Artillery crews still resisting Cavalary....

[MrMerisi]

Hey guys,

Just a quick note to ask if you are going to tweak (or have tweaked) the ability of artillery crews to resist cavalry.

Every time I charge an artillery unit, even from the rear, the 40 or so crewmen put up one heck of a fight. Have you guys looked at this and, if so, what are your thoughts?

Cheers!
MM

[Rammstein]

I attack a lot with knights so I saw them running very fast, but I can still lower their stats to make them weaker

[Cymera]

they probably should be better then peasants, but weaker then militia, since they are only used to crew artillery.

[Valor]

Looking at them, they are peasants with leather armors, trained to move, reload and fire with their arty pieces. So they should be more resistant than peasants but stronger ? Not sure ... don't they fight with a knife ?

[MrMerisi]

To me it looks like they're armed with a knife, which means they'd have to be amazingly agile and brave to plunge one of those into a charging horse. As it is, even when Mailed Knights charge perfectly into the back of them, I still lose 4-5 knights. Then once the melée starts, another few knights go down.

Granted they're better trained than peasants but peasants have pitch forks, which are nasty things that can at least fend off a horse and rider for a little while. These guys just have these silly knives.

I think they should get crushed under charge from heavy cav. Once melée starts I suppose their agility would help them duck and dodge and maybe get a stab or two in, but not be able to withstand an 80 knight assault for more than 20 seconds. Of course higher valour units will resist longer as it should be, but the player/AI should be punished for leaving artillery unprotected.

Lancers in Napoleonic times owned artillery. Leather armour should protect against poorly equipped melée troops, but not against knights with lanes and broadswords, IMO.

[Viper_tempest]

in my experiance this is a problem with the siege equipment screwing the charge ( can't charge through a catapult can ya ? ) and then going strait to melee fight with the crew.

I always move my horses behind the crew before charging into the rear of the unit, that will wipe the crew almost instant.

[Valor]

Whatever weak unit you'll charge, you'll nearly always lose some knights. Of course, during a charge, some horses can fall and their men being killed by flying over them and breaking their neck or something else ... but as you said, guys with knifes cannot simply kill some mailed or plated armoured soldiers so easily in melee. It's a vanilla issue : all units are easy to kill, the armour just provides temporary protection (when lucky). But if it was realistic, knights and nobles would crush anything non-noble in melee and battles between them would be very long... knife armed troops should have a malus against armours (like spearmen have a bonus) but is it possible ? And would the game be interesting if we could lose 1,000 militia or peasants troops against only 200 dismounted knights ?

[Mibo]

I Think the catapults itself are the problems. They block the knights. Most of them don't reach the crew because of the ***** AI.

[Rammstein]

but actually the catapult could block the charge of knights a little also in reality. I have lowered attack of all siege crew by 1 and lowered the moral so they are nearly the weakest units in 2.0 when talking about moral.
they should rout fast. tried with mounted sergents to kill them lost 6 men they lost 40, is it ok now?

by the way I have fixed the ballista Problem now they have less acuracy and more damage to balance it, they hit every 3-4 shots

@Valor
actually if they were low spear and peasant 1000 against 300 knight(dismounted english knight) would be possible to win in 2.0

[edit]
tried it out 360 knights against 1350 peasants and spaer militia. knights win by miles lost 31 killed 1016

[MrMerisi]

Every time I charge an artillery unit, even from the rear, the 40 or so crewmen put up one heck of a fight. Have you guys looked at this and, if so, what are your thoughts?

MM

It's not the siege weapons that are blocking my charge...as I posted originally, I'm charging them from the rear already.

I understand the point about horses falling etc, and I suppose I'm fine with that...but I'll be interested to see what happens in 2.0. Killing 40 and only losing 6 Mounted Sergeants is good I think, esp seeing as they are Lt. Cav.

It's a pity the game doesn't have dynamic morale (or does it)...i.e. a catapult crew's morale goes up if they're protected and blowing up tons of enemy infantry while staying out of danger...and it goes down when they're all of a sudden unprotected and they see horsemen starting to encircle their position, and/or they come under missile fire.

Perhaps the steady-shaken-wavering dynamic could be influenced by the proximity of enemy cav to artillery if there are no friendly infantry or cavalry units nearby? Or is this not in the files?

[Cymera]

ive seen in RTW (haven't played nearly as much Medieval) that units moral is affected by those things "concerned over exposed flanks" appears under moral during battles. Or "Dismayed at the loss of battle" "glad to have general in unit" "inspired by generals speech" "afraid at the number of enemies" stuff like that.

[MrMerisi]

I remember that too from RTW, coming to think of it. Would be sad if they've abandoned it for M2.

[Valor]

Actually that feature was already in the first MTW

[Rammstein]

this feature is definitly in M2TW, but how it done its really poor. so the moral not always react how it should to coverd flanks ect...

[MrMerisi]

this feature is definitly in M2TW, but how it done its really poor. so the moral not always react how it should to coverd flanks ect...

Makes you wonder why they wouldn't just transpose this type of stuff from one game to another. Did they use XML in MTW1?