Is Cavalry Overpowered?

[Bad Ax]

If you're concerned about the balancing act between riflemen and cavalry and decide on a tech-tree solution, might it not be best to just swap them out so that Riflemen become available with Military Tradition and Cavalry with Nationalism? This puts Cavalry after Riflemen, and still keeps MT as a relevant tech.

[Arrian]

I gotta agree with Nic. The problem with Cavalry is mostly the AI's inability to use it properly and deal with defending against it. While I don't generally take defending my frontier quite as seriously as Nic does (I build roads/RR everywhere just like the AI), I might if the AI rushed me more often.

I've only experienced one AI mobile unit rush attack, and it was initially successful. I lost two cities to Samurai. But then, you see, I counterattacked (admittedly, the initial counterattack, with knights, stopped them cold, but I soon got Cavalry, which took back my two cities and then proceeded to destroy Japan). The thing is, I had units fortified on hills near key cities... hills they had to attack across rivers. That HURT them and slowed them down, even if it didn't stop them. The AI doesn't do that in the reverse. Once the AI attacked me, I switched all but 1 or 2 cities to producing troops. I gathered my forces and attacked in numbers. I protected my units as well as I could. And I was winning, even before Cavalry. Cav just made it easier. And you know what? I researched the tech, I had the resources... I deserve an advantage for that.

I've been thinking more and more about this, and frankly I think most of the problem would be solved by moving Cav and Riflemen together. Cav vs. Musketmen is just too easy, I agree. But Riflemen do rather well. That, combined with convincing the AI to upgrade its units and react better to a rush attack, would do the trick.

-Arrian

[Gen.Dragolen]

Well you may all think the AI doesn't know how to manage a combined arms battle, but I think it does a respectible job after watching two AI civ's beat on another AI civ. And there are a couple of points to consider when looking at the AI's actions.

The Main Event: Egyptians, Aztecs and Americans vs Romans.

Initially I was sucked in by a MPP with the Aztecs, but made a seperate peace after taking 5 Roman cities. I had a large technological superiority over everyone and they started with cavalry and riflemen. I had Mech Infantry and Bombers.

Romans advanced into three Aztec cities at their south eastern border while I advanced on the Romans down the west side of their lands. The Romans used their cavalry to good effect in cutting apart the Aztec reinforcements before I put up a solid wall of infantry and armour across the entire frontier to keep the romans out of my lands. (No ZOC is hard to work without, but that's why you keep cavalry or tanks around - mobile ZOC's)

It took my pounding the Romans with bombers and fighters to stave off the defeat of the Aztecs. Finally the Americans and Aztecs got their forces in order and started making assaults into the Roman lands. Initally they would only land one unit at a time and that would get killed attacking the cities

The Romans would also counter-attack with cavalry non-stop. When the Aztecs finally managed to get more than a couple of units next to a city, they would attack with massed cavalry and later with massed tanks.

The Romans never did make tanks, but a pair of their cavalry would routinely kill the Aztec tanks - a 1 for 1 trade with the remaining unit retreating to the city. Cavalry is still a lot faster to produce. Don't foget Nathaniel Forest's strategy: Get there firstest with the mostest.

This went on for almost 20 turns before I got bored and took the Roman cities they were fighting for and that ended the war.

The strangest thing was to see the Romans land Cavalry next to an Aztec city that was across a small sea from the main battlefields. Nice diversion.

And I do like the idea that the strategic resources should be "consumed" as units are built: horses only breed so fast and oil deposits can run dry. More micro-management, but the game is still pretty simple.

The AI isn't a decent general yet, but it is still much better than the any other game I've played since SMAC came out.

[pcasey]

The AI is stupid.
The AI is exploitable.

This isn't news. All AI's are exploitable in one way or another.

The concern I have with Cavarly in specific, and the combat system in general, is that even a human cannot defend against certain tactics.

Cavalry rushes are just plain indefensible by anyone. Its not a case where the AI is dumb and so the strategy works, but a smart human would beat it.

There's no way to beat a cavalry rush.

Combined arms? Please. Give me 30 cavalry. We'll give you 20 cannons and 30 riflemen. Now go set up any defensive system you want for 5 border cities.

