Is Cavalry Overpowered?

[BigRich]

Originally posted by pcasey
A couple comments :

1) I'm inclined to agree with the people who think the real problem is retreat rather than combat factors. I almost never lose cavalry, they just retreat and I can heal them up later. That means I save on production costs, and I get more elite units and a better shot at a still absurdly rare great leader. Perhaps equally importantly, it starves defending units of a chance at a morale upgrade.

2) Cavalry's 3 movement factor is strategic rather than tactic movement. They move across the map at that rate, year after year after year. Historically, horse cavalry units were limited to about 50 miles a day over good roads becaus the horses can't handle being ridden at anything faster than a walk for extended e.g. weeks at a time. In contrast, even primitive armored vehicles could do 10 miles an hour, 12 hours a day over lots of different terrain. There's really no excuse for cavalry being faster than tanks or mechanized infantry.

On the other hand armoured vehicles require supply lines for fuel and spare parts. I'm guessing logistics and the need to repair would slow them down. All a horse really needs is a patch of grass every so often and some water

I guess we could rationalise and counter-rationalise forever though. In the end it's how it affects the game that matters.

Rich.

[Thrawn05]

I don't really think that they are overpowered. By the time you and everyother civ has the tech for it, you should have managed a nice size army (not the army unit, i mean all of your military units), with at least 3 to 4 defenders in each city (wither they are pikemen, musketmen or even a couple of swoardsmen).

Granted, they are a powerful unit, and pretty cheap when it comes done to it, but I like them, even if I'm getting my butt kicked by some other civ.

[Nic]

Re: Is Cavalry Overpowered?

Originally posted by pcasey

2) It outmatches its comperable defensive unit. Musketeers defend at 4, cavalry attacks at 6. Cavalry can disengage. A pack of cavalry can take any city in the game if it outnumbers the defenders by about 1.5 to 1. Knights vs Pikemen was a 4/3 attack/defense. Cavalry/Musketeers is a 6/4.

Cavalry does not really match up against musketeers, it is more a companion to riflemen which creates a far more balanced 6/6 contest. If you have cavalry against musket then you have a genuine technical advantage and I would expect you to be able to expoit it. (The matching mounted unit for musket would probably be dragoon but its not in civ3, there are lots of cases where intermediate units have been omitted).

To a large extent the problem is that the AI does not handle combined arms well, it should have at least a knight of its own waiting in the town to counter-attack your exhausted cavalry - but usually it does not. Cavalry without supporting infantry should be easy meat for counter-attacks especially when down to 1 hp after attacking and I suspect this will happen should MP ever come along. In the meantime we just have to accept that the AI is not as smart as a human opponent.


--
Nic

[Allemand]

I think cavalry matches musketmen closer than riflemen. The defensive unit has bonuses but the offensive unit (cavalry) does not. When cavalry attacks riflemen in a city, cavalry loses. It also loses more often than not against musketmen in cities.

Anyhow, if you think cavalry is too strong, the solution is to lower the movement points to 2, and lower the offensive strength to 5. A lot of people won't like that, but doing it in the editor is fine. Most likely, only the human player will be hurt.

[Bad Ax]

Retreat doesn't seem such an overwhelming advantage to me. My typical defensive complement for a city is 2-3 strong defenders and 2 mobile attackers, and when I go to war I usually pull off one mobile attacker for the effort (this reflects a limited war strategy which I employ permanently. If you use this system, the retreat option doesn't do the enemy any damn good b/c they withdraw w/1hp and you destroy them slowly. As long as you have barracks and they don't have battlefield medicine, you can stall defeat indefinitely at any hard defensive point b/c you heal in 1 turn while the vet cavalry need 3 OUTSIDE YOUR TERRITORY.

Where cavalry strikes me as overpowered is in the defense characteristic. Cavalry were always very poor at defending, just as riflemen were ineffective at offense (thanks to massed infantry fire). Defending cavalrymen had two weaknesses -- they had to dismount, which nullified their mobility advantage, and the limited amount of training time available meant that they had to learn mounted tactics before learning dismounted defense. That's why Buford's defenses at Thoroughfare Gap and Gettysburg are such striking works of soldiering.

As for strategic speed--I think you have to consider force volume when you talk about this. A horse squadron can move in a fairly tight group down any path or road in a region with reasonable efficiency. A tank squadron, however, takes up a lot more space, and as such will be unable to use roads and pathways as efficiently. A tank moving over a road might have a greater strategic speed than a cavalry squadron, but tanks, especially in the early days, constantly had to slog through mud and brush and other landscape features for which they were ill-suited 10 miles per hour is a significant overestimate of their speed. Remember also that the logistics play a role in strategic speed. The constant need for gasoline means that tanks need a large supply chain to be effective, while the cavalry "vehicle" can be fueled by local flora in most instances.

I suggest then, that you mod cavalry to 6/2/3. This makes cavalry vulnerable to counterattack in open terrain (which they were), and forces a more realistic strategy of keeping a main infantry body at the forefront of an advancing force (thus to defend the cavalry while encamped), while using cavalry to clear the flanks, guard the supply chain, scout, and mount major offensives. Note that this also decreases the problem of making sure that cannon keep up with your offensive. I also suggest you mod the price of cavalry up by ~40%, as cavalry troops were significantly more expensive to equip and maintain than musketmen or riflemen.

[Velociryx]

More on Cavalry & why I think the retreat option is overpowering at current unit costs:

Consider a battle against the AI (who, as I have observed in my games, is much more adept at attacking than at defending his own territory).

