Charge bonus

[Quinn Inuit]

I've noticed that the charge bonuses in IBFD are much lower than the ones we went with in RTRE when we ported it over to the BI.exe, to the point where even a properly formed cavalry charge isn't all that much more effective than the cav themselves. Why did you go this route?

To balance this out, we cut the spear/lance cav attack bonus, since no one had stirrups yet.

[Shadow_Imperator]

Your forgetting the cavalry in this era is much heavier than their more classical counterparts...

[Quinn Inuit]

That's definitely true for the Romans, but are the Armenian cataphracts heavier than they were 600 years earlier, too? (I really don't know.)

In that case, why not increase their charge bonus? Charges don't have much of an effect at only 12, even when I do them the way the BI.exe wants you to.

[Ramon Gonzales y Garcia]

That's definitely true for the Romans, but are the Armenian cataphracts heavier than they were 600 years earlier, too? (I really don't know.)

In that case, why not increase their charge bonus? Charges don't have much of an effect at only 12, even when I do them the way the BI.exe wants you to.

I basically just went with near vanilla values, might be a good idea to increase them, thanks for the suggstion

[Shadow_Imperator]

That's definitely true for the Romans, but are the Armenian cataphracts heavier than they were 600 years earlier, too? (I really don't know.)

In that case, why not increase their charge bonus? Charges don't have much of an effect at only 12, even when I do them the way the BI.exe wants you to.

I'd say it would apply to Armenians, tho to a lesser extent. I realise the Romans used rather sub-quality cavalry and didn't utilise much in the way of barding untill this era of warfare. However, I'd say with much confidence that both Armenian, Roman and other cavalries would've become inherently heavier as a result of the changing nature of warfare.

[kambiz]

Good idea ,but Ramon ,you should be careful with such a changes.Changing charge value from 12 to [for instance] 30 means a revision and revaluation of all units which is ofcourse time consuming.

[Quinn Inuit]

I basically just went with near vanilla values, might be a good idea to increase them, thanks for the suggstion

Ah, I see.

Well, I talked to some people involved with RTRE a lot about this before making my MightyMiniMod for it, and here's the cavalry rebalancing system we came up with*:

(note: all cav is categorized by its melee weapon)
Light Cavalry:
Knife light cav. - attack ~2, charge bonus ~6 (weapon sucks, but there is a horse coming at you, after all)
Sword light cav. - attack ~6, charge bonus ~6
Spear light cav. - attack ~4, charge bonus ~20

Medium Cavalry:
Sword med. cav. - attack ~8, charge bonus ~10
Spear med. cav. - attack ~5, charge bonus ~20

Heavy Cav.:
Sword HCav - attack ~10, charge bonus ~14
Spear HCav - attack ~7, charge bonus ~23
Xyston/Sarissa HCav (guys with really freaking long lances) - attack ~3, charge bonus ~27

I know that last one must seem like a low attack value, but how do you use a 15-20 foot lance in melee?

*This wasn't used in RTRE because its goal was to be, as closely as possible, an identical port of RTR:G to RTR 1.5 and BI. Therefore, units were rebalanced only to reflect the fact that charging was actually functional in 1.5, as opposed to the ridiculous values required by 1.2 for a charge to have any sort of effect at all. (Heavy cav in RTR:G had a charge bonus of _63_, and it wasn't noticeably better than heavy cav in RTRE with charge bonuses in the 20s...in fact, it was worse, IIRC.)

I'd say it would apply to Armenians, tho to a lesser extent. I realise the Romans used rather sub-quality cavalry and didn't utilise much in the way of barding untill this era of warfare. However, I'd say with much confidence that both Armenian, Roman and other cavalries would've become inherently heavier as a result of the changing nature of warfare.

I see. That makes sense, then. I'm just used to that earlier era, when you really couldn't use cavalry in melee (except for cataphracts, but with the modifications above you can't really put them in melee, either).

Good idea ,but Ramon ,you should be careful with such a changes.Changing charge value from 12 to [for instance] 30 means a revision and revaluation of all units which is ofcourse time consuming.

That's true, but I'd be willing to do it if he wants (the editing, not the re-evaluation--I don't know this mod nearly well enough yet to make a comprehensive unit tweaking like I did for RTRE). I figure that I brought it up, so I should at least offer to do it. It wouldn't really be hard, just time-consuming. And I have Notepad++, so I could use macros for a lot of it.