I guarantee I'll take any two of them in the first round of combat, and I'll likely take a third. And I'll do it all without losing more than a half dozen cavalry.

You'll *have* to split up your units to cover 5 possible targets.

I won't. I'll concentrate my attackers and beat your forces in detail. Then, I'll use my extra movement points to retreat my cavalry out of your lands and park them in a city with a barracks.

You'll never get a chance to counterattack.

Border defenses? Please, it just spreads your troops out even further. I'll just crack a whole in them and run my cavalry through, then run them back out after I'm done razing 3 of your cities.

Given anything like force parity, an all fast unit rush will knock the snot out of a combined arms force. Combined arms *sounds* nice, and it is something we all want to make work, but the fact is in this game its a pipe dream.

Defense doesn't work. It'll never work in a turn based game that lets the attacker move every single one of his units anywhere on the map on his turn (railroads). Nomatter what defensive system you set up, I can concentrate a superior force against a *subset* of it and break it with a cavalry rush.

[Arrian]

pcasey,

I totally understand what you are saying, and I agree that the Cavalry rush is powerful. But I disagree when you say it cannot be stopped. Your example gives me 20 cannon and 30 Riflemen. No, no, no. I would never build that type of army. I would have a large reserve of Cavalry myself. Sure, your initial rush might take a city or two. I understand that. But I can counterattack with my reserves of Cavalry. And yes, if we stalemate, with me getting my cities back, you still win b/c you've wrecked my border towns. But the player who takes the initiative should gain something. The best defense is a good offense, no? That being said, I do acknowledge that if you have enough Cav, I'm in serious, serious trouble. But why did I let you get that strong?

I have seen some pretty good suggestions for relatively minor changes that could solve this issue to our mutual satisfaction (I think). The two I like the best are:

disallowing retreat from walled towns and cities (7+ size), and
putting Cavalry and Riflemen together in the tech tree.

-Arrian

[MarshalN]

Pceasy, unforutnately, that's how the game of civilization is always going to work. The best defense is a mobile defense consisting of an army that can move and counterattack at any given moment. Static defense with static riflemen and cannons is never going to beat a concentrated cavalry attack, because as we all know if you concentrate your attack on a certain point, chances are you'll break it.

You don't need cavalry to do that -- you can do that with immortals or swordsmen or whatever. The difference is that cavalry is generally faster and you can retreat so you can lose less. But like Arrian said, if your opponent has an army of cavalry of his own and his road network is anything near good, then you won't be able to hold the city you captured -- and you might even risk getting counterattacked. The price? Your 20-30 cavalry for two towns that were sacked and re-sacked. Quite expensive if you ask me. You need at least 2 turns to get back out of the cities you captured (one to get in, the other to get out), so in the meantime, if there are railroads, then you might as well say bye to your cavalry army.

It's not invincible against humans, and if the enemy can do it to you -- then there's really no problems. The bigger problem is the AI doesn't know how to use the retreat function very well and build stupid attack units like longbowmen, and the AI doesn't know how to coordinate attack/defense very well. Humans are a lot smarter.

[pcasey]

You're absolutely right, a mobile defense that rushed its own mobile force to the threatened sector is the way to go. Unfortunately, I get to make all my attacks on my turn, so your mobile reserve has to sit there halfway across the map while I destroy your border cities, pillage your railroads, and retreat my strike force back into my territory, leaving you to survey a scorched wasteland of what used to be the breadbasket of your empire.

Sure, if I wasn't thourough enough in my railroad destruction campaign and left a link intact you can do the same thing to me, and that's the problem.

There's no defense at all.

We'll just take turns burning each other cities down until somebody runs out of cities. Its nuclear war with cavalry.

There's no balance in the combat model when defense is impossible.

Do I mean to say that blitzkreig assaults should be disallowed? Of course not, if you have a 4 to 1 numerical advantage with tanks and I'm still using riflemen, then I'd expect to get overwhelmed.

The problem is that if we both have 1000 shields worth of units, I'd resonably expect that I could set up a *defense* that would blunt your attacks. Historically, given force parity, defense is the strongest form of warfare.

In civ III, given force parity, defense doesn't stand a chance.

