say : if the game handled pikes better and didn't let them switch to their swords so easily) a pike & shot army with a little cav should beat anything thrown at it.
Halberdiers are a weak middle ground : they can fight infantry, but not as good as REAL anti-inf units like heavy cav or DFKs and with many losses which precludes them from taking part in long campaigns, and they completely suck against cavalry when DFKs can beat them off with any luck.
So halbs may have a value of sorts, as cheap yet somewhat efficient militia, but they'll always be worse than well supported pikes. 1-on-1, pikes are probably worse admitedly, but 1-on-1 doesn't say anything about a real battle. Pikes don't kill : they have staying power. Spears don't kill much either, would you say they're useless because most units eventually defeat them 1 on 1 ?
Last edited by Kobal2fr; 06-04-2007 at 06:18.
Anything wrong ? Blame it on me. I'm the French.
Frenchie is mostly right.
Halberdiers are better than pikemen on walls, but that's about it.
I find that the shorter polearms have an easier time of it when fighting on slopes (this probably wouldn't be the case if pikemen knew how to master the technique of pointing pikes up and down).
Well, Pikes are a bit weak right now coz of the sword swap problem which makes them crap when a lot of units rush thru the formation rendering the pikes useless. Many people fix this by modding out the swords but then it leaves the pikeman a bit overpowered in that nothing can pass thru it.
Weird Facts I have contemplated![]()
-Thesaurus is not a species of dinosaur.
-Potassium is not found in potatoes.
-Its Naples, not Nipples.
-All roads certainly do not lead to Rome. Does your state highway link you to it?
- Dog is God spelled backwards but praying to dogs is a bit stupid.
- Fart is Hydrogen Sulfide with methane and oxygen and is indeed flammable.
- Igniting a fart is painful.
pikes not being able to raise or lower their angle is a bug and when asked if CA was going to address the uphill downhill bug for patch 1.2 they said they would not be able to this time around. but there was an admission it was a bug.
halberds in v1.1 can easily beat many infantry units but in v1.2 are easily beaten by shield and sword knights especially dfk. and im not even going to begin to imagine what varangian guard could do to them. with militia halberdier this is not anything of concern to me but when swiss guard are being slaughtered by dfk then im very disappointed.swiss guard should be one of the toughest if not the toughest unit in the game.
pikes will hold up longer than most spearmen when attacked by dfk etc. even better spear infantry dont last very long versus dfk types. pikes will hold up long enough for help to arrive. with militia pikes that is barely in time.
however i am beginning to appreciate how certian kinds of shock infantry can hack their way into pikes. it does give some purpose to all those units and it is possible however my big disappointment is when swiss pikemen and landsneckts are so easily destroyed.
one way for halberds to take out pikemen is a technique i developed not too long ago post 1.2 patch. form your halberds into a column and order them to attack while in spearwall. they will wedge themselves through the pike units center and once past the pikewall they get the advantage and begin to spread out with the flanks turning to the secondary animation [swinging] while the center keeps prodding and poking. i can defeat pikemen everytime with this technique. however against swiss pikemen and landsneckts it would take swiss guard or obundashear to make it work.
pikes are at their best if given the weapon upgrade. this adds 6 attack and gives them the chance to inflict massive casualties at start of melee before an enemy bust through the spearwall.
some of this may not be completely realistic or historical but its the game mechanics so we make do with what has been dealt to us. and even though it is not exactly effecient the arrangement of thin lines of pikemen in column can emulate a true phalanx style fighting arrangement. therefore so long as i am able to have a way to "fix" it temporarily im satisfied.
ive learned to start using other types of units and discovering their strengths. i especially like "better spear units" i will form them up tight or in schiltrom and get them packed up tight against the enemy infantry or cav and once the front is stabilized i turn off schiltrom or guard mode [depending on which formation i decided to use and command them to attack]. they begin pushing like those guys in "300" and shove the enemy back and usually score some good kills that way especially against horses.a lot of this is in cities where their flanks are protected.
in the open field if you place guard mode on and do not move your spearmen cavalry will hardly have any effect on the charge and then after the charge is depleted take guard mode off and attack and kill uber cav. when cav pulls back to launch another charge rush your spearmen back into formation and hit guard mode again and they can usually defeat cav almost as good as pikemen and definetly better than halberds can. being halberds are so pathetic i oftentimes wondered if CA should give them a larger unit so they can have enough facing to hold the cav flanks better when absorbing charges.
im impressed with the shorter polearm units like varangian guard ;). now if only halberdiers and two handed sword units can be rebalanced to match two hand axemen we will have a nice game. although i do believe some shield infantry such as dfk are just a little overpowered. i can accept possibly late plate armored chivalric being uber but dfk are supposed to be obsolete in the later era but they ususally own most "better" infantry from my experience.
