Easy way to balance cavalry

[Kryndude]

Just came up with this idea while commenting on a thread. Make it so that cavalry don't substitute infantry by allocating set number of blocks on each flank to cavalry only depending on a country's flanking range value (e.g. 3 on each flank, total 6 blocks can only be filled with cav if one of the battle participant has flanking range 3). If you don't bring cavs now you're guaranteed to get flanked, and even if you do you get flanked by countries with superior flanking range. Now all three unit types have their unique roles so no matter how they're balanced you have to use them all.


Unintentional benefit of this fix: separate terrain modifiers can be added to individual unit types to represent cav and artillery not working in jungle, etc.


Better, easier fix:

I like the idea to extent the maximal combat width on the frontline. But I am not so sure about the cav and infantry only spots as they lead to cav having a similar role to artillery right now,
insofar as there is an optimal number of regiments (Combat width for artillery and 2x flanking range for cav) and anything more is useless and anything less is basically suicide.
Wouldn't just extending the frontline width be enough, as it would create spots on the frontline without artillery support and the main reason why cav struggles vs infantry in the late game is artillery support. ( You can test this with your combat simulator if you want, but there are quite a few techs where cav vs inf without artillery is quite good for the cav)
This would be even easier you just have to extend the frontline width and nothing more and would lead to a variety of strategies which could be potentially viable (no cav, cav on flanks, more cav if you have a lot of cav CA) and more interesting unit choices as different cav types could be better at beating cav respectively infantry.
If cav is still underwhelming one could adjust combat ability modifiers from ideas/policies a bit to give more cav CA and less inf CA to balance it out.

This would make flanking range a good modifier the same as your suggestion but cav/inf ratio would still have a place for heavy cav armies. I am also unsure if having a lot of flanking range coming from maneuver pips is a good idea as maneuver is already strong and CW gets very large even if you nerf the base CW from tech.

 

[Canute VII]

A new mechanic called 'Initiative.'

Maybe smth like this?

• during combat, for each roll of dice an army has a chance to gain +1 dice roll
• the chance depends on % of cavalry per combat width
• i.e. if combat width is 20 and #cavalry is 4, then for each roll the army has a 20% chance to gain +1 dice roll
• This would make cav more relevant and it scales with time/combat width
• would this be too strong? I don't know. Thoughts?