[Luigi]

After reading a lot of very clever posts I arrive at the conclusion that the best way to balance the power of human vrs AI combat and to make MP fun whenever it comes is to limit the number of units you can make of each type.

You can rush me with XX cavalries but after I hunt them what are you going to bring, you can't poprush more cavalries than "n" so you have to be very very careful about how to attack, when and using with.

I don't agree with the idea to limit the number of units upon resources, I wonder what do you all think about this constrain and if you like it how would you implement it?

[Arrian]

pcasey,

I see your point. And you are right, two smart human opponents, given roughly the same resources, would probably bog down into warfare over a large stretch of wasteland. Actually, no, one or both would probably try and end-around with ships, but you get the gist. It would turn into a slash 'n burn fest. However, there are a lot of other factors that might make things play out differently. That scenario happens when you have parity (in ability and resources).

So, what do you think about putting Cav with riflemen and/or making some changes to the retreat rules? Or do you think making mobile units more expensive is the way to go (what are Cav now, 80 shields?)? And how much, realistically, do you think can be done with the AI?

-Arrian

[pcasey]

I won't speculate on the AI because I've no idea how they programmed it. Writing game AI's is bloody hard though, civ III isn't chess, the search space of possible moves is impossibly large, so saying the AI should be as smart as a chess program is very unfair I think.

I like the idea of pairing cavalry with riflemen. I think you could just make military tradition an industrial age tech with a prereq of nationalism.

I'd put a derivative of the disallow retreats rule.

1) You can always retreat on the defensive.
2) If you attack a stack that contains a fast unit, that fast unit gets an opportunity attack on you if you retreat, even if you were not engaging that specific unit.
3) If you attack a city with a fast unit, no retreat is allowed. Call it street fighting, call it whatever you want, but its necessary for game balance I think.

I'd support making cavalry more expensive, but I don't think it'd fix the problem. If it costs me 4 population instead of 3 to rush one, its really not a big deal. I'll still be able to crank out *enough*.

I'd also support a blanket increase in the defense bonus of cities, and allow city walls to continue to function and stack with the defensive bonus of a city post size 7. Digging infantry out of a city should be hard. As it is, its easier to dig them out of a city than out of a mountain square.

I'd also propose one more completely arbitrary silly rule which I think nonetheless would be a big improvement on gameplay.

If you cross a border with a unit on a specific turn, you cannot attack a city *with that unit* on that same turn.

This would force your attack force to sit there and *take* a counterattack before it could hit a city and would allow a defender to bring up his mobile reserves.

Yes, its silly, yes its utterly arbitarary, but I think it would work.

[Bad Ax]

Originally posted by Luigi
You can rush me with XX cavalries but after I hunt them what are you going to bring, you can't poprush more cavalries than "n" so you have to be very very careful about how to attack, when and using with.

I don't agree with the idea to limit the number of units upon resources, I wonder what do you all think about this constrain and if you like it how would you implement it?

I think a hard cap of this type would be ridiculous and frustrating, because it has no logical basis in reality or in game mechanics. It's no better a fix for the unit imbalances than the unit imbalances were for the resource imbalances.

A better implementation, if you're dead set against resource production caps, which would be impossible to implement in civ3 without a major revision anyway, would be to have a soft cap of scaled unit costs. After all, it did cost significantly more to equip a cavalry unit than a rifleman unit. A price structure might look like this, where the number represents the gold cost for maintenance or the number of "free unit" slots that the unit takes up:

Musketmen -- 1
Riflemen -- 1
Knight -- 2
Cavalry -- 3
Tank -- 3

and so forth. This gives stronger attack unit higher costs (realistic), thus meaning that if you emphasize such units you have to take money away from either entertainment or tech (which is what gave you this advantage in the first place). Unfortunately, this would require a better AI to handle it.

But I don't think any kind of cap is needed. Pcasey is dead wrong about the effectiveness of the cavalry rush, which is not his fault. He hasn't played against any human opponents, so he's not had to deal with any reasonable fear that the tactic will be used against him. And since cavalry production predates industrialization and the ensuing espionage technology, he'll have no way to be sure in an MP game that his cavalry rush against another player won't leave him exposed to a cavalry rush counterattack on his own cities, which he seems convinced he can't defend against. The bottom line is that, as with any other unit, mutual deterrence will be the name of the game in MP. If your enemy builds cav, then you'll build it too, and then you'll be at an impasse again.

