A question about nomad cavalry

[Maksimus]

As to my knowledge (which is limited), nomad cavalry had units that were much larger in terms of numbers of soldiers. In most battle rewievs I saw - hellenic and roman cavlry was much smaller in terms of numbers - is this true?

Because I use to tweak nomad cavalry in most of my vanilla RTW mods by tweaking the scale and numbers of the cavalry units..

Would that be wrong so much?

Thank you!


note: I would like to hear all EB players but most of all I demand ( )
Foot, Persian C. .. Kervanos.. other historians

Thank you again

[Hooahguy]

well, im no historian, but i would probaly say nomad HA's fought in large groups, to maximize their devastation, while hellenic and roman cavalry units were put into smaller units for tactical purposes.....

[Watchman]

The issue is by far simpler actually. Put bluntly, steppe-nomad armies normally were nothing but cavalry - those guys are called "horse nomads" for a reason. Settled peoples did not share that luxury of vast horse herds and zillion remmounts per man; instead, their warhorses were specifically and expensively bred and maintained for that purpose.

While it is obviously poetic license to state the steppe nomads were born into saddle and learned to ride before walk, it's not all that far from the truth and well illustrates how totally their lives revolved around the horses.

[Maksimus]

So it would not be wrong if I add numbers to nomad cavalry in general but keeping the costs as their are - since I tend to belive nomads were not paid as much as Hellenes and still their economy and lack of ports is bacward to the economy so I will try with the larger numbers for the same cost and see what happens

Thank you!

note: by that I mean I will add greater numbers to Saka and Sauromate

[Parallel Pain]

Well I wouldn't say so.

Because there are A LOT less nomads than the settled people, so actually if you want to look at it even the current numbers might be too large for the nomads.

Pre-Genghis Khan nomads fought in large "disorganized" tribes, so there's really no unit (at least to my knowledge, and I've been wrong lots of times before) and I think that's where you're getting your idea from. But just think Genghis Khan had a total of only 80 000 Mongolians in his armed forces, and when he invaded China he probably had less than 120 000 (that's add some Jurchen and Kitan tribes). Compared to that the Jurchens alone probably had over 1 million men all across their empire.

And while nomad warriors don't be paid, they are given mass amount of loot everytime the tribe goes on a successful raid. So in a way they're getting paid too.

Also it's sort a patturn that emerged that whenever a nomad faction stopped expanding and raiding and become more settled down, they start getting paid. This is to my knowledge what happened to all nomadic empires that got settled whether it's Jurchens of Mongols.

And from a game point of view, we still need a faction to be "Neigh-Impossible" that DOESN'T "become more capable later on"

[V.T. Marvin]

So it would not be wrong if I add numbers to nomad cavalry in general but keeping the costs as their are ...

Well, I do not know much on the subject, but I would consider as quite ballanced to keep the infantry/cavalry ratio somewhere around 10/1 for "settled" factions (romans, hellenes) while fielding smaller stacks - almost purely cavalry - as nomadic factions. I would not change size of units - the difference could be quite "reallistically" represented by the number of cavalry units in the army.

Alternativelly I think that the size of cavalry units (base 100 men in a unit on Huge setting) could be lowered across the board - if that would not imballance the game. I understand that EB has a quite sophisticated system by which the overall ballance is achieved and it might not be be prudent to mess with that.

And from a game point of view, we still need a faction to be "Neigh-Impossible" that DOESN'T "become more capable later on"

Seconded!
For example, EB1.0 Haysdan, once successfully unites the Caucasus becomes one of the most capable factions in the game, IMHO.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

But it is probably impossible to do that, as the AI would never match human brain without much cheating

[Sarkiss]

For example, EB1.0 Haysdan, once successfully unites the Caucasus becomes one of the most capable factions in the game, IMHO.

i wouldnt say so. once there you get countless stacks of silver and later on yellow death to deal with, and its still far from getting any easier.
btw, Hayastan aint a nomad faction.

[Parallel Pain]

It's a "Neigh-Impossible" faction though.

[Watchman]

So it would not be wrong if I add numbers to nomad cavalry in general but keeping the costs as their are - since I tend to belive nomads were not paid as much as Hellenes and still their economy and lack of ports is bacward to the economy so I will try with the larger numbers for the same cost and see what happens

Thank you!

note: by that I mean I will add greater numbers to Saka and Sauromate

No. For one thing, nomad cav already gets a pricing discount. For another, at least the Parthians used to get a minor "refund" through the script every time they recruited a cavalry unit.

For a third, what PP said about demographics. Pretty much every adult male steppe-nomad was more-or-less a ready-made irregular light horseman, simply because their harsh and generally rather violent lifestyle made them like that. But the entire nomad population on the average was ridiculously small compared to sedentary peoples per given land area exploited to sustain human life; the nomads lived like that not because they chose to, but because they had to - more productive and (relative to output anyway) 'easier' methods of subsistence simply weren't possible in their environment.

Put this way: a decent-sized sedentary empire and a decent-sized steppe one had probably around equivalent numbers of "effective" combatants at their disposal - but in the case of the latter that represented virtually the entire adult male population, whereas in the case of the former it was usually a proportionally tiny group sustained by the surplus of the society.

For a fourth, it's not like militiamen like the early Romans, the Germanic and Thraco-Dacian tribal warriors, or a lot of the roster of the Hellenics and Easterners were exactly paid wages either. Most such were pretty much obliged to serve, by law, social pressure, the need to maintain their social position, etc. By your logic they should get major price cuts too...
But the system doesn't work out that way. The "recruitement and upkeep costs" of the units as well as the "budgets" ofthe factions are abstractions representing general resource recuirements, expenditures, limits and so on. It's not like, say, a Hai king went around hiring random guys to serve as cataphracts and paid them in hard cash or something; no, they were noblemen who pretty much provided their own gear and training - but also owned a lot of land and other valuable property by the produce of which they could afford it, and obviously those resources were thus not at the disposal of the king (ie. the "faction" of the game).
That sort of thing.

For a fifth, EB unit design doesn't work like that at all. FM bodyguard units aside you will observe every single cavalry unit is of the exact same size, and that there are no more than four sizes into which other units fall into either. This is of course again abstraction; the important thing is how the units relate to each other. It is for example perfectly realistic that even nomad cavalry units are far dwarfed by their infantry peers - because all other things being equal an infantryman was by far cheaper and easier to maintain, and any sedentary society worth the name could call on far more of them than the nomads their own tribesmen.
This does not change between settled and nomadic cavalry either. The sedentary peoples tended to find it difficult to keep large numbers of horses around for military purposes, not in the least also because their preferred forms of mounted warfare generally put greater performance demands on the beasts than the methods of the steppe horse-archer, who mainly needed mobility (for assorted reasons the sedentary peoples had a harder time producing horse-archers, too).
But they could also sometimes muster truly impressive numbers of cavalrymen (sometimes noticeably outnumbering the infantry part of their armies) who also tended to be much better equipped and trained than most of their nomad peers - it was all a question of resource availability, allocation and necessity. A prosperous, well-managed sedentary society after all had a lot more people and other resources at its disposal than any nomad peer - not counting horses of course, but you need someone to fight from the beast too...