LienRag

What ? Cavalry should be quicker than infantry, making them less distinct from infantry isn't the way to go.

We're back to another main problem : ranged units should only be able to kill unarmored units, and only harass armored units. As they did historically.

Formations are a nice idea.

Could be nice indeed. A bit too strong change of balance though, not sure if a middleground can be found. Unable to take garrisonned buildings, maybe (so still able to mount a devastating raid if the enemy makes a mistake).

Nah. Walls should take some time to build. Palissades are historically exactly what is used to slow down enemy attacks, especially cavalry. Maybe get a tech "staked palissades" (or caltrops, maybe) that forbid cavalry to attack palissades (ideally, force them to dismount to attack palissades, but we don't have a dismounting mechanism - so maybe give the staked palissage a small aura that slow down cavalry). What we want is spear infantry on choke points created by palissades to be able to destroy champion cavalry, while cavalry still being dominant on the open field against unarmored foes, and champion cavalry able to take on armored foes on open field in a somewhat equal foot.

Incas have those already. Not sure that it's a good idea to have all civs get that. It's fine imho to have raids in first phase but not the ability to destroy an enemy - zerg rushes are quite detrimental to a game.

Antiquity spear cavalry wasn't able to charge with "couched lance"since they had no stirrups. Couched lance charge is what made spear cavalry devastating in the middle ages. So spear cavalry should be great against other cavalry, against archers, but certainly not against spearmen or any heavily armored unit.

Brett Devereaux (the acoup guy, aka the Orcs Logistics Guy) says that this idea comes from a bad translation from Polybius (I think ?) who meant that the carthaginians soldiers were paid instead of being citizens. But that most of them were levies, not mercenaries.

+1

Flavor-wise it's a good idea, but how do you balance that ?

Citizen soldiers are a staple of Oad indeed, but the OP has a point about the difficulty of mounting raids in 0ad. Which reduces the diversity of tactics (while everyone knows that diversity of tactics is important). Maybe we should find another way to allow more trade-offs between eco and military ?

AFAIK, historically it depended a lot on how one retreated. Rout is catastrophic, organized retreat not so much. False retreat are a part of historical strategy, too. That's the way the game should handle that too - giving agency to both players, since when your enemy retreats you can try to rout him if you have the forces to do so (and do not fear falling into a trap).

This should be interesting for skirmisher cavalry (Parthian and the like), yes. Not all cavalry of the era usedd such hit-and-run tactics, though.

That is exactly how I found that /usr/share/games/0ad/mods/public was taking 3,3 Gb...

Incas, Aztecs, Xiongnu/Scythians, Thebans, Community Maps...