Unless of course, you don't have any horses. But then you're screwed anyway, aren't you?

[pcasey]

Ax,

I agree 100% with you. As soon as I rush you and raze 3 of your cities, you'll rush me and raze 3 of mine on my turn.

That's not defense, that's alternating offense.

As it stands, there's no force allocation you can put in place which will prevent me from razing a subset of your cities every turn.

Yes, you can do the same thing to me, I"m not disputing that.

My problem is that its impossible to *defend* against a pack of fast units.

You can have your own pack of fast units and do the same thing to me, but that's not defense. That's both of us destroying each other in a flurry of unstoppable assaults. Nuclear war with horsemen.

[David Weldon]

pcasey:

I disagree with your asessment of boarder lines. The whole point is to make them far enough from the cities that you _can't_ get to a city on the same turn you breach the line. This works exactly like amphibious landing works. The round you land/breach the boarder, you can't attack any cities. I can then react with my mobil defensive units and engage you or reinforce the city you approached before you can continue with the assault.

Vel's idea here will work. The only queation is whether it's cost effective, and that depends on the specifics of the border, of course.

Cavalry are powerful, maybe too powerful, but not unstoppable.

[Bad Ax]

Originally posted by pcasey
You can have your own pack of fast units and do the same thing to me, but that's not defense. That's both of us destroying each other in a flurry of unstoppable assaults. Nuclear war with horsemen.

Exactly. Deterrence. If you gain nothing from war, and stand to lose something from war, why go to war? This will be the name of the game in MP. Of course, if someone's incapable of strategic thought, deterrence won't do much for him. In that case, though, he's probably already way behind.

As for your border idea, allow me to paraphrase myself:

I think an involuntary stoppage of this type would be ridiculous and frustrating, because it has no logical basis in reality or in game mechanics. It's no better a fix for the unit imbalances than the unit imbalances were for the resource imbalances.

Boring, but I'm low on creativity.

[gnomos]

Originally posted by pcasey
The Franco/Prussian War, Prussian/Austrian war, American Civil War, and Crimean war were all dominated by massed infantry attacks. All these wars were fought between combatants with rifled muskets.

Cavalry was never a war winning battle arm after the late middle ages.

I think the reasons for this are cost and training. Horses cost money and resources to raise and train. Once missile weapons became more prevalent, people just killed the horses from a distance. Infantry on the other hand is comparatively cheap to create, and if you killed the soldier, well, you just gave his weapons to someone else.

[gnomos]

I seem to recall that civ2 units suffered a movement penalty when damaged. I think this should be restored to civ3. It would make it harder for those damaged cavalry to escape to a safe place to heal up.

Also, I'd like to see a change to railroad movement, I think it's too powerful. Why not just make it double or triple road movement? Then it at least costs something to get somewhere.

[Ralf]

I think the Cavalry is tweaked just about right.
If someone here dont like it, he can always change the cavalry-stats in that CivMod-editor.

[gnomos]

Originally posted by Thunderfire


Speed 3 is the problem of cavalry. Their defense raiting doesn't matter if
I am the one who is attacking. Speed 3 + railroads = overpowerfull first
strike. The AI will loose 2-3 cities when I attack him and I can fill these
instantly with my own rifleman. The AI has to deal with a dozends defenders
istead of the 2-5. The AI always counter attacks in my games with his own
units. Most of the AIs units will die against a well designed defense.

Why is the AI letting you run right up to the city walls with cavalry? Why isn't it building fortresses along the way and stocking them with good defensive units? Why isn't it UPGRADING existing defensive units to their best possible incarnation? Every time I see a spearman in a city of a civ that has infantry, I have to scratch my head at the programming. If the AI doesn't want to build barracks everywhere to heal defending units, then it should at least cycle defending units to a city with a barracks to get upgraded. After all, they spend endless moves PATROLLING, why not move for a real PURPOSE?

The AI should build cities on hills as a priority, it should run roads through forests, and stick fortesses on them, to provide better defensive bonuses to defending troops.

Also, walls need to be made more effective. I think they should always provide some defensive bonus, on top of the city size.

