Retinue Tier list, based on damage calculations (including cultural retinues)

[doktarr]

The key stat that I'm basing this tier list on is damage inflicted per unit cap used. I calculated this both for skirmish phase and melee phase. I assumed a generic 12 Martial commander unless otherwise noted. I didn't add in the bonuses the retinues get themselves, but in most cases the tactics are much more important than those bonuses.

Some big picture thoughts before I get into the tiers:

First, there are advantages for both cheap/numerous retinues, like light infantry and archers, or expensive/lower number retinues, like cavalry. The principal advantage of larger numbers are that the AI (including factions) regards you as more powerful if your retinues are more numerous (it evaluates your troop count, not their quality), and that larger numbers make sieges easier. The principal advantage of smaller numbers is that they avoid attrition more easily. While I generally prefer larger numbers of cheaper retinues, I won't be considering that very strongly here.

Secondly, it's important to understand how a retinue is meant to win battles. You basically have three classes of retinues:

• Those which are intended to win battles in the skirmish phase, and are not very strong in the melee phase. This is primarily light infantry and archers. For these, I don't put much stock in how they do in melee, although better melee performance is good of course.
• Those which are intended to win in melee. This includes Pikes and Heavy Infantry. For these, the most important thing in skirmish is their defensive characteristics.
• Those that are balanced and dish out damage in both phases. This is mostly cavalry-based retinues.

Third, while some retinues can simply be spammed for maximum effectiveness, many of the retinues are best when mixed and matched with others. When notable I will mention some of these mixes.

I note tribal retinues with an asterisk, and defensive pagan only tribal retinues with a double asterisk.

Anyway, on to the tiers.

S Tier aka Camel tier

Camels are crazy good, such that retinues with Camels in them are good even when the exact mix of units isn't ideal.

• Camel Warrior: 2.26 skirmish damage/cap, 6.8 melee damage/cap
• Camel + Tribal Warrior*: 4.33 skirmish damage/cap, 6.56 melee damage/cap

I note Camel+Tribal Warrior because it's pretty much the most efficient possible retinue, and there are some tribal Arabian rulers who can create that combination. (You can also create this ideal retinue by culture hopping to get both camels and pure light infantry.)

A Tier

• Outremer Knight: 2.06 skirmish damage/cap, 4.21 melee damage/cap

Once again, Camels are crazy good.

• Himalayan Mountaineer: 2.11 skirmish damage/cap, 4 melee damage/cap
• Hunting Party*: 2.17 skirmish damage/cap, 3.86 melee damage/cap
• Berber Cavalry + Tribal Warrior*: 2.3 skirmish damage/cap, 3.52 melee damage/cap

The combination of light infantry and light cavalry is very efficient both in skirmish and melee. Remember that these retinue need a martial 12 commander to avoid the weaker disorganized harass tactic.

• Generic Light Skirmish: 2.74 skirmish damage/cap, 1.57 melee damage/cap
• Free Warrior: 2.8 skirmish damage/cap, 1.54 melee damage/cap
• Pictish Raiders: 2.76 skirmish damage/cap, 1.56 melee damage/cap
• Trapper*: 2.7 skirmish damage/cap, 1.59 melee damage/cap
• Sworn Defenders**: 2.59 skirmish damage/cap, 1.63 melee damage/cap
• Longbow+Light Skirmish (with a Welsh/English leader): 3.15 skirmish damage/cap, 1.63 melee damage/cap

Here we get to the tl;dr of the entire tier list, which is that most of the time light skirmish is your best option. You get pretty high damage in skirmish, and if you stack them in one flank you can usually win that flank before melee phase.

Note that you need 20% archers to trigger the right tactics, but anything more than that barely moves the needle... with the very notable exception of English/Welsh leaders, where the massive longbow volley tactic makes more archers (up to the 60% limit) useful.

B Tier

• Schiltron/Pike: 0.04 skirmish damage/cap, 6.12 melee damage/cap
• Generic Defence: 0.32 skirmish damage/cap, 5.27 melee damage/cap

Despite the fact that the all-pike options look better in melee, they take much more damage in skirmish. You need a sprinkling of archers to get the shieldwall tactic, so throw one generic defensive retinue in each pike flank.

• Generic Shock: 0.37 skirmish damage/cap, 5.69 melee damage/cap
• Baltic Warrior/Lombard Heavy Infantry/Druzhina/Housecarl/Gallowglass/Bar Kochba Guards/Frankish Heavy Infantry/Guerriers: 0.08 skirmish damage/cap, 6.6 melee damage/cap

Same note as above: include one generic shock retinue in your cultural heavy infantry flanks so they can shieldwall their way through skirmish phase.

