Byzantine units?

[Cope]

I'm quite new to this mod, but it seems that the Byzantine military is somewhat weaker than most other factions.

It seems to be lacking in decent infantry (aside from the Varangian Guard) and its cavalry is only equal to the factions that surround it. Turkish cavalry archers can easily charge the Greek spearmen headon whilst even the Royal Kataphracts have trouble engaging any form of Turkish cavarly without taking losses.

The Roman missile units are simply awful. In an equal money battle, playing as the Eastern Romans seems really hard.

[Dago Red]

Their missile units are supposed to be pretty low quality. As for the rest are two problems as I see it:

-It's not that they don't have great units, but it takes you forever to get populations up high enough to even begin building the structures you need to produce them. You can't even really produce that many of the standard line infantry pikemen, it's impossible to produce a standard romanized army. These recruitment options need some adjustment. You can do some light cheating and increase the pop in a couple more cities to be able to build those structures.

-In the meantime most of the low quality troops you have need to be micromanaged as little more than fodder. The Skutatoi spearmen are very good but their swordsmen counterparts are nerfed along with all the other swordsmen due to a bug in the animation. You can use the RBBR submod among others to fix this before the next patch.

[Cope]

yeah I completely agree. The crusaders, for example, have a giant array of heavily clad knights (both mounted and on foot) complimented by decent regular infantry and crossbowmen. By comparison the Byzantines have very little, an issue which is compounded by the fact that their cataphract units do not sufficiently suplement the lack of an infantry core.

As you said, by the time the elite heavy cavalry of the Byzantines is available, most other factions are able to field something which can at least match, if not better them. It suprises me greatly that heavy cavalry can be successfully attacked by much lighter missile cavalry.