I've been puzzling over this question myself, as I have the option to raise Scottish Pike Militia in my current campaign but looking at their stats they don't seem as useful as Dismounted Knights.
This thread prompted me to do a bit of testing, mainly for my own benefit.
The first test pitted Scottish Pike Militia against Dismounted English Knights just to see what the results would be. Battlefield was Grassy Plain and no bonusses were added to either side.
Scottish Pike Militia V Dismounted English Knights
The knights won but only after a prolonged struggle. They found it hard to penetrate beyond the pikes to reach the militiamen, in several cases falling back to regroup and then charging the spear wall again to force a penetration. Once beyond the pike points the knights had the advantage forcing the militia to drop their pike and draw their sword in an uneven fight.
Losses: 181 Pikemen 73 knights
Next I decided to pit the pikemen against the best mounted knights they were likely to face in my campaign e.g. Feudal Knights
Scottish Pike Militia v Feudal Knights
I actually had to run this test twice.
In both tests the pikemen hunkered down ready to receive cavalry and the Knights trotted up and then refused to charge home. They just sat their looking at the wall of spear points and refused to budge a single step closer.
The question then arose how to take the battle to the knights. According to Mike Loades the Scottish Pikemen were trained to move and fight but the Pikemen in MTW2 clearly aren't. My first experiment was simply to tell the pikemen to attack the Knights. This proved to be a total disaster as as soon as the order to attack was given the pikemen dropped their pikes and charged with their swords to be cut to ribbons by the knights.
Losses: 210 Pikemen 41 Knights
The second test started in the same way as the first but this time instead of ordering the pikemen to attack the knights I simply ordered them to move to a point beyond the knights thus creating an apparently accidental collision.
This worked better, although as soon as the first collissions occurred I did press the BACKTAB button to order an emergency halt. A lot of the Pikemen did still drop their pikes, but some of them quickly picked them up again and the knights seemed more willing to attack now that they had been bloodied. The result was a series of charges by the knights into the pikemens rather ragged spearwall which was enough to unhorse a lot of knights and send the rest running for home.
Losses: 76 Pikmen 96 Feudal Knights
So, even allowing for the 'sword swap bug' Scottish Militia Pikemen can own mounted knights if handled carefully. In practice the reluctance of mounted knights to charge them creates an interesting opportunity for crossbowmen and archers to practice their archery.
So, a mixed force of Scottish Militia Pikemen and Mercenary Crossbowmen ought to prove very effective.
I just tested this theory in a custom battle: 6xFeudal Knights v 3xScottish Militia Pikemen and 3xScottish Noble Archers. The result was as predicted, the knights refused to charge the pikemen and just stood there getting picked off by the archers. About halfway through the archers ammunition I even moved them forward to stand in front of the pikemen so that they were firing directly into the faces of the knights but they still refused to charge.
Losses: 0 Pikemen, 0 Archers, 111 Feudal Knights
Likewise in seige assaults these Pikemen ought to prove useful in blocking streets so that your missile troops can fire into the struggling mass beyond.
Last edited by Didz; 06-04-2007 at 11:34.
Didz
Fortis balore et armis
mbrasher, do the tests i just did, pikes vs dfk halbs vs dfk, even the most ghetto of pikes outperforms all but jannissaries (which really arent the type this is about), and even then its close
halbs break formation always, i assume its the animation
this is with ltc mod, but i'm sure its the same results with vanilla
also nobody ever stops before hitting my pikes, they charge happily into them
Last edited by Callahan9119; 06-05-2007 at 15:16.
And when the brazen cry of achilles
Was heard among the trojans, all their hearts
Were troubled, and the full-maned horses whirled
The chariots backward, knowing griefs at hand...
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