Pike units - putting secondary back in

[PrestigeX]

Just hoping anyone can give me some tips here, or maybe point me in the right direction (ie. older posts i cannot seem to find lol).

Okay so, I've been playing some mods where the pikemen have had their secondaries removed. At first, I had to conclude they were overpowered and I reduced all their attack values to 1 or 3 for the more elite pikes, and I also reduced their defence stats. And altho it was better, the pike units are still way too powerful - they just poke in every direction and cannot be overrun, even when flanked or anything it just becomes as good as cheating.

So, I decided to add their secondaries back in -- after testing it around and such, I had to decide that they all needed their primary attacks to be a lot higher, that their defenses should be higher , and their secondary should be slighty better.

It seems to make them decent, but there are still some problems. When I adjust them, over and over, it seems that they can take down cavalry most of the time - but they generally tend to take very heavy casualties to do so - and a single unit of pikemen has no chance to win, it has to be 2 to 1 at least to win vs. cavalry.
As an example, the Default, french 'pikemen' unit has a 9 primary attack (spear bonus 8) , a 7 or 8 for secondary, and defence skill of 2.
I changed it to be a 13 primary attack (spear bonus 12), a 10 secondary, and 4 armor plus 9 defense skill -- it seems to be fair enough, but I'm still trying to play around with it a bit and attempting to get the right formula...

So if anyone has some advice about this, maybe from their own customizations or knows of a detailed thread or guide about this I'd be very grateful. I want them to be able to kill enemy cav well, and maybe hold off the enemy a bit longer but be vulnerable to enemy infantry in prolonged melee.

IS the solution to lower their defence skill, but make their default 'armor' defence higher, and then reduce their primary / secondary a little so they aren't very good against infantry?

[Taiji]

If you want to use pike only then adjust their attack delay upwards, space them out a bit and decrease their defense.

Pikemen with a secondary will all change to the secondary when it's in range. It seems unavoidable. So if you want them to be able to fight cav, you'll have to make their secondary anticav capable. Pretty sure 'mount_effect' affects the secondary too, so you can use that instead of 'spear_bonus_X' on your pikes.

[PrestigeX]

Thanks for that, I totally forgot about the mount_effects because it wasn't listed on the EDU for the pike or spear units (only some of the 2-handers)...

I'm still using the spear_bonus_12 , plus a mount effect of +8 for camels and horses... IT's giving the desired effect against cavalry for sure.

But I also lowered the attack and defenses a little more than what I had before, and that causes them to be still capable vs infantry but not especially good without support.