Cavalry and Light Foot

[Morbio]

I can't help but feel I may be opening an old topic, but I didn't see it in the list and I didn't fancy scrolling through 21 pages of discussion...

I feel that LF are too good versus cavalry (by cavalry I mean non-light horse, but not very heavily armoured horse). My rationale is thus;

• They pretty much always successfully evade charges by cavalry
• Cavalry take heavy damage from missiles (I don't think this is wrong), but cavalry can't outrun skirmishers

The second point particularly frustrates me as I can send a few cavalry units to flank the line, but by the time they get behind they have been decimated and there's no way to outrun the constant barrage, so without any support to chase off the skirmishers it's just a waste of units. I don't think that a cavalry flanking force should have to take other LF or LH with it to be effective, but I do accept LH supporting units are a good idea.

My feeling is that skirmishers should be limited to 3 squares of movement (in normal terrain) to allow skirmishers to deal their damage, but allow cavalry to be able to outrun the damage after a turn or two. It seems logical that Light Horse be able to cover much more ground, cavalry to cover more ground and cats (and other very heavily armoured horse) to cover similar ground. It would still allow LF to cover more ground than MF and HF. The same sort of restriction would apply to evade range (with some random variation) to mean that LF are caught more often by cavalry. At present LF can be directly in front of cavalry and evade in the vast majority of cases and this just doesn't seem logical. I appreciate that cavalry have significant weight to move, but I struggle to think that someone on foot can still outrun a horse, except if the horse is very heavily armoured, e.g. cats.

Am I alone in this thinking?

Morbio

[Ludendorf]

It does seem a little odd that units like light bows and slingers are able to keep an almost perpetual game of keep-away with medium cavalry (as I call them). It is possible to catch skirms from a tile away (as opposed to adjacent, which is guaranteed), but it doesn't happen very often. If I was a group of archers firing a short range volley at a cavalry unit, and the cavalry remained well ordered, I'd be making peace with whatever deity I believed in.

[rbodleyscott]

Note that Armoured cavalry will be getting additional damage mitigation against shooting in the next patch.

[MVP7]

At least when playing against the AI I never had too much trouble chasing down light infantry with cavalry. Waste the enemy LF unit's evade with one cavalry unit (or any other unit) and then charge them with another. Of course it often takes time and leaves the cavalry spread out all over the map and makes it impossible to maneuver the cavalry into flanking position without heavy losses if you choose to ignore the skirmishers but that's what skirmishers are supposed to do.

The skirmisher damage vs cavalry is a bit high considering how small difference in speed the units have but I hope the upcoming damage mitigation isn't too big since cavalry already has very high initiative and is very hard to force into a fight against its will. Dropping the cavalry cohesion with ranged fire before a charge is the only effective proactive counter to cavalry for many armies that don't have good cavalry or elephants available.