Industrial era unit; Sword armed cavalry

early industrial sword armed cavalry

A new unit to fill the gap between knights and cavalry and to give civs with no saltpeter a chance to strike back.

"In the early period of firearms the weapons were unwieldy and difficlt to aim as well as reload, even long barrel muskets were inacurate at anything other than short range and one way of defeating musket armed troops was to take advantage of the weakness and slow rate of fire of the musket men to charge and break the line, once the musket troops were fleeing, their high tech weapons became useless. Even the earlies muskets however could easily penetrate the toughest armour and the ony protection for attacking troops lay in mobility and ease oof movement; Thus the all over armour of the feudal knight was abandoned in favour of a breastplate and helmet, to protect the head from hand weapons while leaving the body relativly free to avoid incoming fire as best they could."

Put the contents of the zip file in to a new folder called Dragoon in your CivIII/art/units folder and add the unit to your scenario using civ edit. I would recomend ADM values of 5/2/3 and costs around the same as the knight. You may want to give it the Zone of control flag also to represent their role as "raiders" and early "partisans".

Here is a preview of the unit;

Good idea. I was using the arab horseman for this role already - but only for arab countries (got 2 in my mod) of course. I de-flagged cavalry for the arab countries.

Here is what the unit looks like at Civ scale; the jacket is civ coloured (here green).
I am going to do another Horse mounted unit, though I'm not sure which yet, perhaps an advanced pastoral nomadic Horse archer as the cut and paste one on the boards is a conversion of the babylonian (assyrian) bowman; an early bronze age unit. The Huns and later the mongols perfected the nomadic horsearcher @1000 years after the last bout of assyrian militarism; conteporary with the long bow in europe, its realy a middle ages unit.
I may also do an early Light horseman to fill out the ancient era, the standard horseman (wearing chainmail) should be a heavy horseman, the precursor of the knight.

That is very much 17th century cavalry.
It could appear fairly soon in the game...

During 18th century the breastlate and helmet was taken off as useless and "the real military tradition" which was forgotten for sometime came to fashion again. I mean the horsemanship and gentleman skills of the cavalry.

Personally I would put 18th century cavalry (like napoleonic cavalry) to replace the original cavalry of the game and then it would jump straight to the "cavalry" by Dark Sheer.

However in game problem is that there aren't basically any room for these units as rifleman which comes from natiolism is mainly very much the infantry used in civil war so Dark Sheer cavalry would have to come available then...There would be only few years to light cavalry make great effort when in reality they were necessary for whole 18th century.

Great Dragoon unit
Now I can use it as an upgrade to the knight. Possibly the Dragoon comes when you discover Military Tradition while bumping the Civ III Cavalry up to Industrialization.
And I cant wait for the Super Ironclad

YES!! Beautiful unit... Just what I needed to recreate the 30 years war. I really wish the game had more units in the 16-17th century eras. I'll definitely add this one to my game.

great unit. Renamed it to Curasier, and made it appear with Gunpowered to replace the knight.

tanks, ships, planes, and now dragoons?? [dance]

Great unit smoking mirror. And it fits into the game well. Any game.

As always, great unit!

Calling it a Dragoon isn't really accurate. Dragoons were units equiped with muskets who used horses to move about but dismounted before firing. However, I don't know what to call this unit... so Dragoon works. Maybe it can be a intermediary between knight and cavalry. I'm not sure...

Originally posted by Donal Graeme
Calling it a Dragoon isn't really accurate. Dragoons were units equiped with muskets who used horses to move about but dismounted before firing. However, I don't know what to call this unit... so Dragoon works. Maybe it can be a intermediary between knight and cavalry. I'm not sure...

Click to expand...

One of the earlier posters was on the right track with Cuirassier. In the 16th to 18th centuries when armor was being made obsolete by firearms, they were a heavy cavalry type that still wore a breastplate (aka Cuirass) and armed with swords. The armor consisted of a little more or a little less depending upon where in the history they were used, obviously with more armor being worn the further back in time one looks.

