Hello!
Before I begin, let me first say that I am a tremendous, tremendous fan of this mod. Even at beta, it is absolutely superb, one of the finest I've ever seen for any game. I applaud the modmakers for their obvious hard work and dedication--you are creating something very special here.
With that in mind, I must make a criticism, and that is the behavior of cavalry in this mod. Familiar with how RTW and M2TW have treated cavalry, to be honest I expected little difference in PI--and was vindicated as I played through a Roman Republic campaign, which I have just finished. This is not meant as a critique of the mod team--you are only following precedent.
Unfortunately, that precedent--brought home most spectacularly in the Ride of the Rohirrim in The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King--is absolutely, completely, utterly wrong.
This is because
CAVALRY DO NOT CHARGE!
At least, they do not "charge" in the way that you think they do. Let me explain:
The horse evolved to run away from things--that is how they survived, as they for the most part lack any other defensive mechanism. This is ingrained into the horse so deeply that it simply cannot be overcome. No horse--not even an enraged, trained charger--can be made to run into a solid object. It will veer off, or buck, or most likely simply stop.
Period.
If you have ever seen a steeplechase, then you are seeing this behavior in action. It takes an extremely skilled rider to coach and coax a horse to run towards a fence or other obstacle and leap over it--and even at the highest levels, such as the Olympic Games, this does not always happen.
This becomes even more egregious when you consider that in a battle setting, the solid object the horse is moving towards is almost certainly carrying a sword or, worse, a spear or a pike--i.e., something long and pointy. A horse is not stupid--"pointy"="bad", and no horse can be made to blithely run into an object so obviously dangerous.
This is a lesson well learned by Napoleon. Time and again his cavalry attempted to charge the British infantry squares--and time and again the horses veered off at the last moment, only to be blasted to smithereens by the infantry. To paraphrase the eminent military historian John Keegan in his The Face of Battle (in which he discusses, among much else, everything I've mentioned here, and is a superb read), we often sympathize with the poor British soldiers, but really we should be pitying the French cavalry.
On a similar note, people do not bounce off horses, and horses do not bowl over people. Horses have no instinct to ram--they will kick and even bite, but they're not bulls (or, for that matter, an elephant, which will indeed happily charge into things). Horses--especially domesticated ones, as they are bred for sheer speed--are terribly fragile animals. Even if you managed to get your horse to charge into a person, the impact--particularly if the foe is shielded or armoured--would almost certainly cripple the horse--and kill it, since, as those of you who follow horse racing or raise horses will be all too well aware, a horse with a broken leg is a goner.
This makes more sense if you just visualize it: two groups of horses charging into each other at full speed, or one group charging into steadfast infantry, must undoubtedly utterly devastate everyone involved--and horses, of course, are a valuable, expensive commodity which cannot be wasted so blithely.
To get even more graphic, this explains why English archers historically were able to wipe out French cavalry in droves. Imagine a group of large, powerful horses, with heavily-armoured men wielding shields and swords and lances, charging towards the archers. The archers loose, and their arrows strike some horses, or riders, or both. The stricken and all their paraphrenalia will of course immediately fall to the ground--and then the horse behind it, at top speed, will suddenly crash into the debris--a horse's body, an armoured knight, a lance stuck into the ground--and they in turn will undoubtedly collapse... like a massive highway pileup, except that everything involved is living.
This doesn't happen in RTW or M2TW only because dead bodies have no collision detection--hence, your Feudal Knights are able to happily continue on their way without pause, and cause much choppy death to your Peasant Archers.
Gothmog was exactly right at the Pellenor--pikes in front, archers behind. With the numbers coming towards them (and in way-too-close order, for that matter), it should have been a slaughter.
Want me to ruin the Lord of the Rings movies --and for the record, I love them--further? Watch the Battle of Helm's Deep very closely, as they gallop out of the fortress--you can clearly see the horse's legs go right through the dead bodies as if they weren't even there (which, of course, they weren't).
So, what is cavalry? How is it really deployed? What did a cavalry charge actually look like?
Cavalry are fast, and cavalry are scary.
