No, it does not. Mean time to happen 3 days - it takes average three days that this tactic is taken - every third day this tactic is used
Light Cavalry (Caballero) viability
- Thread starter Zakath
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No, it does not. Mean time to happen 3 days - it takes average three days that this tactic is taken - every third day this tactic is used
It is just an average, which means it might happen a lot or not at all, if your luck is extreme. The tactic happening is not guaranteed
No you are wrong and I am quite certain.
What you say would be true if it were a normal event but these are combat_tactics we're talking about and the mechanics for calculating which tactic is chosen is different from normal events.
If I gave a tactic 100 days mtth, it would almost garantuee getting that tactic every time. If what you said were true, it would take FOREVER to get that tactic. And then also all of the modifiers would not make any sense to increase the MTTH for great tactics if you have a good general. In your assumption, the better the general & troops the longer it takes to get a good tactic.
Looking at the values (finally found the file with values for skirmish/melee/pursue! Yay!) it´s pretty clear that light cavalry is very viable if the plan is baiting the AI into attacking, which is notoriously easy to do. They have excellent defensive stats compared to archers.
No, mtth only affects the weight when it decides to change tactics. Each tactic itself lasts for a number of days, to take the example above, volley harass lasts for 18.
Also, because the sum of probs for tactics must be 100 (and some tactics may be ineligible), mtth doesn't have its regular meaning (and even if it did average 3 days does not equal happens every 3 days!).
You can see what tactic your units are using in the battle screen by mousing over the icons on each flank.
Hmm, I was under the impression that att = damage, defense = reducing casualties, irrespective as to whether you are attacker or defender.
Mind you, I´ve only recently returned to the game, last patch I played was 1.05. So if anyone could clarify this would be nice.
.... this is completely contradictory and you don't even realize it because you lack any understanding of how retinues work.
cultural retinues automatically have the max level of their cultural building applied. If the Spanish/Andalusian cultural building is that good, that means the LC retinue is awesome, because it automatically gets the best version of the cultural building applied.
While most of what you say is correct, it's trivially easy to have an 80% heavy infantry army just by having shock retinues. You can very quickly have an army of 10-20k with 80% heavy infantry.
If you're going to look at longbows you have to look at their cultural tactic, Massive Longbow Volley. I think it's more like +420% attack.
yeah longbows have like 42 damage during skirmish phase if you get the Massive Longbow Volley Tactic.
That's not so bad compared to the 44ish damage you get from the heavy infantry shock retinues and their cultural retinue.
BUT you are MUCH more likely to trigger the shock heavy tactics with success, like twice as likely. And skirmish phase doesn't really last much longer than half a month while melee phase can take much longer depending on army sizes.
are you sure?
I've used a setup where I have tactics set at 100 mtth and they work fine, I still sometimes get the off vanilla tactic slipping in. And when I entered a modifier to multiply the 100 by another 100...well it almost garantueed no vanilla tactics showed up...
That's not so bad compared to the 44ish damage you get from the heavy infantry shock retinues and their cultural retinue.
BUT you are MUCH more likely to trigger the shock heavy tactics with success, like twice as likely. And skirmish phase doesn't really last much longer than half a month while melee phase can take much longer depending on army sizes.
are you sure?
I've used a setup where I have tactics set at 100 mtth and they work fine, I still sometimes get the off vanilla tactic slipping in. And when I entered a modifier to multiply the 100 by another 100...well it almost garantueed no vanilla tactics showed up...
Ok then it would be strange. Of course i know it doesn't mean it have to be every third day only that you can expect that it happens every third day at least when you summarize 9,999E+20 fights
Concluding, it seems most people think caballero is underpowered compared with other cultural buildings.
Its the impression I get from the battle screen. To be honest, I've had difficulty mapping combat_tactics.txt onto that screen, so details may be wrong (although the tactics are used for x days thing is easy to see)
That really really depends, and for many wars your are right. However if you want to finish an enemy stack off quickly, because for example you are outnumbered with one stack fighting multiple enemy stacks then often having to fight fewer battles can be really important. Or for example where you are defeating the enemy in detail as he tries to combine his stacks, destroying each smaller stack with one battle can really help reduce the size of the combined stack when you face it and mean you've got a better chance of winning that face off.
It also helps for finishing wars quickly, because then you can divert your stack to sieges etc. Spending a couple of months chasing ever smaller stacks around means the war lasting a couple of months longer. That means less time waiting for vassal opinion penalties to build up and wear off, so not only finishing this war quicker but being able to start the next one sooner.
But better than not bothering at all if that is your cultural option.
The Caballero isn't underpowered, it's light cavalry that is. The Caballero is actually a pretty decent building compared to other light cav buildings. Bonus offence is a better stat IMO for light cav. Horse archers, on the other hand, are overpowered, which is why they're so hard to get (ahistorically actually, mounted archers were a minor component in more armies than they are represented in game, especially Hungary.)
I actually think it's the longbows that are way overpowered.
Archers are already at the top of the unit damage chart. Then you buff them 60%. Then you give them the most powerful tactics in the game to buff that even more. And of course they're cheap as dirt, so you can spam longbow retinues. Wow.
The only counter-balance is their weak morale and the short length of the skirmish phase. I haven't played around with longbows. So I'm not sure if in practice they get destroyed during melee to make up for that ridiculous power in skirmish. But wow, in skirmish they're really sort of absurd.
Archers are already at the top of the unit damage chart. Then you buff them 60%. Then you give them the most powerful tactics in the game to buff that even more. And of course they're cheap as dirt, so you can spam longbow retinues. Wow.
The only counter-balance is their weak morale and the short length of the skirmish phase. I haven't played around with longbows. So I'm not sure if in practice they get destroyed during melee to make up for that ridiculous power in skirmish. But wow, in skirmish they're really sort of absurd.
As a few people have intimated, if archers are >60% of a flank, then the enemy will almost certainly (prob increased 100x) choose 'charge on undefended flank' (not on the wiki page, but its in the file), which puts you immediately in melee. So if you spam longbow retinues to the exclusion of everything else then you get 3 days of skirmish then they start dying quick. But provided you don't fall into that trap, yes its probably quite nastily effective.