Also, the AI should stock cities with more than one artillery piece. I think artillery should require no upkeep costs, as they are basically items, not troops that you have to feed. This would let everyone build more of them, and use them more effectively. As it is right now you run a cheap horsie up to a town to take the first shot and flee, then get serious about what you are doing.

[gnomos]

Originally posted by Bad Ax
If you're concerned about the balancing act between riflemen and cavalry and decide on a tech-tree solution, might it not be best to just swap them out so that Riflemen become available with Military Tradition and Cavalry with Nationalism? This puts Cavalry after Riflemen, and still keeps MT as a relevant tech.

This makes a lot of sense to me. Also, I think the shield cost should be raised on cavalry, to prepresent the additional effort to raise and train the horses (cavalry mounts are not generally captured, despite the horses resource thing) they are bred for speed, strength, and stamina.

BTW, here's an exploit I haven't seen mentioned. You start a longbow, get 1 shield in a turn, then pop rush it (this gives you 40 shields). Then switch to cavalry/rifleman, wait 1 turn for another shield, and pop rush the remaining 39 shields. This is more efficient than pop rushing it all at once.

[roadcage]

David:

Close but it's even better than you think.
Remember, fast units will retreat only when ALL of the following are true
.) The the unit has some remaining movement after the initiation of battle.
.) The unit is not defending a city square.
.) The counter-party unit is not a fast unit.

So all that is necessary for massive cav deaths to ensue from the cav rush is a border far enough away that the cav is attacking on it's last movement point. Lets see know, temple + 5 (turns) leaves just the corners exposed. Temple + 10 (turns) + Library + 16 (turns) does the trick.

Remember, the hypothetical proposed was two large human civs with hostilities beginning somewhere between Nationalism and Replaceable Parts. (Not spelled out in the scenario but implied by the troop dispositions.) I suggest that by this time the border will be more or less +2 tiles for each side. There may be a few deviations due to actual city placement, but these exceptions will be clearly obvious allowing some concentration of force. The cities will probably be maxed out at 12 pop unless Sanitation is available.

Looking at the defender's position in this scenario, 30 riflemen to spread over 5 cities. One 3 rifleman army for each city with per city plus the others in 3 rifleman armies in the cities with the short borders.

To make things simple we will assume 100% vets for both sides.
And give the offense a break only 2 armies to defeat (no short borders).

Offensive bonus- none
Offensive value 6
=6
Defensive bonus
City 50%
Pop 12*4%
Buildings 2*4%
Terrain variant assume 0%
total 106%
Defensive value 6
=12.36

cav hitpoint success fraction 6 / 18.36 = 32.68%
cav hitpoint /rifleman hitpoint ratio 67.32%/32.68% = 2.06
rifleman hitpoints needed for success 6*4 = 24
cav hitpoints expected 24*2.06 = 49.44 say 49

With the cav attacking on last move, no retreats so:

Expected cav deaths 12 * 80 = 960 shields
Riflemen equivalent lost 6 * 80 = 480 shields

And this is just the initial attack. The counter-attack will be even more devestating.


Please promise to use this strategy against me in MP

To quote the great one (el Rushbo)
When in doubt, run the numbers!

roadcage

[gnomos]

Originally posted by pcasey
You're absolutely right, a mobile defense that rushed its own mobile force to the threatened sector is the way to go. Unfortunately, I get to make all my attacks on my turn, so your mobile reserve has to sit there halfway across the map while I destroy your border cities, pillage your railroads, and retreat my strike force back into my territory, leaving you to survey a scorched wasteland of what used to be the breadbasket of your empire.

Sure, if I wasn't thourough enough in my railroad destruction campaign and left a link intact you can do the same thing to me, and that's the problem.

There's no defense at all.

We'll just take turns burning each other cities down until somebody runs out of cities. Its nuclear war with cavalry.

There's no balance in the combat model when defense is impossible.

Do I mean to say that blitzkreig assaults should be disallowed? Of course not, if you have a 4 to 1 numerical advantage with tanks and I'm still using riflemen, then I'd expect to get overwhelmed.

The problem is that if we both have 1000 shields worth of units, I'd resonably expect that I could set up a *defense* that would blunt your attacks. Historically, given force parity, defense is the strongest form of warfare.

