Mercenary cavalry: The Macedonian case.

[alre]

1 hour ago, Freagarach said:

Because it is hard to be firing a bow at someone when they poke you with a sword?
And that means you don't have to give cavalry some pierce resistance just becasue they "need" to counter archers.

I named skirmishers. for the damage archers make, it wouldn't make much of a difference anyways.

[alre]

1 hour ago, Dakara said:

1) attack when moving for spear cav.  If you run through an army, the spear cav can attack  one or two attacks without having to stop. intéressant non?

2)To simulate the effect of a strong charge and stimulate the strategy of combat / withdrawal / combat / withdrawal / etc. Reduce the attack speed of cav spears and significantly increase their damage. This way when they arrive to land their first melee attack they hurt a lot. The sword cavalry will have a more constant dps while the spear cav will play with its mobility to use its attack when leaving and returning in combat.

I like the combination of these two ideas, sadly, they would need very big changes to the engine.

1 hour ago, Dakara said:

3)Modify the armor of all cav types to rebalance them in the metagame. Big balancing work.

not that big I think. tweaking the values for sword and spear cav is sufficient, easy peasy. Anyway, mercenary cost should be fixed. Unit overlapping also could be reduced.

[Freagarach]

2 hours ago, alre said:

I named skirmishers. for the damage archers make, it wouldn't make much of a difference anyways.

I guess skirmishers are a special case. ^^

1 hour ago, alre said:

I like the combination of these two ideas, sadly, they would need very big changes to the engine.

One could try to use a very low prepare time and a higher repeat time.

[LetswaveaBook]

10 hours ago, Freagarach said:

Ranged infantry:

• Low armour, vulnerable against any unit when in range.
• When the enemy is too close, they switch to their melee weapon, which is merely a dagger, so they'll be massacred by (almost) anything.

Melee infantry:

• Good armour, depending on the exact unit type, meaning they can hold their ground against cavalry.
  • Spearmen have their "range" advantage so multiple men can attack one target more easily.
• Their lack of speed make them sustain casualties against ranged infantry, but when up close they hack them away.

This is not close to how it currently is for ranged infantry. If a single skirmisher is attacking a spearman, which walks right at the skirmisher and attacks it, then the skirmisher can win. So it is not vulnerable. If there is a battle with 40 opposing skirmishers and you send 10 CS cavalry to attack the skirmishers from behind, then your cavalry will disappear fairly fast. Most often they do not take out many skirmishers in such situations.

I think it would be fairly easy for a good programmer to cause melee attacks to force the enemy to switch to a melee weapon. So when a ranged unit is hit by a melee unit, it is forced to use its melee weapon for say 2 seconds. Then with the next hit, the counter resets.

The range advantage of the spearmen is also something that does not show itself in the current game. 50 swordsmen can easily surround 50 spearmen once(I really mean once, not before) the battle has begun and the range of the spears currently means little. Also, most damage is done by ranged units, so the main job of the melee infantry is to absorb damage. Pikemen are the best damage absorbers.

Again, when a small number of melee infantry is close to the ranged units, they get defeated easily and cause little casualties. It might seem smart to send half of your melee infantry at the opposing skirmishers, but actually it is not always smart. When the melee infantry are close, then the ranged units are troubled less by their inaccuracy. In practice that means that the ranged units get some easy kills, while the smaller group of melee units hardly get any. That might be exactly contrary to what you would expect.

4 out of 4 of these issues are at least partially caused by the fact that ranged skirmishers(and slingers to some extent) do to much damage compared to melee IMHO.

 

8 hours ago, alre said:

why would a unit have its attack lowered when in a close fight? right now skirmishers deal a higher damage than spearmen.

It does not really make sense that spears were used in melee, yet  in melee they deal a lot less damage than a javelin.

NB: This is going off topic, the original intent of the post was to gather any experiences with Macedonian mercenary cavalry.