Cavalry are Pissing me off

[gradeAhaze]

ok, so I've noticed this throughout a few different campaigns with different kinds of cav. units.

The first campaign I noticed was my Kievan Duchy campaign. I had alot of PEcheneg horse archers in my armies. Alot of times theyre path finding seemed totally ed up. Now I don't know if this is Original metw2/kingdoms problem or if it became so with SS but I haven't played vanilla in so idk.

Well I send them to attack, and half run towards the guy, some run backwards in total opposite of unit I'm attacking and some go to either side. This becomes very frustrating when I am trying to whittle down the enemy army before they come to my main battle line because I am usually outnumbered with foot troops 3to1 but I like using mounted archers to do the most of the work.

In another battle with 4 pecheneg unitsI tried sending them out the front gate to whittle down the enemy force but they got stuck halfway in the gate. One unit was all the way out, but he would not go to the area I told him to. The units just walked around stupidly ignoring my orders. I then tried making them go back in the castle but they wouldnt do anything. Once the enemy force arrived it killed 3 out of 4 of the units and I was finally able to get the 1 back into my castle. I ended up winning the battle but still lost alot more units than I had wanted.


Another time I had alot of trouble was playing as Sicily. I had sent my king, one of the other family members and 3 knight/heavy cav units along with a decent sized army of foot soldiers to attack a Greek city on the Late SS campaign. I was outnumbered on the assault, so the defenders sallied out.

I grouped my cav together and had my main battle line hold for defense. I had one successful charge with my cav but my King and one unit of heavy cav seemed to get stuck for no reason. They were not surrounded and were only engaged with a light infantry unit. The other 2 heavy cav units and my general unit escaped. I then took control of the 2 units that were stuck engaging the stupid light infantry. I clicked a hundred times and they would not disengage, finall the heavy cav disengaged but they started walking the opposite way I told them to go straight into the enemys main battle line. By the time I got my kings unit out he only had about 15 men left.

I regrouped and sent my cav in for another charge into the side of the enemys forces. Again they seemed to get stuck. I tried making them disengage but they would not turn around. Same thing, 1 or 2 of the units were able to disengage but they started walking the opposite way of which I told them to go and they went right into the center of the enemies forces and were massacred.

So basically, what should have been a few simple charges with my cavalry, ended up being all 5 regiments destroyed. Shortly after the enemies main battle line engulfed mine and I was utterly destroyed.

I have easily won battles like this before but it seems my cavalry wouldnt do a thing I told them to and I paid the price dearly.

Anyone else have a stupid unresponsive cavalry before?

Another problem seems to be with sieges. One time I was assaulted by an enemy with a 3/4 stack. He had 1 catapult 1 ballista 1 ram 1 siege and 1 ladder.

I sped up to 6x and nothing happend. Finally the catapult starts attacking 1 wall, gets it to about 13% damage, then goes to another wall. All this time the rest of the army is standing still. He gets the second wall to about 90% damage, so I think here we go, finally the battle will begin. But the catapulkt switches to the gate and only does 1% damage to it. It then begins firing on the buildings inside of my town.

Wtf i think, this is retarted, so I send my cav out to destroy the cat. and his army just watches until i get close. I manage to destroy cat. and lose only a few men. I retreat back into castle. His siege tower, ladders and ram never approach my walls. So I send out cav again to slowly destroy his army. My cav becomes to weak so I just waited out the battle time and won that way.

Still a very annoying and not very enjoyable way to play. Why is this happening and has anyone else experienced this as well?

[hochmeister devin]

not sure about your cav issue, but the seige one in my exeriance the AI will bombard like 1-6 sections of wall almost destroying them before bombarding and destroying and another section of the wall. if they run out of ammo i find they then use thereseige towers ladders and rams, atleast on hard battle difficulty.

[young_dude]

I notice you say you grouped your cav before issuing combat orders. That is most likely the cause of the unresponsiveness.

Giving orders to grouped units is all well and good while positioning them prior to engagement, however when combat begins it is best to ungroup them. If you don't you will find the units will disregard orders, attack units other than the one you click on, and refuse to disengage. This is not limited to cav either, nor is it a SS thing. All unit types will do this in any mod or vanilla.

