Pikemen

[Ano2]

Are they ever gunna be fixed so that they don't switch to swords when advancinginto combat? They have been broken for over a year now. Also maybe CA will wanna always have guard mode enabled for the A.I. for pikemen, as without it they are terrible.

[Hellbent]

Get real combat (only for Teutonic and Brittania campaign atm) or take out their secondary weapons in the files and it should be fixed.

[Spong]

Taking away the sword makes the pikemen extremely overpowered without extensive rebalancing (as has been done in Medieval Classic). Furthermore, even if you do this I find it infuriating that the pikemen do not lower their pikes unless being charged, if you order them to charge they run in with their pikes shouldered then lower them once they are embedded in the enemy front line. Pikemen in general need a complete rebuild - they should use the pike 90% of the time, they should lower the pike when approached by enemies, they should lower the pike when charging enemies, they should be able to form an effective schiltron (I have tried adding the schiltron to them but they simply stand in a big circle, pikes permanantly raised even when approached, and due to my reluctance to remove the swords they fight with them almost exclusively). Someone did find a method of fixing the pikes (http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...+pikemen+stats) which supposedly is better, where they use the swords less, I've tried it myself and found that when attacked they do use the pike much more of the time, but if you order a charge they still switch to swords - which sucks.

[Panzerbear]

1) use in Defense mode
2) eleminate the secondary weapon in the files.

3) CA FIX THE DAMN PIKES, WILL YOU?!!!

[PooFoo]

Agreed. They do work a bit better in kingdoms though.

[Spong]

I've been tweaking the pike militias EDU all day and testing it in game to try and get something out of it, I think disabling the secondary weapon is certainly the way forward, I looked into making the unit take out the sword less but it simply isn't feasible. From my observations I would say that to eliminate the overpowered-ness of disabling swords there are two factors which need attention. First of all the spacing of the pikemen; half the problem is that the charging enemy hits the pikes like a wall and so cannot do much damage to the pikemen themselves, there needs to be space between the pikes for a few men to get through so that, if the unit is powerful enough, they can potentially cause alot of damage - setting the 'side-to-side' spacing to 1.5 instead of 1.2 seems to create an adequate gap. The second problem is the pikemens attack speed, this may well be down to the animation side of things but they poke too quickly in succession, I have tried increasing the 'Min delay between attacks (in 1/10th of a second)' statistic to make them poke slower but it did not seem to work, they poke so frequently that even when you reduce their health, armour and attack damage it still makes no difference because they can continually prod doing as much or as little damage as has been set and keep the enemies at bay, gradually wearing them down, you can see the enemy trying to swing with their weapon but being inturrupted mid swing and just being buffeted by repeated pike prods.

I've currently got mine set to:

formation        1.5, 1.0, 2.4, 2.4, 8, phalanx, square
stat_health      1, 0
stat_pri         5, 3, no, 0, 0, melee, melee_blade, piercing, spear, 200, 1
;stat_pri_ex      0, 0, 0
stat_pri_attr    spear, long_pike, spear_bonus_8
stat_sec         0, 0, no, 0, 0, melee, melee_blade, piercing, none, 0, 0.15
;stat_sec_ex      0, 0, 0
stat_sec_attr    no

Does anyone know how to reduce attack speed for a unit through either the EDU or the animations?