Cavalry Melee penalty in woods is to extreme

[LegioX]

This new change for Cav Melee in woods is way to extreme. Skrimishers in woods hold up against cav units double their number. Also artillery in woods vs cav takes forever to route, which should not be the case. For example I sent a 750 melee focused cav unit against a 209 man arty unit and they never routed. They retreated with flashing flag, but I could never eliminate the unit all together. Can this be changed or altered in some way?

Edited March 5, 2017 by LegioX

[Guest]

2 hours ago, LegioX said:

This new change for Cav Melee in woods is way to extreme. Skrimishers in woods hold up against cav units double their number. Also artillery in woods vs cav takes forever to route, which should not be the case. For example I sent a 750 melee focused cav unit against a 209 man arty unit and they never routed. They retreated with flashing flag, but I could never eliminate the unit all together. Can this be changed or altered in some way?

Well in all history of warfare it has never been advisable to send cav into the woods.. Horse and rider are too heavy, unmanouverable and the ground too uneven for any actual fighting to be done with a horse. That artillery shouldn't be able to fire accurately when inside a forrest (note inside - not the outskirts of a wood) is an entirely different matter..

[A. P. Hill]

2 hours ago, LegioX said:

This new change for Cav Melee in woods is way to extreme. ... Can this be changed or altered in some way?

No, Cavalry is not the supreme military arm that every keeps errantly thinking they are or wishing they were. 

Edited March 5, 2017 by A. P. Hill

[Nicolas I]

Having done some horseriding in woods I can tell you that unless you find paths you have to go quite slowly, not even thinking of charging. Not only it is difficult to manoeuvre as it has been said, but the uneven ground and debris can be very tricky for your best friend who can easily hurt itself. Each time I would go in the woods I would carefully inspect the legs and hooves and often find small problems.

That been said, I don't know to what extent the game makes a difference between deep woods and sparse ones regarding horses penalties. As the game does calculate the level of coverage, the same level of penalty could/should apply to horses.

[Jamesk2]

While keeping true to history is important, having a fun game is important too. Previously there was a balance between infantry - skirmishers - cavalry - artillery with one type kind of counter the other. Taking cavalry out of the equation will make the game less fun and may very well lead to balance problem that will need to be addressed further down the line.

[LegioX]

Even in woods cav should easily take on skirmishers and artilley. I mean a 100-200 man unit should get overrun pretty quickly by a 750man cav unit. Espically when you consider they are in a sparse skirmish formation and not line of battle.

Edited March 5, 2017 by LegioX

[Nicolas I]

48 minutes ago, LegioX said:

...Especially when you consider they are in a sparse skirmish formation and not line of battle.

A sparse skirmish formation hidden behind trees seems hardly an easy target for cavalry impeded by the same trees/stumps/bushes.

[The Soldier]

1 minute ago, Nicolas I said:

A sparse skirmish formation hidden behind trees seems hardly an easy target for cavalry impeded by the same trees/stumps/bushes.

You're right.  But that makes skirmishers completely invulnerable to pretty much everything that isn't a bayonet charge by a block of infantry.

[Draluigi]

I personally think the balance should be historical. I mean close-ordered infantry is already the main component of the game right now, and shooting is the main component of infantry tactics, and I think that's what we want, since that's the way it was. I think melee cav should be confined to the only role I can realistically see for it, which is scattering skirmishers in open terrain, and maybe prolong the rout of a brigade. As far as I understand it large melee cav units were only used by the union in the beginning of the war, with poor results. Efficient cav was mainly armed with P61 enfield and shotguns for the south, or carbines for the north. I'm no expert on the civil war but that's what I could gather from the little reading I've done.

[Nicolas I]

9 minutes ago, The Soldier said:

You're right.  But that makes skirmishers completely invulnerable to pretty much everything that isn't a bayonet charge by a block of infantry.

I fight enemy skirmishers with my own detached skirmishers putting two companies/battalions against one for a 1,5 or 2 to 1 ratio to get some success. After I get rid of them I go after another.

Charging them with cavalry on open ground still works fairly well, if you distract them a bit before you reach them.

I agree skirmishers are highly annoying, but so are yours for the enemy.

That being said I find their hiding and melee bonuses, as well as their speed, a bit too high. That needs some fine tuning.

