Non-Dismountable Cavalry Exploited

[HKDDJulker]

If a squad can drop their seige equipment, or leave their artillery sitting in the field, they should be able to hop off a horse. Perhaps it does open a whole new can of worms, having to deal with mounting and dismounting in battle (what happens to the horses? what happens if a unit has more men than horses? or more horses than men?), but I agree that all horsemen ought to be able to get off of their horses if necessary.
Perhaps it would unbalance things?

[A Very Super Market]

Well, they already have dragoons.

[GMaximus]

what happens if a unit has more men than horses?

I had that happen with dragoons.



They just ran around, mounting and dismounting again, and couldn't even move in the face of a pikeman charge. Rather ridiculously, though, they managed to somehow fend off the 120 pikemen and lose 4 men. Which still didn't fix the issue though, for the rest of the battle the dragoons went about headless, despite the fact their losses had fixed the issue of not enough horses.

[Relic]

This will definately be a part of my mod for Empire at some point.

[Bob the Insane]

I would aggree with the concept of all cavalry units being dismountable. The dragoons handle more horses than men fine and the more men than horse issue shouldn't happen to often...

As the game stands though I would say if you turn up to a remotely urban map without infantry or dismountable cavalry and you are attacking then you lose fair and square if you can;t force the defenders out of their buildings.

A similar arguement would be describing a defender kitting his last unit of cavalry around the map until the timer runs out as an exploit if the attacker has no cavalry to intecept them (cheesy of course, but not an exploit IMHO)...

[Subotan]

(what happens to the horses? what happens if a unit has more men than horses? or more horses than men?),

Pair up. Two guys on horse, or have a horse following the others. Or have horses suffer strokes when their rider gets shot whilst off his horse.

[imperialus]

Wouldn't that also mean that every unit of cavalry would need twice as many models? Not to mention different stats, not to mention the PitA that I'm sure it would be to program the AI to use the ability with something approaching a glimmer of intelligence.



I can see it now. "Teh AI is stoopid! Their calvary dismounted and marched across a field and I shot them!"

[A Very Super Market]

Well, the only use would be to plug gaps in a desperate situation, or take down some lightly garrisoned houses.

[RelatyvT]

CA has a very good reason to not allow regular cavalry to dismount. It would only be confusing to most players as they wouldn't be able to tell the difference between cavalry and dragoons. When they see the dismount button on, for example, life guards they will automatically assume that they are good at fighting dismounted.

[hoom]

OK so I haven't yet had Dragoons in the full game but in the demo when a dragoon unit had more men than horses, the remainder followed the mounted dragoons on foot. I'd expect the same in full game.

[Relic]

CA has a very good reason to not allow regular cavalry to dismount. It would only be confusing to most players as they wouldn't be able to tell the difference between cavalry and dragoons. When they see the dismount button on, for example, life guards they will automatically assume that they are good at fighting dismounted.

You could consider that they only dismount with an attack order on a building?

[NimitsTexan]

If your enemy only has cavalry, and you have infantry in a building . . . your enemy at that point deserves to loose (whether AI or Player).

Yes, it would be nice if cavalry could dismount, but the fact is in pitched battles European cavalry generally stayed mounted. Even the Dragoons dismounted role in this game, while plausible, is a bit exagerated in my opinion. Certainly towards the end of the ETW era Dragoons were generally used as light cavalry, rather than mounted infantry. Dismountable heavy/medium cavalry is definately a case where a small degree of functionality would probably be accompanied by complex AI routine requirements and all sorts of ahistorical and unnatural exploitation of the feature by players.

[Melvish]

Why were they called Dragoon? Because they tend to eat their horses!

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The European cavalries of this eara considered it was below themselve to dismount to do battle, in fact they look down on dragoons for this particular reason.

I found it funny that before patch i had a bug the caused a enemy cavalry unit to be half garrisoned into a house, it made the other part of the unit, that charged my cannons, untargetable... Now that an "exploit"

[Hollerbach]

It seems that the problem the OP reports stems from an overall tendancy for the AI to:

1) Get stuck in an indecisive loop
2) Never retreat in good order when beaten

Clearly it would be prefferable for the AI to realise that it cannot possibly win this battle and therefore needs to retreat. I think that is a far better solution than making all cavalry dismountable, which would simply make the already struggling AI fall in a heap.