A dragoon, as you said, was a type of mounted infantry. They rode up to the battlefield on horse, but dismounted and fought on foot. One way of similuting them in the game would be to use the cavalry (or better yet, this absolutely amazing unit that Smoking Mirror has created) for the run and default animations. But use the musketman for the attack and fortify animations.

Other mounted units in the same period include:

The Arquebusier, similar to the Cuirassier was armed with the Arquebus. I use JimmyH's Conquistador unit as an Arquebusier since I don't have the Spanish Civ in my game.

Lancers: light cavalry armed with lance.

Hussars: medium cavalry with sword and lance and the winged guards extending from the back of the saddle. JimmyH has posted a great Hussar unit from AoK elsewhere.

Pancerni/Panzer: Medium cavalry armed with mail, short bow, sabre, and pistol.

I think Cuirassier is a great name for this unit. And I have just the place to put it in my mod.

Yes Cuirassier is probably the best name for this unit. I used dragoon, because that was the unit in Civ II that filled the gap between knights and cavalry.

On my website, I used Dragoon. Great Job

GIDustin

nonnob - I'm not sure where they started, but I do know the French used them a lot in the New World.

What do you recommend for stats on this unit? It's hard because we got the knight 4/3/2 and cavalry 5/3/3 so there's no middle ground there. I was thinking of 4/2(or3)/4 with only horses as the resource requirement to benefit resource-starved civs.

Any good suggestions?

Cavalry is 6/3/3.

as far as stats go, I give Knights 5/2/2 (to encourage the use of Pikemen), Sword Armed Cavalry 4/3/3 (showing the increasingly flexible role of cavalry), Dragoon - Civ3 Cavalry - 6/3/3 and Cavalry - Dark Sheer's Bandit - 8/4/4 (available around Industrialisation).

I had a progression like that, but cut one cavalry. I might be wrong, but I don't think any country had the cowboy style cavalry except the US. Judging from pictures, it looks like most European Cavalry wore those goofy helmets right into WWI, so I put that back as the regular cavalry and made the other into American cavalry, kind of a unique unit but with the same stats. I called the sword cav a dragoon, even though that's pretty inaccurate. Right now, here is how I set it up: (Note: I increased all unit speed by one, except cavalry. I wanted to see how the game played with infantry having 2 moves. The jury is still out, but so far it's kind of cool.)

Knight at 4/3/3, -1 HP (Doesn't seem to put the Pikeman out of business, since they are a spearmen upgrade and they are half as expensive)

Dragoon at 6/3/3, no HP penalty, with Metallurgy (Like Zulu said, to reflect their flexibility and improved tactics at the time)

Cavalry at 8/4/3, no HP penalty, with Nationalism (Dragoons can still beat them, but Knights will have a harder time.)

On a sidenote, I recommend everyone mess with the HP bonuses. It should help eliminate those stupid fluke battles, and is another way to boost special units.

Ive been having lots of fun with;
Horseman 2/1/2 (horses) horse riding
Horse archers 3/1/3 (horses) polytheism
Knight 4/3/2 (horses, Iron) Chivalry
Dragoons/Cuirasser etc... 5/2/3 (horses, iron) Gunpowder
Cavalry 6/3/3 (horses, saltpeter) military tradition

The extra difference in movement makes sword armed cavalry very usefull, the extra point of attack makes a real difference also. With the sword armed cavalry not requiring saltpeter they also make civs with out firearms somewhat less than a walkover as they can at least make counter attacks and with the high attack can sometimes deliver a dramatic rversal of fortune if you become over confident. Knights perhaps don't last very long, enough perhaps for one or two wars, but at least that means that when you get in to the industrial era most of the horsemen are either sword armed cavalry or carabiners/ full cavalry- not the legions of totaly outdated knights that you usualy get running around, the last knights disapeared in the 17th century, full armour being relagated to ceremonial use, while cavalry was still in use all the way up to WWII, so this make the game feel much more realistic (apart from the fact that even the average player is usualy about 100 years ahaedo fthe clock when it comes to techs- tanks rolling in to the battle field around 1700).