Edited March 5, 2017 by Nicolas I

[The Soldier]

Tips - if you want Shock Cavalry to perform better in melee in forests, Dismount them!  Press your shortcut key for Dismounting (usually M, since there's no dismount button for Shock Cavalry on the bar) with the Shock / Carbine Cavalry selected.  Dismounting in combat has no penalties, and you'll perform way better while dismounted in forest.  Another exploit, I suppose, but I've reported it with F11 a while back, so get it while it's hot. Tested at Chickamauaga with all of Forrest's cavalry, works very well.

[Draluigi]

2 minutes ago, The Soldier said:

Tips - if you want Shock Cavalry to perform better in melee in forests, Dismount them!  Press your shortcut key for Dismounting (usually M, since there's no dismount button for Shock Cavalry on the bar) with the Shock / Carbine Cavalry selected.  Dismounting in combat has no penalties, and you'll perform way better while dismounted in forest.  Another exploit, I suppose, but I've reported it with F11 a while back, so get it while it's hot. Tested at Chickamauaga with all of Forrest's cavalry, works very well.

You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

[Wandering1]

In this particular case with the cavalry part of the trifecta, there are two parts to the question:

1. Why bother including melee cavalry if there are only a few battles where you aren't severely hindered by trees? It just essentially becomes a 'new guy' trap, for people that aren't well versed in the ACW.

2. If skirmishers become less vulnerable in the trees to their natural counters, it basically just encourages people to stack skirmishers instead of cavalry when forcing people out of trees, because skirmishers naturally have a cover bonus (so light forest effectively becomes a heavy forest, practically speaking).

 

[The Soldier]

7 minutes ago, Draluigi said:

You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

Well, heh, at this point it's the dev's fault for not fixing that. Think I reported this bug more than a month ago.  I don't use it myself, I only tested it at the Historical version of Chickamauga.

Edited March 5, 2017 by The Soldier

[Draluigi]

1 minute ago, Wandering1 said:

In this particular case with the cavalry part of the trifecta, there are two parts to the question:

1. Why bother including melee cavalry if there are only a few battles where you aren't severely hindered by trees? It just essentially becomes a 'new guy' trap, for people that aren't well versed in the ACW.

2. If skirmishers become less vulnerable in the trees to their natural counters, it basically just encourages people to stack skirmishers instead of cavalry when forcing people out of trees, because skirmishers naturally have a cover bonus (so light forest effectively becomes a heavy forest, practically speaking).

 

I think I will still keep one full brigade among my 3-5 corps to act as a "melee fireman", taking advantage of its mobility. Other than that I guess you're right, but the solution is just a tooltip fix away. Just say so when you hover your mouse over cavalry brigade creation.

"Sabre armed cavalry will see limited use other than against light units in open terrains, while your long-armed horsemen can harass the enemy. Cavalry will generally be at a disadvantage against dense masses of infantry, especially attacking from the front."

[Draluigi]

2 minutes ago, The Soldier said:

Well, heh, at this point it's the dev's fault for not fixing that. Think I reported this bug more than a month ago.  I don't use it myself, I only tested it at the Historical version of Chickamauga.

Just teasing fellow poilu.

[Wandering1]

1 minute ago, Draluigi said:

I think I will still keep one full brigade among my 3-5 corps to act as a "melee fireman", taking advantage of its mobility. Other than that I guess you're right, but the solution is just a tooltip fix away. Just say so when you hover your mouse over cavalry brigade creation.

"Sabre armed cavalry will see limited use other than against light units in open terrains, while your long-armed horsemen can harass the enemy. Cavalry will generally be at a disadvantage against dense masses of infantry, especially attacking from the front."

That's actually a bit counter-intuitive; larger squads are actually easier to flank than smaller squads, because they take longer to rotate due to rotating on one point.

Regardless, unless the tooltip is very visible, it will probably be missed. Not to mention having to add tooltips to every other squad type to keep it visually consistent.

[Draluigi]

5 minutes ago, Wandering1 said:

That's actually a bit counter-intuitive; larger squads are actually easier to flank than smaller squads, because they take longer to rotate due to rotating on one point.

Regardless, unless the tooltip is very visible, it will probably be missed. Not to mention having to add tooltips to every other squad type to keep it visually consistent.

Never noticed that about brigade size thank you for the tip. I'm no tester so it's not like my text was going to make it in anyway ^^. But I thought there were already tooltips. I'm a big fan of paradox grand strategy games, and I think part of what makes them so good is the abundance of tooltips that allows for both complexibility and relative ease of understanding of the mechanics of the game.

