Trav'ling Canuck
Deity
- Joined
- Feb 7, 2018
- Messages
- 2,959
I agree, with Cavalry being BOTH faster AND stronger than melee units, and with no significant penalties applied to their use, things end up looking grimly for melee units. Buffing anti-cav as suggested above is obviously a first step, but not much likely to solve the problem because cavalry can just move around them, plus frontlining your army with anti-cav will basically just make you stall if on offense, because anti-cavs are basically rubbish at doing anything than, well, countering cavs (which they are also rubbish at as things are). I'm generally a proponent of 1UPT, but this is definitely a shortcoming of that system.
I would like to see the cavalry penalty vs. cities from Civ5 return, this was a good way to level the field, and it also makes sense logically (if you're doing siege on a walled city, sitting on a horse is not going to help you, quite in the contrary). And if not that, then the logical solution is to make cavalry weaker than contemporary melee, so cavalry has the advantage of speed, while melee has the advantage of strength. But historically, that is less accurate, as cavalry has dominated melee units in one to one battle.
I agree mounted troops should not have an advantage versus cities compared to foot troops of the same era. So a malus making them equally to their foot contemporary makes sense (ignoring that a mounted unit typically had far fewer fighting men than a foot unit of the same period).
The main balancing issue, though, to my mind should be that you should be heavily limited in the number of elite troops, like cavalry, you can field, and it should be far more expensive to maintain them. I believe the resource system is intended to have this effect, but I'm not sure it works out in practice.