First of all, I apologise if my tone was received as snarky or whatnot: I do not mean to insult anyone here, so if you felt attacked I'm sorry about that.
Now, let's go into the details.
First of all, all your clips in the video are sourced from multiplayer, which is hard-coded to be played on Medium battle difficulty (i.e. neither yourself nor your opponent receive any bonuses or buffs to your stats). Multiplayer is completely unrelated to the topic here, which is campaign, single-player, against the AI. I personally never play on Medium difficulty because I think the mod is ridiculously easy on Medium. Hard battle difficulty balances it out nicely, and gives the AI a fighting chance.
Well, your claim was that
So MP is related to the topic, as you claim that cavalry is nerfed in the game. Also, you don't consider that Medium difficulty against the AI cannot be compared to Medium against a human opponent. Actually, not even Very Hard is comparable to a human opponent. If the enemy army has actually a brain to back it up, things are much much different: you are perfectly aware of this, since you say that Hard nicely balances things up and gives the AI a fighting chance. Why? Because you have a brain.
Claims that MP are inadequate for talking about unit effectiveness are thus not solidly supported.
based on your later comments to me accusing me of abusing and exploiting the AI
I want to make this very clear, I didn't blame you for the exploits I mentioned; I was referring to LoTW playthrough. Regarding the horse archers, we'll get on that later.
I concede that I may have misidentified the final unit used, but it's hardly my fault given the video is in potato quality. Max resolution of 480p? It's 2019 not 2006.
You did, those are Roxolani Noble Cavalry. Unfortunately I have a limit on the number of GB I can use every month, so I usually can't upload high quality videos. I am very aware of the lack of quality of that video, thank you very much.
The first thing that strikes me about those is, look at the ratio of kill to death, it is horrendous. You've thrown away entire units, very expensive to recruit at that, for some 100 or 200 kills. Not even managing to wipe out a full enemy unit on huge unit scale, in exchange for throwing away some of the best and most expensive units in the game. On medium difficulty at that. It has all the hallmarks of a wholly incompetent performance, certainly not something worth shouting about as though it debunks the claim that cavalry is nerfed on this mod.
And that's because you don't play MP. That's a really good performance for those units, provided they charged twice or thrice in the whole battle. We can rewrite your statement in a more correct way, such as "if your opponent doesn't have a brain, it's easy to brag about one's performance". You cant' call someone who plays against a human "incompetent" if he gets a worse k/d ratio than in SP, it's just bollocks. As I already said, difficulty means nothing against the AI, you win anyway.
You cannot do that on a campaign. […] It's not like multiplayer where you fight one battle, shake hands and go home afterwards.
That's not entirely true. You know, one battle is still quite a commitment. You can't just throw away units (especially cavalry) like you seem to imply: that's one sure way to lose that battle. As a matter of fact, it has been said multiple times that the most important thing in MP is to conserve your resources.
Now, secondly, I already conceded that certain elite cavalry units are exceptions to the rule that cavalry is nerfed on EB. I even called them out by name. And you made use of several of them in your video. Sarmatian General's Bodyguard, Armenian General's Bodyguard (late)... these are the strongest units in the whole game, they can even take down Armoured Indian Elephants when massed. Your video simply vindicates my point. Why aren't you using ordinary medium or light cavalry? Why are you using the heaviest, the best, and the most expensive cavalry?
Because cavalry is nerfed on EB.
I made use of one unit that you mention, the Armenian General's Bodyguard. Also, the other units are hardly the best of the best. Roxolani Nobles? They have the lightest armour among the high-end Eastern cavalry and get stomped by decent medium cavalry in hand to hand. Armenian Armoured Horse Archers? They rout as easily as the Hellenikoi Cataphraktoi, which is saying something as the HellKats have crappy staying power in melee, plus they don't even have a good hand to hand weapon. Ambakaro Epones? They last less than my grandmother against an arrow barrage. Numidian Nobles and Ptolemaic Heavy Cavalry are not even at the top of the food chain in their factional armies.
Actually that's kinda your fault that light to medium cavalry are ineffective in your games. By that I don't mean that you lack knowledge or skills: maybe you do, maybe you don't, but I don't know that so I won't imply anything (like you, on the other hand, did on me). The reason for this lies in one of your previous statements:
By playing in Huge scale you are artificially bumping the usefulness of elite units, or conversely decreasing the effectiveness of light and medium units. You probably do that because it feels more epic and more entertaining, but Large unit scale is the most balanced for battles. Therefore, some of your later statements such as
You must bring elite cavalry to the fight, and you must use tactics; you must use an infantry unit as a fixing force and charge the enemy from the rear or flank with your elite cavalry.
lose validity, because you're playing with a unit scale that by definition favours elite spam. Also, something like
They do not have staying power in combat; they cannot overpower a decent infantry unit one-on-one, head on.
is pointless anyway, because that's not what you take cavalry for. If you find in history one case of cavalry unit overpowering a decent infantry unit one-on-one before the Medieval Age, please let me know. Cavalry is used for charging, harassing, provoking, force mistakes or bad plays; not fighting hand to hand. If you ask that to a cavalry unit, you're simply asking too much.