... the tier list continues below, but at this point we've hit generic retinues that perform very well in both melee and in skirmish. Everything below is going to be suboptimal outside of relatively rare/unusual scenarios.

C Tier

• Jaguar Warrior: 0.78 skirmish damage/cap, 4.47 melee damage/cap
• Praetorian: 0.05 skirmish damage/cap, 4.9 melee damage/cap
• Suebi Longspearman: 0.51 skirmish damage/cap, 4.84 melee damage/cap
• Goedendag Militia: 0.84 skirmish damage/cap, 3.98 melee damage/cap
• Veteran Warriors*: 0.63 skirmish damage/cap, 4.95 melee damage/cap

These are all playable, but are almost uniformly outclassed by generic shock or defence retinues. And they all need archers for shieldwalls in skirmish, so you would end up combining them with shock or defense retinues anyway.

• Arberian Stratiotet/Hussar/Caballero/Andalusian Cavalry/Berber Cavalry: 1.13 skirmish damage/cap, 3.4 melee damage/cap

Unless you have a way to sprinkle in light infantry (probably from tribal retinues - see A tier), the light cavalry retinues are just so-so in both skirmish and melee.

• Tie-Futu: 1.3 skirmish damage/cap, 3.03 melee damage/cap
• Tie-Futu+Brave/Cavalry Leader: 1.3 skirmish damage/cap, 3.51 melee damage/cap
• Knight (with a Frankish/German/Occitan/Norman/Breton leader): .65 skirmish damage/cap, 4.44 melee damage/cap
• Gusar: 1.05 skirmish damage/cap, 3.19 melee damage/cap
• Gusar+Brave/Cavalry Leader: 1.05 skirmish damage/cap, 3.7 melee damage/cap
• Generic Cavalry: 0.78 skirmish damage/cap, 2.85 melee damage/cap

The mixes of light and heavy cavalry generally fall flat, even when you give them the cultures/leader traits that trigger good melee tactics.

D Tier

• Ethiopian Skirmisher/Somali Skirmisher: 1.79 skirmish damage/cap, 1.43 melee damage/cap

These have some value just for the sheer quantity of troops for sieges/faction suppression, but unless you culture hop to combine them with camels, archers, or light cavalry, they will be underwhelming in combat.

• Nubian Archers: 1 skirmish damage/cap, 1.7 melee damage/cap

No real reason to use these unless you can import some English leaders, and then combine them with Light Skirmish.

• Matoei: 0.63 skirmish damage/cap, 2.89 melee damage/cap
• Ardent Guardians**: 0.66 skirmish damage/cap, 3.19 melee damage/cap
• Sardinian Birrudo: 0.69 skirmish damage/cap, 2.46 melee damage/cap
• Nubing: 1.02 skirmish damage/cap, 1.86 melee damage/cap
• Generic Skirmish: 1.12 skirmish damage/cap, 2.11 melee damage/cap

All of these suffer from the same problem: they are more than 20% archers, so their melee tactics get muddled with Barrage and the Pikes/Heavy Infantry are wasted.

F Tier Horse Archers and Elephants are broken, and not in the good way

• Horse Archer: 1.33 skirmish damage/cap, 0.85 melee damage/cap
• Steppe Riders*: 1.09 skirmish damage/cap, 2.34 melee damage/cap
• Cataphract: 0.56 skirmish damage/cap, 2.87 melee damage/cap
• Steel Bow Infantry: 0.51 skirmish damage/cap, 1.57 melee damage/cap

Both Horse Archers and Elephants are essentially bugged because they get tactics for Light Cavalry and Heavy Cavalry, respectively, but don't benefit from those tactics. This would be bad even if they were cheap, but they are (along with Heavy Cavalry) the most expensive units in the game. Avoid.

 

[Gundabadguy]

This is a really good breakdown thank you

 

[Urloc the Great]

Would the ranking change with increasing technology levels? Since Light Infantry doesn't get the 60% extra damage from tech.

Thanks for the calculations! I didn't know that Hunting parties was this much efficient.

 

[jonjowett]

Wasn't there an online tool somewhere that would calculate the efficiency of any combination of retinues, according to user input? I remember using it relatively recently (within the last 1-2 years), so I tried searching for it... but I can't find anything...

Anyway, it would have been interesting to see how that tool's results compare with OP's.

 

[doktarr]

Would the ranking change with increasing technology levels? Since Light Infantry doesn't get the 60% extra damage from tech.

