LienRag

Actually, big horses that can't feed on pasture only cost money. Smaller horses (mongolians, US mustangs - yes I know, not the same time period, and afaik berber horses) don't; they cost food and care. So basically we already have that in the game : skirmish cavalry costs food, war cavalry costs gold.

This one is quite obvious, IIRC on the same map some other aren't that obvious.

Oh right, you meant impassable mountains, not regular elevations/hills !

Sure; but more importantly, fix the Temple of Amun not expanding territory... (if this isn't already fixed in a27, I mean)

Yes, that's a problem. Historically people didn't fight like that because the one who didn't get in formation would be wiped out easily by the one who was in formation. That's what we should try to reproduce - if I'm reading Devereaux's Acoup well, the roman formation had swordsmen stabbing the enemy if they had an opportunity, then retreating to the formation. We could have something like that for some formations I guess... Also and as I mentioned many times, historically one of the main reason for formations was to keep morale. So only when we'll have a morale system will we be able to have a good formation system. Side note : IIRC Devereaux also stated that the modern recreations of shield walls pictured above are not really how a shield wall was done historically.

Is the formula for that available somewhere ?

How does that work ? I've never understood how terrain (and especially elevation) could be used for defense...

As written above, they do when you garrison them on walls. But alas they die quite quickly there - that probably should be buffed in a way or another. Maybe with an option to have them automatically garrison in the wall towers once they lost half their hit points ? Archers on walls are a historical thing, and in-game they're nearly unusable without too much micromanagement...

How do you do that ? I mean, loading and unloading is easy of course, but I've never been able to make a trader resume an interrupted trade. I only can select a new origin market then a new destination market (both of which could be the same as the previous ones) which then makes them lose whatever resources they were trading and go back to the new origin market to load some new resources.

I wasn't thinking about bonus, but about AI : put the vulnerable units behind melee ones, close gaps, have the fast units engage the cavalry and the strong then come and destroy them.

That should be addressed by specific anti-cavalry formations (again, as it was historically).

Light melee cavalry needs to be faster than ranged cavalry. FTFY. Ranged cavalry, being light, should certainly be faster than heavy cavalry. If we make disengaging from the enemy quite costly (as it was historically) either in time or in blood (the choice between the two options being made by the player through specific formations), then we can have light cavalry engaging the ranged cavalry and the heavy cavalry coming behind them to finish the job. Is it difficult to implement Charges mechanism with cooldown timer after use ? That would allow even light infantry to somehow counter ranged cavalry, and more so for champion cavalry.

If they have a toggle for their behavior after being out of ammo "go fight in melee/go reload" then no it's not too micro-intensive. They could even have toggles about what to do after spending half their ammo : keep firing until no ammo/lower their rate of fire (with lower rate of fire should come better accuracy).

It's probably the best way to solve the problem, yes. But I wouldn't have it replace the different stances, rather parameter what each stance means (like in "passive" stance, do the unit flee at first attack or after having lost 10% hp ? does it go to a safe distance from enemy units and then stand idle, or go back to its task once it's out of range of the enemy ? In "aggressive" stance, how far do they go from their allied units ? Do they pursue someone who is faster than them or not ?). Also, we could use work formations for Citizen-Soldiers : go work as a group, and if one member of the formation is attacked, they all fight back (but if someone not of their work formation is attacked, they keep working).

I noticed that too, and I kinda like it. Way less micromanagy that way - you only need to keep your unit/building alive, not to care about how much it will cost you (beyond the repair time) to repair them.

Ranged units cannot die too fast to (mêlée) cavalry. Cavalry are supposed to bring havoc to ranged units if they get to them. If you don't want your ranged units to die to cavalry, don't expose them to cavalry ! What we need though are formations dedicated to interdict passage : where units would engage enemy units in a way that is maybe less destructive (reduce number of strikes by 2 or something) but prevent the enemy unit to pass through the formation. That would both make protecting ranged units more sensible, and remove the situations where your troops are between a building and the enemy coming to garrison in it, but they still are able to garrison...

Not sure whether that's still useful to answer it now, but yes they can. And it's very frustrating when on the same map (I believe that this happens in the skirmish islands map) some are reachable by horsemen and some others are one pixel too far in the water so aren't reachable but that fact can only be learned once you've sent the horseman there...

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.