It's my first game in Italy since retinues exist. While the Knights in France and Cataphracts in the ERE were very efficient, I have my doubts on the all-Pike retinue specific to the Italian region. Any thoughts anyone?
Pike Retinue
- Thread starter GillesDeRais
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im not sure about the pike one. while heavy inf combined with a slight amount of cav or cav support are quite strong, i dont believe pikes have a lot fo strong tactics like charge or shieldwall.
Pikes have access to Shieldwall, although it's not quite as effective for them. Italian pikes have access to Pike Column Advance, and Scottish pikes have access to Schiltrom Formation, which are both good tactics.
Don't pikes help vs cav, giving Italians a way to negate French, German and BYZ increased heavy cav numbers? I'd expect significant penalties for cav in such a situation but I'm not sure as to the level of detail in CK2's handling of battles.
Whew, that sucks. No Battle of Golden Spurs while there are still plenty Agincourts delivered by Cheap Archers of Imba.
Longbow retinues effing rock
Would pikes work well with light cav? Everyone complains how light cavalry throws the battle into close combat too quickly, but if you are a general of pikemen, that would seem to be exactly what you want.
I have used them and found them quite effective.
I created stacks of 3/4 pike and 1/4 cav (to bolster the non-existent pike pursue value). They work just like heavy infantry, but more defensive. The Italian bonus isn't either attack or defense but morale. Combined with the natural high defense of pikes, battles tend to last a long time as the pikes slowly grind out the enemy. You just need the cav to clean up when the enemy breaks first.
The one place I don't like them is in assaults. For some reason, they seem to be terrible at assaulting. They win, but it takes forever for some reason. Nobody t knows the actual mechanics for assaults so I don't know why. I presume the moral bonus helps though, as morale is so important in assaulting fortresses.
Given the choice, I would rather have a heavy infantry cultural retinue than pikes. But the pikes are a decent all around choice, and better than some of the alternative options.
I created stacks of 3/4 pike and 1/4 cav (to bolster the non-existent pike pursue value). They work just like heavy infantry, but more defensive. The Italian bonus isn't either attack or defense but morale. Combined with the natural high defense of pikes, battles tend to last a long time as the pikes slowly grind out the enemy. You just need the cav to clean up when the enemy breaks first.
The one place I don't like them is in assaults. For some reason, they seem to be terrible at assaulting. They win, but it takes forever for some reason. Nobody t knows the actual mechanics for assaults so I don't know why. I presume the moral bonus helps though, as morale is so important in assaulting fortresses.
Given the choice, I would rather have a heavy infantry cultural retinue than pikes. But the pikes are a decent all around choice, and better than some of the alternative options.
Longbow retinues effing rock
Especially with them costing 1 to 1 in retinue cap usage and being the cheapest to reinforce and almost the cheapest to make. Where a French noble can field 1500 heavy and 1000 light cavalry, an English lord can just make 8000 Archers of Imba (with the offensive capability of 12,800 archers, nice opening volley, isn't it?). He will also pay 200 gold instead of 640 and reinforcement will cost 5 a month instead of 16. Agincourt pales before that.
The author of a fan guide to Shogun 2 used the expression, "to make horse kebab," to describe those type of encounters. If anything, I'd expect heavy cav to be better vs pikemen than light cav. Light cav are still melee and not missile troops, while they have less protection. Heavy cav sometimes charged pike formations and won. Poles did stuff like that well into 17th century.
I suspect assaulting a stronghold uses skirmish attack/defense values, judging from what longbow retinues do to a garrison.
Actually I was talking about combining a few cavalry regiments with your pikes, to bring the battle out of skirmish to close combat more quickly.