In civ III, given force parity, defense doesn't stand a chance.

Hmm, one problem here is the wounded cavalry always gets away. Even if it takes damage from cannon fire as it initially attacks, it's still usually going to survive the attack. How about if the defending unit got a counter attack as the wounded cavalry flees? This would be a "free shot", like an artillery barage, as the unit flees the field of combat, a chance to take off that last HP.

[Sevorak]

Originally posted by roadcage
Pop 12*4%
Buildings 2*4%

roadcage,

The "4" in the editor (actually an 8 with the newest patch) is not a percentage bonus to the defending unit. It is used only to determine the chance of a population point or building to be "hit" in bombardment. Read the Civ3Edit Help entry.

-Sev

[vmxa1]

What is the point of saying we can use the editor? Do you suspect we are not aware of that? This is about tweaks to the game, not the using the editor.
It may be of interest to talk about humans on humans, but so far as I know we do not have MP in Civ3 and no mention of it coming.

[Nic]

Originally posted by pcasey
Combined arms? Please. Give me 30 cavalry. We'll give you 20 cannons and 30 riflemen. Now go set up any defensive system you want for 5 border cities.

Lacking any rapid units that is not a combined arms defense, it is a dumb defence. Generally I would want mounted:foot:artillery in 2:2:1 proportions, less artillery if I'm not planning on conquest any time soon. So that would be 20:20:10 according to your proportions above, 10 per border town split between the fortress and the town itself. Generally I put mostly infantry in the fortress and mostly cavalry and artillery in the town.

Fortresses are very nearly free, trivial against the costs of units in the middle ages. Therefore building lots of fortresses is a low-cost way of ensuring that the initial rush captures targets of trivial strategic value and bogs down. Add in a forest (where nature did not provide) and you get both improved defense and you slow down the cavalry enough to stop them blitzing through to the town on the first turn.

If you have no infantry in the attack my mounted counter-attack should kill almost one unit for every mounted unit I possess within range. Assuming my two neighbouring towns are within 1 turn move on roads (they nearly always will be) you can expect a counter attack of artillery followed by 15 mounted troops plus possibly an infantry rush if I think I am going to recapture the fort. After the first counter-attack our forces fighting for the town should be about equal in numbers but many of yours will be exhausted and unable to heal, you would need a lot of luck to win from this position and would be wiser to retreat.

Cavalry can be a real bane but not when used in a frontal assault on my border towns, this is a good way to lose a lot of cavalry for little gain. Keep them for the purpose they were historically used for: exploiting weaknesses made by the foot-sloggers or pillaging and forcing me to come out of my fortresses to fight. Having broken through my front line by other means[1] your cavalry can indeed rush through my less well defended heartlands[2].

Once the defender has Construction the mongol horde rush begins to lose its impact, once they have Engineering it becomes an even blunter weapon. IMO Cavalry is just powerful enough to postpone the transition into defensive attrition warfare until infantry come along, at which point offensive warfare had better wait for the invention of the tank.

[1] Culture is my favourite, the loss of a border town by defection could break any defence especially as the border garrisons defect. Strangely this seems to force aggressive and militaristic civs to defend in greater depth than cultural builder civs.

[2] I'll only defend my heartlands in this strength if I'm being very paranoid indeed, the cost would be prohibitive.
--
Nic

[Nic]

Originally posted by Arrian
While I don't generally take defending my frontier quite as seriously as Nic does (I build roads/RR everywhere just like the AI), I might if the AI rushed me more often.

I will only defend this vigorously at the highest levels and even then only if I want to play a reasonably peaceful civ without too many annoying attacks causing war-weariness. In MP I suspect I would either attack aggressively or adopt a solid defence and counterattack, a strategy of underplaying the military aspects of the game would be suicidal in MP.

--
Nic

[pcasey]

Some Notes:

1) A well managed cavalry blitz won't leave cavalry exposed for a counterattack. I'll just move them all back into my territory after they've razed a couple of your cities. With a movement factor of 3, this is easy enough to do with railroads and possible but hard with roads. Yes, you'll do the exact same thing to me if you have cavalry. That's not combined arms though, that's us trading unstoppable city assaults until somebody runs out of cities.

