Friendly Fire

[Bringer Of Storms]

I've been having a problem with Horse Archers recently. Playing as the Mongols, (SS 6.4) and when ever I'm sporting an army comprised of mainly horse archers, I get a lot of friendly fire on my own horse archers, not my other units. There are times where I send 10-15 units of only horse archers out to tackle two or three armies in a turn. Gotta make use of that Mongol skill. While I do win each and every battle, I come out with anywhere from 50-150 friendly fire casualties every time they fight a large scale battle. Not one death from the enemy army, they can't catch me.

So, to the point. Any horse archer savvy people out there who have some strategies on managing large horse archer armies? Not like I can substitute other troops in place of the HA's, playing the Mongols. While I generally play the Byzantines more than any other faction, I don't employ a large variety of HA's when I play them, so my experience managing large HA groups is lacking.

Thanks.

[Silverheart]

Are you using a shooting circle?
Because if several shooting circles are overlapping, they almost always bequeath friendly fire.
Try to keep the circles at a distance from each other, or not use them at all. I like setting up the horse archers in one long battle line and advance forward slowly (unless the enemy has archers or such, of course)

Also make sure to keep all your horse archers at a safety distance from the enemy.
If an enemy if close to one of your units, and several units are shooting at those enemies, there will be plenty of arrows flying awry all around the enemy - and if they are close to your own units, that means yours are at a risk of being hit too.

[Aeratus]

Are you using short range HA (i.e., skirmisher cavalry such), or long range HA (i.e., missile cavalry)? If you have long range HA, you can simply use them as normal archers, and thus avoid all the problems of friendly fire. But if you rely on close range tactics, you're going to have friendly fire. This has been a problem since vanilla.

[Bringer Of Storms]

Well I never use shooting circles. Tires out the cavalry too quickly.