How “good”/important are cavalry and elephants really?

[unmerged(85507)]

I do not intend to spam this forum but for me it is one of the most important questions.

Concerning their stats (in %) they do not seem to be worth the money. They look like just another ordinary unit and seem to be even worse than heavy infantry in many respects. Only infantry and archers seem to have overall good stats (in %). Especially elephants seem to be heavily overpriced in comparison to other units.

My questions:

1.) Is cavalry only good for its speed (for “cavalry armies” that operate independently)?

2.) Or do mixed units (including cavalry and/or elephants) give a certain “combined arms bonus” to all units - as it was in HoI 2?

3.) Or do cavalry and elephant units cause a greater morale damage to opposing enemy units - and thus are better in battle than the stats (in %) do tell us?

4.) Or is there another reason for using them?

 

[unmerged(76922)]

I do not intend to spam this forum but for me it is one of the most important questions.

Concerning their stats (in %) they do not seem to be worth the money. They look like just another ordinary unit and seem to be even worse than heavy infantry in many respects. Only infantry and archers seem to have overall good stats (in %). Especially elephants seem to be heavily overpriced in comparison to other units.

My questions:

1.) Is cavalry only good for its speed (for “cavalry armies” that operate independently)?

2.) Or do mixed units (including cavalry and/or elephants) give a certain “combined arms bonus” to all units - as it was in HoI 2?

3.) Or do cavalry and elephant units cause a greater morale damage to opposing enemy units - and thus are better in battle than the stats (in %) do tell us?

4.) Or is there another reason for using them?

1) Always useful.

2) Not that I know of.

3) Not that I've seen.

4) As I understand it, cavalry can attack units farther way then regular infantry (so can archers), meaning you can have more units gang up on a single enemy unit, acheving local superiority in numbers and so inflicting more relative damage and taking that unit out of combat that much sooner. At least that's how it seems to work/is supposed to work from what I understand things.

Elephants don't have anything real spectacular in offensive stats... but if you look at other units offensive stats against them, you'll notice that every single unit except heavy infantry takes a 50% hit on damage against (75% from militia) them and even HI just breaks even. In essance, they don't do a lot of extra damage, but they can soak up a lot more punishment then other units, so they live longer and have more chances to deal damage, which means they end up doing more damage overall. In theory, only taking 50% damage should equal out to doing 100% more damage, so their effective stats should be something like this: militia 800%, calvary 200%, heavy infantry 100%, horse archers 200%, archers 400%. Does the increased cost make more sense now?

I haven't been playing as countries with elephants for the most part, but as for calvary, I have recently been using a 16,000 man force for my main combatant groups - 5 HI, 4 calv, 7 archers, and it has been working pretty darn well. I've only lost 1 combat since I switched to that mix and even then, I iflicted 6000 casualties and only took 1,500 against a general with a 5 point martial advantage on me. I was previously runing 9 HI/7 archers and the new mix seems to be providing supperior performance.

Elephants/archers also seem like a good mix to try, since the elephants are going to run over every thing but HI and as long as the 'phatns can keep the HI away from your archers, the archers should be able to massacare them. But I haven't played around with this one yet.

 

[Snall]

Horse archers <3

 

[orwell]

Playing as Carthage, I've gone with two types of armies. Either the internal army of mostly mil and archers in a haphazard mix to defend the hinterlands, and a couple armies to provide hard defense.
8HI
8Calv
6mil
4archer
2 elephant
2 HA

And so far they've been nigh unbeatable, and can grind deep into enemy territory and force them to the usually small peace I want. They also split in half nicely, and that 6 mil acts as a nice mop while your main troops are on the front lines.

 

[Grubnessul]

Cavalry increases the amount of damage your armies do significant

 

[Grumpyoldman]

2.) Or do mixed units (including cavalry and/or elephants) give a certain “combined arms bonus” to all units - as it was in HoI 2?

3.) Or do cavalry and elephant units cause a greater morale damage to opposing enemy units - and thus are better in battle than the stats (in %) do tell us?

I tend to accept those two as advantages of cavalry and elephants. They wouldn't cost so much if they didn't provide increased bonuses to combat imho. The units that are absolutely a waste to me are militia/light infantry. The only thing I can see them useful for is guard duty. Cheap and fast to produce guards. Anyone look inside the files to find the stats on cavalry/elephants?