I mass my cav in 3-4 strategic locations....sufficient for overwhelming the defenses at those 3-4 cities all at once.

DoW and attack.

Despite borders creating some barrier between me and the cities (a barrier that would delay by 1-2 turns, an infantry based attack), I can launch my attack immediately.

The AI has no mobile defenders in his cities, so all my cavs get to retreat when damaged.

All the target cities are overwhelmed. No losses on my side.

I call the AI up and wrangle a surrender. If he won't surrender, I use any spare units to sever roads to buy my troops time to heal, buy my infantry time to move up for defense and wait him out.

Repeat as necessary.

Game.

Vs. Human opponents:
A little more uncertain, but for drawing first blood, it's no contest. If there ever IS MP, I promise you that you'll see "Mongol Hordes" when humans attack each other....mounted troops pouring en mass over your borders. Even if you have mounted troops in numbers yourself, the fact that they'll dominate MP games implies that they're superior in some way, and I think that retreat, and it's implications where capturing cities is concerned, is a major part of that.

Or....no?



-=Vel=-

[Quurgoth]

Sun Tzu + Cavalry = Dead AI

I always race to Sun Tzu in Civ3, and cavalry provide the best example of why it's so important.

I was able to take 3 cities from an AI civ in one turn, using 15 cavalry (3 cavalry against a tiny city, 6 against each of two larger cities).

The next round, the cavalry were moved into the cities, where a new barracks awaited them.

The next round, each cavalry completely healed itself, safe within the confines of a city with a fortified defensive unit.

Lather, rinse, repeat... end of AI civ.

IMO, cavalry are overpowered. 3 movement is too many... run two squares within your cultural envelope, cross two enemy culture squares, and you're right at the enemy's gates, with 1/3 movement point left to conduct the attack. I support reducing the 3 movement to 2.

[Nakar Gabab]

...what if 1/3 or 2/3 a movement point remaining was multiplied by your attack factor? Like SMAC? It doesn't do that in Civ3, right? Should it?

[Arrian]

I can't keep from thinking that if Cavalry wasn't in the game, or had different stats, that we'd be debating whether or not Longbowmen were overpowered or something. I think the unit balance is pretty solid, and the problems that have shown up (easy mid-late game conquests) have to do with the human player understanding how to use the units while the AI does not.

Changing the stats on a given unit may slow down the human player, but it won't change the stategic and tactical advantage of having a brain. It's not really the retreat thing that gives us an advantage. The AI will in fact track down and kill a beat up mobile unit you stupidly leave out in the open. That's not the problem. The problem is that when I move a stack of infantry, artillery and cavalry into his territory, the AI cannot deal with it. In fact, it doesn't even try to hurt the stack. It tries to sneak past it to capture workers. A human player would bombard the stack, then attack with mobile units and whittle it down. A human player would understand the power of concentrated firepower, and would muster all of his/her artillery in the target city to deal with the incoming stack. The AI does not do this. So, even if you invaded the AI with weakened Cavalry, or some other unit in place of Cavalry, you're still going to win.

The AI can beat you early with sheer numbers, but once combined arms comes into play, it suffers.

-Arrian

[Dis]

I actually think horseman are overpowered for the same reason. Sure they only have a 2 attack, but they can retreat. A horseman rush is just as effective as a calvary rush.

solution? 50% chance the retreat fails.

[MarshalN]

Cavalry's 3 movement factor is strategic rather than tactic movement. They move across the map at that rate, year after year after year. Historically, horse cavalry units were limited to about 50 miles a day over good roads becaus the horses can't handle being ridden at anything faster than a walk for extended e.g. weeks at a time. In contrast, even primitive armored vehicles could do 10 miles an hour, 12 hours a day over lots of different terrain. There's really no excuse for cavalry being faster than tanks or mechanized infantry.

This is actually not true, since the primitive armoured vehicles (say, WW1 or even WW2 tanks) break down very often. You definitely can't run them for 12 hours straight, or even 2 hours straight in some cases.

[pcasey]

The graphic for the tank though shows a WW II type tank which looks suspsiciously like a US Sherman, a tank whose sole virtue was mechanical reliability.

[Luigi]

A solution?

I know it's not reallistic but I've been thinking that it would be a good idea to limit the total number of units you can make of each type, the limit may depend on the number of strategic resources you have, the size of your empire, particular characteristics of the empire, technologies, city improvements (this city cannot build another tank without a power plant sir....) the unit itself etc....
This will force the player to a balanced strategy for combat, combining several kind of units in a battle discouraging the tedious "all horsemen, all cavalry" way of handling militar units.

I think this can greatly balance the power of units, if you have the "supermastertank" but you can only build 5 of them then you must use other units to empower your armies. Adding aditional units will also be easier without risking unbalancing the combat system.

It's just an idea I had after crushing the world with horsemen, hundreads of horsemen. In MP it will be very boring to see battles between 34 cavalry vrs 35 cavalry and so....

[knott]

An overpowerd unit is the mounted warrior.
IMHO cavalry should have 2 move BTW

[Padmewan]

I think the designers purposely made cavalry a bit overmatched, just as soon thereafter infantry are overmatched defensive units. It's "realistic": before WWI, the cavalry were the backbone of any serious army, and gave the advantage to the attacker. Well, then the machine gun came along and gave the advantage to the defender, until the tank came along. All in all, well thought out.

If there is a problem, it's that the AI is bad at using cavalry as counterattack units. With 3 a unit move of 3 and the "home turf" advantage of roads (making them a 9 move unit), cavalry illustrate that "the best defense is a good offense." I have seen the AI direct massive counterattacks, but not always.