Is it just me, or do cavalry units seem very impervious to missile weapons.
I remember back in EB1 one of the strategies I could use against steppe factions is to field armies of foot archers guarded with a few well placed units of spearmen and some light cavalry. If properly supported and protected, the foot archers with their greater numbers could make short work of the horse archers in a missile duel. But if left unprotected, a well-placed charge from the horse archers could do serious damage to the foot archers (after modding the EDU to give foot skirmisher units a melee penalty against cav, otherwise you would have slingers standing their ground and killing even dedicated melee cav that cost up to 4x as much).
EB2 is better balanced in the sense that cavalry are significantly cheaper, more effective at routing unguarded foot skirmishers in melee without having to mod in a melee penalty, but still vulnerable in melee with just about anything if bogged down. You as the player are really well rewarded for proper use of cavalry, but can lose multiple units very quickly if you don't pay attention to them (except for katas, which will rout basically anything with a frontal charge and can even push through and rout units of spearmen guarding a gate during sieges...). I really do enjoy the balance decisions y'all made with cavalry in this mod.
However EB2 cav are bulletproof compared to EB1 cav.
I know that the EB2 team adjusted the missile kill rate down compared to EB1 via the battle_config.xml, but I don't think that this accounts for why horses and elephants are so hard to kill. A long time ago I adjusted the missile kill rate so that missile units are a bigger threat when left alone:
<missile-target-accuracy>
<infantry>0.235</infantry>
<cavalry>0.295</cavalry>
<elephants>0.25</elephants>
</missile-target-accuracy>
With this, and some changes to descr_projectile and the EDU, the balance of missiles vs infantry fits my own personal tastes (to each their own, I respect y'all's reasoning for setting it so low in the first place). But somehow horses and elephants are still crazy good at dodging non-siege missiles:
In a shoot-out with foot archers, each party in loose formation and using all of their ammo, a unit of cheap ~1,000 mnai pajama-clad horse archers will kill many foot archers and take few losses of their own. Even without cantabrian circle.It makes it especially boring to fight against steppe factions as settled factions: you either have to field armies of light cavalry to chase them down on the battlemap, or armies of phalangites for the autoresolve cheese.
I've also noticed that elephants are nearly impervious to javelins, which are supposed to be their Achilles' heel. I've had multiple units of foot skirmishers and jav cav hurl more javelins than the entire history of the Olympic games at a unit of elephants, to only maybe kill 1 or 2 after exhausting all of their ammunition. So the only way to kill elephants is a meat grinder of cheap spearmen. Or getting them to front charge a phalanx. Or shooting them with oxybeles. No longer do well-micro'd jav cav cut it, like the venerable ol' Daha Rog Baexdzhyn Aefsad who helped me conquer the mines of India in my old EB1 Baktria campaign.
Is this something to do with the game engine and how it treats mounted units? Does M2TW overcorrect for the larger hitboxes of cavalry or something? Because I just find it weird that cavalry die quickly in melee combat, but even with some pretty heavy-handed buffs I gave to missile units, they fare much better than infantry units when under fire.