Horse Archers still not fixed / Brotherhood of the Sepulcre Bug

[Shebaloso]

So, the horse archers issue of counting as light cavalry and making "Harass" eligible has still not been fixed?

Another thing. When i hire the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulcre the unit model is that of levantine (i know it's cultural, but it tends to be usually muslim) cavalry, with the pointed helm and all. Is this a bug? Are there no unit models for the orthodox holy order?

 

[DàbiànLājīdàrén]

I think that's actually WAD.

 

[Dahoota]

I think the Order's model changes when the culture of their home county (Jerusalem) changes......pretty sure this is how it works for all mercs and holy orders? It shows up noticeably here because the Order of the Holy Sepulcher's home is in a totally different culture group in all bookmarks unlike nearly all merc units.

 

[RagingJaws]

I think that's actually WAD.

This.

HA are extremely effective with HC or by themselves.

 

[Shebaloso]

This.

HA are extremely effective with HC or by themselves.

No! A thousand times no! The horse arches count as light cavalry for the purpose of calculating the eligibility of tactics in a battle. This makes a flank containing horse archers able to fire "Harass", which actually REDUCES their power by 150%. Fancy that. I thought this was a bug. If it's WAD, It makes no sense whatsoever.

The "Harass" tactic only fires if 50% or less of the flank composition are Horse archers, but such tactic shouldn't be firing at all, as even with such condition, it makes both the "Cataphract" and "Iranian" retinues completely useless

 

[RagingJaws]

Don't have the interest in testing it now but last patch, on one of my Mongol games, I played around with a pure HA flank and didn't see any issues with it. Mainly due to Retreat and Ambush, Altaic culture tactic. Was trying it out against feudals.

The only times I noticed the HA flank performing poorly was when my allies would join in a battle with their terrible mixed LC/HA armies.

I might be mistaken, it's been some time since I played that particular save. Still think that it's WAD. Never played with the Byzzie cultural retinue. Still think, for the most part, that HA are garbage.

 

[FinalLegendZero]

No! A thousand times no! The horse arches count as light cavalry for the purpose of calculating the eligibility of tactics in a battle. This makes a flank containing horse archers able to fire "Harass", which actually REDUCES their power by 150%. Fancy that. I thought this was a bug. If it's WAD, It makes no sense whatsoever.

The "Harass" tactic only fires if 50% or less of the flank composition are Horse archers, but such tactic shouldn't be firing at all, as even with such condition, it makes both the "Cataphract" and "Iranian" retinues completely useless

The Raid tactic can also fire in melee with Horse Archers if they are between 20% and 50% of your army, despite it not benefiting Horse Archers at all.

Another, related problem that is actually WAD is that War Elephants count as Heavy Cavalry for picking tactics when they receive absolutely no value whatsoever from HC tactics.

 

[FinalLegendZero]

Don't have the interest in testing it now but last patch, on one of my Mongol games, I played around with a pure HA flank and didn't see any issues with it. Mainly due to Retreat and Ambush, Altaic culture tactic. Was trying it out against feudals.

The only times I noticed the HA flank performing poorly was when my allies would join in a battle with their terrible mixed LC/HA armies.

I might be mistaken, it's been some time since I played that particular save. Still think that it's WAD. Never played with the Byzzie cultural retinue. Still think, for the most part, that HA are garbage.

That's because Harass and Raid don't trigger if HA make up at least half the flank (though Volley Harass, the mixed LC/Archer/LI tactic that penalizes HA, can still fire if you have enough Archers and LI). Not half the flank's skirmishers, mind, but half the entire flank.

 

[qijiang_ok]

Do you know how to fix this in mod? I don't want my cataphracts become just useless honor guard.

 

[Shebaloso]

Do you know how to fix this in mod? I don't want my cataphracts become just useless honor guard.

You would have to analyze individually the syntax for all the tactics involving horse archers in the tactics file and see what is causing the issue. Chances are the problem is not that simple, though, as the problem is not limited to a single or a few tactics, but to all of them, which probably means that somewhere in some file there's a localisation error that is attributing horse archers the status of light cavalry.

 

[bonixavier]

which probably means that somewhere in some file there's a localisation error that is attributing horse archers the status of light cavalry.

That file would be 00_special_troops.txt where it reads

horse_archers = {
...
   base_type = light_cavalry
}

I believe that's where the problems come from. Actually, things started to go bad for Byzantium and horse archers when Rajas of India was released and they added elephants, but something in the game couldn't handle an extra troop type being included, so they replaced the last troop type, horse archers, with special troops. That was good because now we have camels and elephants, but horse archers have been broken ever since. Right after this happened, cataphracts started rolling gray wall, which was way worse. Thankfully, that got fixed. Harass and raid tactics firing have been reported for a few patches now, but to no avail so far.

Another annoying thing about this switch to special troops is the fact that previously cataphracts looked totally bad ass, but that will probably never get fixed, since they have to make the 20 elephants appear in the Indian retinue along the 200 archers so their graphical factor has to be way high in the defines. Good for India, I guess, but some more love for Byzantium wouldn't hurt.

In fact, I started a thread to try to brainstorm solutions for the harass bug so those of us who don't care about achievements can play happily until Paradox decides to fix it. I actually found a partial solution, but it only worked when the other army didn't also have horse archers. I don't have much experience with modding and I don't own Horse Lords so I can only do limited testing myself, and I can't figure out what is missing. It would be really nice if we figure out a fix.

The thread is here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/lets-try-to-fix-horse-archers.968612/