Originally posted by Free Enterprise
Zachriel is right. All the documentaries, such as one on the history channel spoke very little of cavalry being used at all in the Civil War(American). Mostly riflemen were used to attack, especially in forrests. Grant's army had huge amounts of riflemen when attacking.
They make sensible history TV documentaries where you live? I'm impressed.
At the time of the American Civil War, infantry units had been used as main attacking units for centuries. Nothing remarkable about that.
In World War I calvary was considered a dieing breed so to speak. It is much more difficult to fire a modern rifle on horse back than on foot. Infantry can use camoflauge and group cordinating attacks. One uses a machine gun to suppress the foes while another rushes in with the rifle and grenades. A cavalry merely charges into their death. And to top it off Cavalry are easy to hit, can't make the horse try to get out the bullet's/s' way very easily.
Do you really think 1700-1800s cavalry were as good at attacking as a WW1 or WW2 infantry?
In most circumstances, no.
The game, of course, abstracts away all the development that went on in the kind of troops represented by a given unit. When you've acquired Infantry and are still havign Cav, we're speaking roughly 1900 tech level. I assume that the attack rating includes tactical manoeuvrability etc, and I do think that the same attack value for Infantry and Cav is a decent approximation, when fighting on open ground. That didn't happen alot during WWI.
That brings us to one of the most unrealistic features of the combat system of the civ games; in reality, mounted units were really only any good in open terrain, whereas the games positively encourages us to throw them at fortified cities. SMAC took a step in the right direction by giving footsloggers an attack bonus against cities, but even there you generally took cities by running mechanized units straight into them, and Civ III increased the advantage of using mounted units to attack cities by including the retreat ability.
In non-medieval times (ie both ancient and industrial), the main strength of mounted units should be high mobility, not high attack rating as compared to contemporary foot units. The reason cav did well in the Polono-Soviet War was precisely that they could outpace infantry units and quickly secure strategic locations etc. And they should suck at storming fortified cities.
To achieve realism in this regard would require a drastic rework of unit stats, which's doable in the editor, and different terrain and city defence effects on different units, which's not. Let's hope for Civ IV. For the meantime, I'll assume my Cav are dragoons; moves on horse, typically attack on foot.
I think by the time you have infantry it isn't a well thought out plan to keep build cavalry since they cannot be upgraded to anything. Infantry on the other hand can, plus you can use surplus infantry to defend against tanks.
