Inf or cav doesn't matter when defending? Just making sure I understand this.. And those attacking penalties are rough for cav. As they should be.
The defender gets no (visible) modifiers regarding the units he uses. So, yes, there is absolutly no reason not to use CAV on defence.
Could be that there is a modifier hidden (like terrain also boosting defence roll for defender), but even if it is there - it is not signifiacnt.
Not already at Men at arms? They have twice as much offensive and defensive morale as the cavalry, will the higher shock "win" over that?
And why 2-4 cav units? Is there a reason to have more than 2?
This is a common misinterpretation.
The "dots" from unit types are the least important factor that influence combat. At most they would increase your dice roll by +1. On the other hand, if you take a look at the shock modifiers, INF will have something around 0.45 during the early game, while CAV has 0.9. This modifier is used for the very final combat resolution, so basicly CAV deals (roughly) twice the shock damage of INF. On the other hand, the fire value for INF during the early game is 0.05, so your INF will only have 5% effective combat power during the fire phase for this timeframe. Or short: Fire is useless until the modifier goes up to (at least) 0.25, better 0.5.
This effect decreases over time as INF gets better, but it takes up to LT 12 until you will notice the INF model and fire advantage. Landsknecht INF has enough defensive morale to withstand CAV and win morale wise. They will still take much higher casualties and deliever less damage to the enemy, though.
However, CAV will get a higher and higher shock modifier, ending up with something like 1.2 INF vs. 4.0 CAV. In IN, where shock came before fire this meant that a CAV charge around 1600 would be devestating if you rolled a high number, because CAV dealt almost quadrouple shock damage compared to INF. To make things worse, a high shock general boosted that value even more, leading to increadible losses on enemy side, sometimes almost annhilating a 2:1 superiour INF force within the first 5 days of combat...
In addition, CAV was faster than INF, so you could basicly run in front of a retreating army and force it to attack you in their retreat destination, giving THEM the terrain modifiers. This was probably the biggest thing about CAV.
However, all of this is fixed in HTTT - fire comes (once again) first, so INF does much, much better against CAV, esp. during the later game. CAV speed has been reduced to INF speed, so no more outracing retreating stacks.
Why use more than 2 CAV? Well, because sometimes the order of battle changes - reinforcements, breaking units, etc. With 4 CAV instead of 2 CAV, two units will remain as a reserve after a battle, so you can still flank during the next combat, even if the other 2 regiments get beaten up. But it's more like a luxury.
