Combat in the Med II engine

[Rolling Thunder]

One thing the Medieval II engine does well is model cavalry behaviour. Getting a charge is difficult, they're more powerful in melee and when they do hit home, it's like being smashed with a sledgehammer. Oh, and trying to countercharge with infantry gets you killed. So pretty damn realistic there - a man with a 12 foot lance is going to deliver a hell of a lot of damage to any infantry formation before they can hope to strike back.
The 'Realism' mod for Medievall II, Stainless Steel Real Recruitment/Real Combat, actually buffed a lot of the charge values for the knights and other units and did a lot of splendid work in general.

Pikes in vanilla ME:2 suck, but with proper modding they work great.
However, part of this modding requires removing the secondary weapon, as in Medieval II the tendency for units to switch to secondary's is far too great for them to be useful in a melee. However, this actually makes them less rigid as you don't have to obssessively maintain the phalanx formation.

[Rahwana]

One thing the Medieval II engine does well is model cavalry behaviour. Getting a charge is difficult, they're more powerful in melee and when they do hit home, it's like being smashed with a sledgehammer. Oh, and trying to countercharge with infantry gets you killed. So pretty damn realistic there - a man with a 12 foot lance is going to deliver a hell of a lot of damage to any infantry formation before they can hope to strike back.
The 'Realism' mod for Medievall II, Stainless Steel Real Recruitment/Real Combat, actually buffed a lot of the charge values for the knights and other units and did a lot of splendid work in general.

Pikes in vanilla ME:2 suck, but with proper modding they work great.
However, part of this modding requires removing the secondary weapon, as in Medieval II the tendency for units to switch to secondary's is far too great for them to be useful in a melee. However, this actually makes them less rigid as you don't have to obssessively maintain the phalanx formation.

well, it's true that pike units somewhat love to drop their pike in battle ;clown:
but this will solve age old hardcoded bug in EB with pike turning 180 degree, at least partially since the pikemen are now baing much much much more vulnerable.

and yes, this could be somewhat compensated by get really high attack values for pikes, so they kill more before finally dropped

[Ichon]

Actually pike with low stats are pretty effective vs most units in MTW2 due to the pathfinding and coherent units. IE- longer reach mean pike usually get at least 2x attack vs opposing unit and also if the opposing unit is dense/high cohernent it takes long time to even reach into range where they can hit pikes. As well MTW2 has better modeling of armor/shields. IE- heavy armored cavalry with shield is pretty tough for most infantry without really high attack or bonus vs cavalry to take except thru mass numbers but soon as cavalry turns to disengage they become very vulnerable for a few seconds. Cavalry in RTW move so fast disengage almost instant.

Charge bonus works pretty well depending on stat as well. IE- many mods put charge shock bonus of 12 and higher which means one unit of 50 cavalry can kill 150 infantry unit in a few seconds. Mod that stat down to 6-8 and it is much better especially for the timeframe of EB when heavy cavalry charges weren't quite on the devastating level of armored knight with couched lance of medieval times. Though still devastating in the right situation head on charges into set infantry formations should probably only be possible for a very few elite cavalries without large losses. Hopefully the generals bodyguard units are more varied in EB and someway to make them smaller without adversely affecting AI generals killing themselves even more quickly.

Even more important though might be model the difference between speed of light and heavy infantry and cavalries... never seen a MTW2 mod yet where heavy cavalry can't eventually catch light cavalry on the map corners because the difference in speed is so small.