A horse, even a fully armoured cataphract (which is armoured, incidentally, not to give weight to impact but to survive arrow fire--hence why cataphracts are an Eastern invention), is faster than a person--usually much faster. This gave cavalry far greated tactical flexibility than the infantry. As we know, this makes them superb for flanking manuevers, and as any battle is all about timing, cavalry can go from Point A to Point B faster than anything else on the battlefield--except other cavalry, of course, which is why an examination of historic battles shows that the most common thing cavalry did in battles was... fight other cavalry.
OK, so my cavalry has outflanked the enemy formation--now what? Charge, right? Well, yes--sorta. The point of a cavalry charge is not to actually get the horses to slam headlong into something--as we've established, that just won't happen. The point of a cavalry charge is to scare the living **** out of the infantry.
As we all know, cavalry have always been an elite. Throughout any ancient or medieval society, only a few could afford any kind of horse at all, and even fewer could afford to have a warhorse. Having a warhorse meant having money, and having money meant having power. This naturally caused all infantry to look upon cavalry with a sense of awe--in fact, it still persists to this day.
So, here you are, Mr. Infantryman. You are most likely poor and probably malnourished and exhausted. You probably carry a spear, or if you're lucky a lousy sword, and your shield is either light and small or big and heavy, and you have, oh, maybe a helmet and what is basically a padded sweater.
All of a sudden, you hear the unmistakable, ominous rumble. You look and see a group of huge horses heading towards you at speed. You can see the sunlight reflecting off the riders' fine armour, great swords, massive spears as they continue heading towards you. Your knees quake, your bowels clench--every fiber of your being is telling you to RUN. The veterans are shouting to just "HOLD!", but that's clearly insane because the cavalry is heading towards you and they'll be on you any second now and you know you can't run faster than a horse but maybe they'll get the guy next to you instead and WAIT IS HE RUNNING TOO SO IS EVERYONE ELSE RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN!!!
Cavalry charges do not break infantry by physical impact, but by psychological impact. No horse can stand to run into something, but it is almost as hard to get a man to stand instead of run. And, of course, as soon as the formation breaks apart and is moving away, the horses will cheerfully give chase, since horses are social animals and are ingrained to run in herds. The warrior atop the horse is then free to thrust his long lance or swing his mace into the panicked men vainly fleeing before him.
And let's not even go into the devastation mounted archers (arguably the single best use of cavalry) can cause....
If by "charge" we mean "hit the enemy at speed for physical impact", then elephants charge, and infantry charge, but cavalry do not.
Cavalry manuever around infantry, cavalry scout infantry, cavalry frighten infantry, and--to use an expression familiar to anyone who has played an MMO--cavalry "kite" infantry (either by peppering them with missiles or just by causing the infantry to vainly chase them). But cavalry do not charge into infantry.
Forget everything you've seen in Hollywood and everything you've seen in games. This is really not up for debate.
Therefore, to the PI mod team, if you truly want your otherwise-spectacular mod to be accurate, and if you intend PI to be a realistic depiction of warfare during the rise of the Rome, then I suggest the following changes:
My credentials, in cause you care: I studied Classics at university, I am a huge reader of military history from John Keegan to Robert Massie, and I am a historical reenactor--my primary impression being Roman.
- All cavalry--or, at the very least, heavy cavalry--should "Frighten nearby enemy"
- To give more impact to this, this might require infantry morale levels to be tweaked.
- All cavalry should have their charge values drastically reduced--like, almost nonexistent. Charge values belong to infantry, and the heaviest charge values should belong to hoplites (or elephants, if you choose to introduce them).
- Light and medium cavalry should have "Good" morale, and heavy cavalry should have "Excellent" morale. If you're a cavalryman, you're a very lucky person--and your ego is enormous.
- All cavalry should be more vulnerable to missiles--a horse is a big target. Heavy cavalry will probably have better armor than infantry, but their defence skills should probably be lower (to represent the horse, which other than bucking--not in the game--is defenseless). Heavy cavalry beats light infantry in melee, but heavy infantry beats heavy cavalry.
- To better display their mobility advantages, consider more liberal application of "Fast Moving"--which seemed to me, incidentally, a rare trait for anything as I went through my campaign--and "Good Stamina" and "Very Good Stamina", especially for lighter cavalry.
I hope, then, that you consider what I have said here today--brought, again, not out of malice, but out of a wish to assist--and will introduce changes to cavalry in PI. I recognize that you are all very busy (I've modded RTW myself)), and this will require much balance testing, but your mod will undoubtedly be the better for it.
Thank you for your time.