That's the case with RTW. The examples that you mentioned are misleading because they rely on the charge, not on the following hand to hand fight. Those units would be torn to shreds in a hand to hand, while with the pressure of the charge you can break pretty much everything. Also, should we mention the horrendous casualties that a cavalry unit in RTW would suffer while charging straight at an infantry unit? So your reasoning that you must conserve your forces holds in EB but not in RTW?
If you want to argue that something is nerfed in EB with respect to RTW, that would be archers and chariots which were OP. Cavalry is still strong, and the way it should be played stays the same. In vanilla cavalry is faster, but that's it really.
Using a fixing force is totally unnecessary on vanilla Rome Total War.
Again, that's against the AI: a competent human opponent who sees a full cavalry army would just laugh, taunt you in the chat and then rape you inside and out. If you take a look at high level RTW gameplay, you don't see full cavalry, EVER, because that's just not cost-effective. In tournaments, some factions that rely on cavalry even get a money bonus on top of their budget, because otherwise some battles would be horribly onesided. But you may complain that we're talking about the campaign and the AI, right? But again, "Using a fixing force is totally unnecessary" is true for EB too. I suppose you didn't ever see some of the old threads at the Org, where people were wiping out AI infantry fullstacks using only two or three bodyguards.
These costs are astronomical. No faction in the game has the economy to sustain armies featuring units of such expense until late in the game. For instance, in my current campaign as Armenia (Very Hard campaign difficulty, Hard battle difficulty), I am currently in the year 202 BCE. I have conquered 181 settlements, only 17 remain in the game. I estimate I will have 100% completion of the game by 197 BCE at latest. So I am not just in late game, I'm actually in end-game right now. I have not recruited a single unit of Armenian Noble Cataphracts or Armenian Armoured Horse Archers.
Man, now you're just trolling me. Are you really saying that you can't afford 1k upkeep units with 181 settlements? When I used to play campaign, I could afford those with 15-20 settlements. Also, how is that relevant for a standard campaign game? The OP mentioned that Epirus is one of his enemies - you don't run into trouble with supply lines until late in the game, so most of the time you're just fine with some of your elite factional units.
Infantry is much much cheaper, and therefore more cost-effective.
Infantry is much cheaper, cavalry is much more decisive. That's why cavalry wins games 95% of the time (in EB, that is). And that's why cavalry is cost-effective as well.
Multiplayer is simply EB on easy mode.
Try fighting battles against someone with a brain without pausing. Decision making is the hardest part in this type of game. You have as much time as you want in a turn-based campaign, while on the battlefield you don't.
By the way, something that got to my mind just now: cavalry is actually stronger in SP (AP lances, horse archers overpowered). Also, in the campaign you get experience: your men get more and more experienced, and thus stronger, for every battle you play. Also, you get armoury upgrades. This is not the case in MP: armoury ups are forbidden, and you can't upgrade the experience of your men beyond one single chevron. This might tell you something about how imbalancing those parameters are, so I actually think a SP player is at an advantage with respect to a MP player when using cavalry. Still, cavalry is what decides most of the MP battles, so...
The stronger and more specialized a unit, the less useful it is on the campaign
Hmmmm, not true as a general statement. Would you argue that pikemen are not useful because they're too specialised? Also, most of the cavalry units you mentioned are very specialised:
Armenian Medium Cavalry - cataphract killers
Scythian Horse Archers - general purpose unit, fair enough
Arabian Light Cavalry - harasser
Eastern Light Cavalry - harasser and cavalry enveloper
Numidian Cavalry - cavalry killer
My treasury is worth half a million and it is growing with each turn. I make 143,000 per turn in profits. That's a GDP growth rate of 116% per annum. At this point I could easily sustain half a dozen armies entirely made up of elite heavy cavalry units. But what's the point of recruiting them? I can only get them from Armenia, and my wars now are in France and Britain. […] It was impossible to recruit the expensive elite cavalry units.
Ah, maybe I see your point. Your financial situation allowed you to recruit a lot of elite cavalry, but you chose not to. Why? Because they're horrible and underpowered? No, because the supply lines are too stretched out. Maybe you are maintaining that cavalry is nerfed because you can't provide elite cavalry support to your armies. I'm sorry, but that's not a good reason to extend the statement to every aspect of cavalry usage: the same is true also for your core infantry, supply lines are even more stretched out because infantry moves slower on the campaign map. Also, if you could afford to build the last level of barracks that gives you access to those units, you could also afford to recruit them: it's just your personal choice not to.