2) The counterunit for cavalry is not riflement, its the musketman. You can get Cavalry with this set of Middle Ages Techs:

Feudalism --> Engineering --> Invention --> Gunpowder --> Chemistry --> Metallurgy --> Military tradition.

Riflemen require all of those except military tradition, and also:

Monotheism, Theology, Education, Astronomy, Physics, Theory of Gravity, Mangnatism, Banking, and Nationalism.

You can get cavalry less than half way through the middle ages if you beeline.

[Nic]

Originally posted by pcasey
Some Notes:

1) A well managed cavalry blitz won't leave cavalry exposed for a counterattack. I'll just move them all back into my territory after they've razed a couple of your cities. With a movement factor of 3, this is easy enough to do with railroads and possible but hard with roads.

2) The counterunit for cavalry is not riflement, its the musketman. You can get Cavalry with this set of Middle Ages Techs:

1. Unless you have some way of making your cavalry move rapidly through forest you have no choice but to sit and take the counterattack on the chin, this is why I believe that Engineering seriously blunts mongol-horde type attacks. No sane defender is gong to give you 2 turns to plough through to their border city and then another turn to retreat before launching their counter-attack. I don't care how well you manage your attack, you cannot avoid going through the intervening terrain and I'm not going to be dumb enough to place border cities within move-3 of the border if I can possibly help it. If by misfortune and extreme proximity I cannot achieve enough distance to the border my city will either be a write-off or will be fortified and garrisonned to make any attack a pyrrhic victory.

2. Cavalry is counter-unit for both musket and rifle (and to some extend infantry). In the earlier part of its lifespan it can be an effective assault unit but should not be overwhelmingly so, in the latter part of its period it is primarily useful for counterattack and exploitation as it loses the ability to achieve a breakthrough on its own.

3. We are only going to know how this balances out when we have MP because we all know the AI is not at good at these sorts of tactics as a human opponent. I believe cavalry pose a real threat but not a game breaking one (pop-rushing is another matter however). You believe otherwise, I think we will just have to agree to differ.

--
Nic

[Grim Legacy]

ROFL. I just made some very succesful raids against small enemy cities.

The last town was defended by a regular rifleman (f), a regular spearman (f) and a longbowman. 8 regular horsies did the trick, taking only 1 loss.

Yes regular horsies.

HORSEMEN!

[Whoha]

Cavalry have 3 movement points, but they can not gain a bonus from roads. Even if the boarder is only 2 squares from a city such a set up would prevent any attack since your own mobile force could then engage and kill all the cavalry. Though since the ai does not use cavalry effectively, and since multiplayer is not out yet, this is all theory craft.

[jan3]

well in my opinion cavalry is suposed to be at least 3 times faster then units at feet its only logic
and cavalry was used as elite troops a very long time as army routers
in fact the mongols used them the first to blitz
when the mongols invaded western country's the western town and country's tought there wher 5 or 6 mongol army's sacking their towns
in fact there was only one or 2 but the mongol little horses could keep up draft(quick pace) a very long time so that one mongol army could move very fast and so make the western towns believe their where more army's :-)
conclusion not the germans invented the blitzkrieg but the mongols

Originally posted by Velociryx
cavalry is supposed to be paired up with riflemen, IMO (6/3/3 cav and 3/6/1 Riflemen). Still, I'm of the opinion that ALL mounted units in the game are overpowered, and should be more expensive to reflect the power they give you to control the tempo, place, and time of any given battle.

For me, the reason that they're overpowered lies not so much with the move of three, but the fact that unless they're facing another fast unit (and let's face it, when you're assaulting cities, you rarely see a fast unit defending the town), the battle is not "resolved" even if the cav is chased off by the defender, meaning the defender gets no chance for a morale upgrade....meaning further that a massed cav strike WILL wear down a city and that the attacker will take zero losses (or sometimes one loss...if the cav "hangs in" the battle trying to nab the last hp from a defender). This gives cav users a higher percentage of elite troops, gives a correspondingly higher percent chance for great leaders (more elites fighting, more chances in general), and, adding the 3 moves and ZOC on top of all that makes them too powerful for their cost, IMO.

-=Vel=-