If you feel the need to keep your units grouped to keep tabs on them better, try issuing each units orders individually instead of multiple units from the same group. You may get better results.

Hope it helps.

[gradeAhaze]

I notice you say you grouped your cav before issuing combat orders. That is most likely the cause of the unresponsiveness.

Giving orders to grouped units is all well and good while positioning them prior to engagement, however when combat begins it is best to ungroup them. If you don't you will find the units will disregard orders, attack units other than the one you click on, and refuse to disengage. This is not limited to cav either, nor is it a SS thing. All unit types will do this in any mod or vanilla.

If you feel the need to keep your units grouped to keep tabs on them better, try issuing each units orders individually instead of multiple units from the same group. You may get better results.

Hope it helps.

I thought grouping might be at the root of my cav problem, but I hoped it not.

I never noticed with infantry because I move them in as a group but once they engage i usually let the front line play out. Then with heavy and light infantry i flank so i control individually, same with archers/xbow, I move them individually where needed on the battle line.

thanks for the responses

[Dark Lord's Heir]

I notice you say you grouped your cav before issuing combat orders. That is most likely the cause of the unresponsiveness.

Giving orders to grouped units is all well and good while positioning them prior to engagement, however when combat begins it is best to ungroup them. If you don't you will find the units will disregard orders, attack units other than the one you click on, and refuse to disengage. This is not limited to cav either, nor is it a SS thing. All unit types will do this in any mod or vanilla.

If you feel the need to keep your units grouped to keep tabs on them better, try issuing each units orders individually instead of multiple units from the same group. You may get better results.

Hope it helps.

Hmm this has never happened to me, grouped units never caused me any trouble

[delra]

All units are harder to handle when bundled together, so keep order in your ranks. Also, awful city and bridge pathfinding is the fault of CA and would need them to patch the exe to be improved (which they won't do at this point). Nothing modders can do about. Smaller unit sizes might help you a bit though - if you want to be the one person in the whole world who doesn't play SS on Huge. ;-)

[Jean=A=Luc]

Well I send them to attack, and half run towards the guy, some run backwards in total opposite of unit I'm attacking and some go to either side. This becomes very frustrating when I am trying to whittle down the enemy army before they come to my main battle line because I am usually outnumbered with foot troops 3to1 but I like using mounted archers to do the most of the work.

Turn off skirmish mode?

[delra]

They do try to maitnain their formation and it leads to some silly pathfinding.

[Ultra123]

i concour with above posts, its the grouping. i group my cavalry units and when im ready to send them into the charge, i quickly (in real time) click each portraid get them to 'walk' in to the charge on the units i want, once i have done this for all the charging units i then hit the group number ie '1' and then hit 'r' and they all run exactly to the target i want, at roughly the same time.

and yes this is a med2 issue not ss, and everyone know seige battle pathfinding is buggy as hell.

[Ichon]

Skirmish mode sounds like the issue here for sure.

Grouping has some issues but what you described with parts of the unit moving in different directions is almost surely due to skirmish. If find you must go back periodically to HA on skirmish and take them off- double clock some direction away from enemy and let them regroup, then turn skirmish back on and aim them at enemy. Otherwise they scatter everywhere as they don't always run the same direction away from enemy approach. I make several comments on such behavior in my Norwegian AAR where a few battles that cost some HA half their unit in casualties. Still its acceptable for how powerful HA are.

[Lazy]

Some time ago i have found a submod that fixes the "cavalry-problem"...
I cannot find it right now because I do not remember its name and I have never installed it... the desciption of what it does was : "removing some cavalry animations"
what would fix charging problems like some units start charging and some do not. The point of this submod was to make cavalry stick together...
Does someone know the name of it? I do not even remember if it was for SS or TATW...

[Navajo Joe]

I believe you are referring to SSTC, which was a sub mod for 6.1, sadly I don't recollect as to whether it was included in 6.3. I remember with BFTB for 6.1 a hotfix was required so that they would not spread out

[Liandro]

Grouping causes all kinds of problems for cavalry, some of your units will go attack whatever they feel like it others will start to walk, similar problem in SHogun 2 with grouping boats... they just sit there