The main question is whether those bonuses are additive or multiplicative with tactical bonuses. I know the bonuses inherent in the retinues are additive, but I'm not sure about the tech bonuses.

If they're additive, then tactics are still by far the most important thing, since good tactics routinely give much larger bonuses (e.g. Harass tactic gives +300% attack to camels and light cavalry) and it won't dramatically change the numbers. They're still going to be basically the same, only changing around the margins.

It it's multiplicative, then it's decisive, and all the LI-heavy flanks become much less useful in late game.

 

[Urloc the Great]

The main question is whether those bonuses are additive or multiplicative with tactical bonuses. I know the bonuses inherent in the retinues are additive, but I'm not sure about the tech bonuses.

If they're additive, then tactics are still by far the most important thing, since good tactics routinely give much larger bonuses (e.g. Harass tactic gives +300% attack to camels and light cavalry) and it won't dramatically change the numbers. They're still going to be basically the same, only changing around the margins.

It it's multiplicative, then it's decisive, and all the LI-heavy flanks become much less useful in late game.

The bonuses are additive:

 

[majdavlk]

all gold costing retinues are F tier if you have conclave. better spend the gold on your custom merc company. only use prestige and piety retinues

 

[Rockphed]

If you mod the game so horse archers and elephants aren't broken anymore (which I could swear is a 1-line mode), how does it change cataphracts and elephants?

 

[majdavlk]

If you mod the game so horse archers and elephants aren't broken anymore (which I could swear is a 1-line mode), how does it change cataphracts and elephants?

how are they broken ?

 

[Rockphed]

how are they broken ?

I read this in an old thread on this forum, but I believe that the way troop composition is calculated takes horse archers' "base_type = light_cavalry" and uses it to mean that any time you have a tactic that calls for light cavalry percentage it should include horse archers in that number. I think the fix was changing the base_type to "horse_archers", but it might have required changing the tactics files instead. I think leaving camels as special light cavalry works (though no holding can produce more than 1 type of special unit, so camel cavalry existing at all gives tribals in certain circumstances a raw deal).

 

[doktarr]

If you mod the game so horse archers and elephants aren't broken anymore (which I could swear is a 1-line mode), how does it change cataphracts and elephants?

It's an interesting question (and yes, it's so easy that I had already implemented the "fix" in my calculations spreadsheet before you asked about it). The short answer is that it would make some strong retinues possible but not necessarily the ones we have.

The Horse Archer retinue gets incrementally better, although it's a bummer that you're still nerfing your light cav with the swarm tactic half the time. You'd be much better off pushing closer to the 65% Horse Archer limit, and probably having just enough light cav to get all the multipliers on Harass Swarm. But even with the fix to the tactics and an ideal ratio for the retinue (say, 160 HA, 70 LC, 20 LI), you're still only doing about 1.66 skirmish damage/cap, which is only an incremental improvement on where they already were. It's hard to evaluate them without actual in-game testing because a big part of their strength is the ability to keep the battle in skirmish indefinitely with the right cultural leader. But the HA tactics just aren't especially strong even after you fix them.

Steppe Rider is helped by the fix more, but mainly because it allows Harass to fire and help the light cavalry. Harass and Harass Swarm both hit hard, but the Swarm tactic burns you hard by turning off your light cavalry. The skirmish damage improves to 1.37, making it an overall respectable balanced retinue, but nothing great.

Cataphracts are probably the most interesting one if you implement the fix. You get an incremental improvement to skirmish tactics by getting rid of the harass tactic (absolutely insulting that that fires for a flank that has zero light cavalry) but the real benefit is that you no longer get the useless (for Cataphracts) Raid tactic in melee, instead getting pure heavy cavalry tactics. This takes the melee damage from 3.22 (with a non-altic M16 commander) up to 4.85, which is right on the level of stuff like the standard defense retinue. (Unfortunately, Byzantine leader doesn't help since Embolon Charge has a smaller heavy cavalry bonus than Awesome Charge. A Frankish leader would help, but it's hard to select for that given the rules for commanders in the Byzantine Empire.)

Steel Bow still sucks, because fundamentally Archers and Elephants make no sense together given the way tactics work in CK2. You throw Grey Wall in skirmish, which is fine, but not so great when charge on undefended is going to fire. In melee you get barrage a third of the time which doesn't help elephants, and trample/force back the rest of the time which doesn't help archers. If instead of 200 archers, the retinue came with 200 Pikemen, and you included the fix, then it would be a very solid retinue (Grey Wall in skirmish, 50/50 split between Trample and Force Back) with similar performance to the standard pike retinues.