Nomad Army Composition?

[Noxatrox]

What is the best army composition when using nomad horde retinues? I've heard of some people who had a 10k stack of horde units destroy an Abbasid 30k stack with ease, but I've personally had no luck. How can I get my nomad armies to be that strong?

I currently have no heavy cavalry and only light cavalry and horse archers. I figure that this may be one of the problems.

 

[toroltao]

How are you using your commanders? Commander traits matter a lot.

 

[Noxatrox]

All of my current commanders have 20+ martial, haha. I have one aggressive, one trickster, and one organizer. I have a few courtiers who have lower martial but with good commander traits. Should I switch out some of the higher martial commanders with these fellows?

 

[Zsrai]

Higher Martial isn't always better. Definitely look at Commander Traits (Organizer, etc) and also other traits like Wroth, Patient, Zealous, etc.

 

[Noxatrox]

So does army composition really have such a small effect? Am I okay with just ignoring heavy cavalry?

 

[toroltao]

I believe martial score only matters up to a certain point for tactic chance, something like 16 or 14? Idk I read that somewhere. I just hover over the shield icon for the actual battle modifiers.

 

[fridabina]

Do not ever mix Light cavalry and Horse archers, you can have HC mixed in with LC but LC and HA tactics are so horrible mixed together that it can totally ruin a battle for you. If you really want to use horse archers put them in their own flank, but beware of other nomads as light cavalry flanks will totally destroy HA flanks.

 

[Kasemacher]

Martial does, however, boost damage by 2% for each value of the skill. 16 Martial = 32% damage 20 = +40% damage

Not a huge difference but it does matter. If I were to design my perfect nomad commander, they would have Organizer, Cavalry Leader, and then Flat Terrain Leader. This would give you +40% damage on plains and +20% speed.

That means, if you had an identical force, that you would do 80% more damage on plains compared to a leaderless force.

 

[Fabiano79]

I want to know about composition too. Im using with sucess something like the proportion 1000 light, 250 archer, 150 heavy. But I have no clue if this is a good composition.

 

[bkerns]

If they've got a 30k stack you might be able to get them to chase you through some place where they'll take attrition. I use pure light cavalry early on and it seems to beat levies easily at 2 to 1 odds. More than that and it might depend on you having good commanders and / or them having bad commanders.

 

[fridabina]

I want to know about composition too. Im using with sucess something like the proportion 1000 light, 250 archer, 150 heavy. But I have no clue if this is a good composition.

The best in my experience is to spam pure LC and if you manage to get income from a big tributary/lots of pillaging switch some of the horde over to Heavy vanguard.

 

[majorlupa]

Dont mix HA and LC. Use either HA+HC and LC+HC. You can also spam camel retinue which is 'ok'.

 

[Fabiano79]

Thanks, as I said, I had no clue.

 

[fridabina]

They honestly need to make a volley tactic for Horse archers that doesnt require the army to have normal archers. They are so incredibly weak against LC that it's not even funny.

 

[Eslin]

LC are best for fighting hordes, HC are best for anything else. Never mix your units.

 

[Fabiano79]

LC are best for fighting hordes, HC are best for anything else. Never mix your units.

You are probably right. But its not weird, and kind of boring, that you should not use more than one type of unit?

 

[Eslin]

I'm not the one who designed the tactics. As it is, most tactics give a 300% boost to one specific type of unit and no boost or even a negative modifier to units of other type. You use 100% heavy cavalry, you get 100% chance of quadruple damage for all heavy cavalry, you mix in heavy infantry and all that does is mean the heavy infantry are useless when the cavalry tactic fires and the cavalry units are useless when the infantry tactic fires.

It's why nomads are strong, they get free monotype armies - a 5k feudal army is filled with a mix of LC, LI, HI and archers and maybe one or two of those will get a benefit from the tactic being used, while the nomad army gets a boost to every single unit.

That, and the fact that they get ridiculously huge armies for no reason - took me 20 years of playing as the Magyars to get an army of 20,000 heavy cavalry, they're pointlessly broken.

 

[majorlupa]

Funny thing is that harras-swarm (LC and HA mix) has higher modifier (120% damage) for HA than normal swarm which fires for pure horse archer retinue (100%).

 

[Sunspawn]

They honestly need to make a volley tactic for Horse archers that doesnt require the army to have normal archers. They are so incredibly weak against LC that it's not even funny.

WAI. Horse archer tactics are at their most effective against less-mobile enemies like infantry and slower, heavy cavalry. Light cavalry kicking the crap out of them is perfectly logical.

 

[Eslin]

Still worse than just picking pure light cavalry. Only conceivable use for HAs is as a counter melee unit, but that's only going to matter against human players, and nomads are so brokenly good that no non-nomad can deal with them.

Again, please keep in mind that they didn't even try to balance nomads - normally units are balanced by cost, light cavalry cost 3 and heavy cavalry cost 6 so in say a retinue or cultural building you'll get twice as many light cavalry as you would heavy - a building will have 30 LC, a different culture's building will have 15 HC, etc. In horse lords, 250 heavy cavalry costs exactly the same manpower as 250 light cavalry, meaning you're getting a huge amount of stats for free and should always buy HC where possible. Really disappointing expansion, steamrolling everything without effort is not entertaining.