Legend of Total War is the best campaign player this entire franchise has ever seen, and perhaps will ever see. He is the most authoritative source on campaign strategy and battle tactics against the AI in campaign mode. He completed an EB campaign on Very Hard campaign difficultyand Very Hard battle difficulty in 74 in-game years, capturing all 198 settlements as the Seleucid Empire, using no exploits or cheats. If I am not mistaken, that is effectively the record for EB 100% completion under those settings. It may not be the blitz record, but he didn't play it as a blitz campaign, just as a regular Let's Play - no exploits, no save-scumming.
You on the other hand do not have any such achievements against your name in campaign mode, be it on EB or any other game in the franchise. Who are you to claim that his ability "is not that great?" It's very easy to sit behind a keyboard and make accusations against another person's ability and credibility, much harder to demonstrate your own authority on the subject. All of us here can benefit enormously by watching his Let's Play of that campaign, because he set the standard for how to play EB brilliantly and offered a guide for how to do it yourself.
Just to prove my point, five minutes ago I picked up one random video of his playthrough, No. 50. There's a battle, roughly 35 mins in. He runs his Somatophylakes Strategou until they're tired, charges one Toxotai unit, the charge does few casualties and he says "That wasn't really a charge".
If he doesn't even understand how the game and the engine works, to me he's not a good player. Not even mentioning the "best player", or someone who "set the standard for how to play EB brilliantly". The thing is he's experienced with Medieval 2 but not quite with Rome. And talking about battle tactics against the AI roughly equals to not talking about battle tactics at all.
Legend of Total War is just a guy who did a 100% completion playthrough and uploaded it on YouTube. He is hardly "the best campaign player this entire franchise has ever seen". I mean, he doesn't read the manuals of the games he plays and then he complains about things he could have read in the manual in the first place (EBII reference). You can't really say "he has x million views on YouTube and so he's the best and his opinion counts", you really really can't.
Who am I? First of all, you don't know: I may be an EB developer, for what you know, so you can't really brag about my personal achievements in campaign mode because you simply don't know.
I'm just a guy who played a lot of multiplayer and considers himself quite experienced at that. In fact, I'm kind of the dominant player in MP, in the sense that nobody could beat me consistently. You may argue on the never-ending "old expert vs new expert" issue, but suffice to say that some of the old experts were really sloppy.
I've come here with research to back up my points.
I've yet to see such a research. You explained your point in a rather accurate way, but I don't see any research.
Tactics in general are the Achilles heel of the AI. It can't even deal with being outflanked properly. Everything you did on your video was tactics - I saw a lot of hammer and anvil, and a lot of outflanking. If you do that to the AI, you are cheesing the AI, because the AI cannot deal with tactics in any shape or form.
I completely disagree with this. The AI can deal with outflanking, in fact it tries to go for the flanks almost always as far as my campaigns are concerned. I've never had the AI charge straight into my phalanxes. This may depend on the AI formation mod that I installed, some other players reported that. But you even say that yourself a few lines below:
let the AI march slowly up to your line and surround you
"Cheese" = using something that the AI can't deal with. Sniping the general is something the AI can't deal with, because it doesn't understand that the loss of the general has catastrophic effects on morale. Probably killing the AI general means reverting the battle difficulty to Medium, or even Easy. Generals were coded to be artificially stronger than in vanilla because the AI can't protect them correctly.
Flanking is something the AI can understand, on the other hand, so that's not cheese.
So basically, you're saying:"
Oh, Genghis Khan, he was such a bad general, all he ever did was cheese by spamming horse archers and abuse the human inability to deal with some tactics"
Now you're just fishing for arguments. Genghis Khan had a human opponent, you know, not an AI.
If you are suggesting that my use of horse archers is inappropriate, then you simply don't understand the philosophy of this mod, the reason its developers and its playing community love it so much. […] Following on from this, the only reason the Greek city-states did not incorporate horse archers into their armies was because they had no access to them, to the Eurasian steppe.
Hmmm, no. Simply no. The horse archer culture was completely alien from the Greek culture, and their lands could not sustain it. You have to wait until the Byzantines to see consistent horse archer contingents in Greek armies. I agree with a massive use of horse archers in Armenian armies, but not in Greek armies (unless you're roleplaying as Bosphorus). So if your concern was OP's post, then a massive use of horse archers is cheese.
Don't let me started on the philosophy of the mod.
Overall, I think we didn't understand each other. Now I believe I got your point. I guess your main concern in the campaign is the speed of completion, so that's why you think cavalry is nerfed in EB: it hinders the speed at which you expand. If this is what you say, okay, I get it. But if you claim that the performance of cavalry in EB is nerfed, then I'm sorry, but I don't agree with you.