As you said nerfing melee cav that much would indeed make the balance awkward to apprehend for someone other than a civil war aficionado or a veteran player. The answer : tooltips, tooltips everywhere

[Hitorishizuka]

I commented on this in the Feed(b)ack thread, but the other annoyance about melee cavalry being too weak in forests is not just skirmishers but also dealing with ranged cavalry. You now have to plod infantry through the forests to catch ranged cavalry who constantly run away, draining Condition all the while, just to slowly push them out and barely get kills (assuming you even had an infantry brigade spare to do so). It used to be you could just send a couple melee brigades after them and rout them, now they dance away for free.

[The Soldier]

1 hour ago, Draluigi said:

Just teasing fellow poilu.

Heh, sadly I'm not French, but I am part of the mod team for TGW1918, the mod for Company of Heroes - since we're working on the French, why not use an anonymous french soldier?

You know, a nice buff to melee cavalry might be somehow letting it fire and reload at normal speeds during melee combat.  That way, they actually use their guns and can kill quicker while engaged in melee than other units of comparable melee strength.

[Draluigi]

15 minutes ago, The Soldier said:

Heh, sadly I'm not French, but I am part of the mod team for TGW1918, the mod for Company of Heroes - since we're working on the French, why not use an anonymous french soldier?

You know, a nice buff to melee cavalry might be somehow letting it fire and reload at normal speeds during melee combat.  That way, they actually use their guns and can kill quicker while engaged in melee than other units of comparable melee strength.

Especially for shotguns, since right now they're quite useless, but were at the time very much used in melee combat.That would probably need to be associated with a nerfing of cavalry short guns. I find that silver medium quality revolver, and the Lemat very powerful, they'd wreck whole brigades one after the other.

Edit : they should have a reduced rate of fire during the volley itself, like demoralized brigades. That would make the melee look very cool

Edited March 6, 2017 by Draluigi

[The Soldier]

23 minutes ago, Draluigi said:

Especially for shotguns, since right now they're quite useless, but were at the time very much used in melee combat.That would probably need to be associated with a nerfing of cavalry short guns. I find that silver medium quality revolver, and the Lemat very powerful, they'd wreck whole brigades one after the other.

Edit : they should have a reduced rate of fire during the volley itself, like demoralized brigades. That would make the melee look very cool

The reduced rate of fire on brigades with less than 50% goes something like this:

Bang....................Bang.....................Bang.........................Bang....................

That kind of slow.  It would really have to be quicker than that, more like an Infantry brigade's volley (drawn out, ragged volley) rather than skirmisher volleys (where all the men fire at once).

[Wandering1]

Pretty much if one is allowed to use the pistols in melee combat, it would turn melee cavalry basically into the revolver cavalry from TW Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai. Which is to say, the best anti-cavalry unit, but for the wrong reasons (revolver cavalry got two shots off before entering melee with other spear cavalry, and still fired their pistols in melee).

[The Soldier]

8 minutes ago, Wandering1 said:

Pretty much if one is allowed to use the pistols in melee combat, it would turn melee cavalry basically into the revolver cavalry from TW Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai. Which is to say, the best anti-cavalry unit, but for the wrong reasons (revolver cavalry got two shots off before entering melee with other spear cavalry, and still fired their pistols in melee).

Also intended.  Shock Cavalry should be able to beat skirmishers, carbine cavalry - note that carbine cavalry shouldn't have this fire and reload ability in melee, only shock cavalry - and artillery given a reasonable amount of soldiers (although do note that cover should still affect their ability to actually hit things with their pistols).

Also; remove the damn stocks on the pistol and make them regular caplock and revolver pistols.  It's just silly that they have pseudo-carbines that were extremely rare - if they want, I'll even do the new HUD images.

Edited March 6, 2017 by The Soldier

[Wandering1]

2 minutes ago, The Soldier said:

Also intended.  Shock Cavalry should be able to beat skirmishers, carbine cavalry - note that carbine cavalry shouldn't have this fire and reload ability in melee, only shock cavalry - and artillery given a reasonable amount of soldiers (although do note that cover should still affect their ability to actually hit things with their pistols).

Also; remove the damn stocks on the pistol and make them regular caplock and revolver pistols.  It's just silly that they have pseudo-carbines that were extremely rare - if they want, I'll even do the new HUD images.

I will also note though, that while the melee damage nerf for cavalry in forests is still in place, even this change wouldn't matter much due to units being in cover while meleeing (ask not how Farmer Joe manages to put a tree or a buddy in the way of every shot that comes flying towards him, including canister).