Horse Archers - why the hate?

[Porphyrius]

I've tweaked my program to also compute the size of the army you need to achieve victory. (And I corrected a bug that was lowballing the hammer cost of your casualties)

Again, the scenario is to compute the cost of killing a CG 2 archer in a flatland city with a 25% fortify bonus.

Swordsmen are all CR2, and valued at 40 hammers.
Horse archers are an appropriate mix of FL2 and C2, and valued at 50 hammers.
C2 Horse Archers are purely combat 2 horse archers.
"need" is the expected hammer cost of the units you need to kill the archer.
"lose" is the expected hammer cost of your casualties.

40% cultural defense:
Swordsmen: need 70.57 hammers, lose 30.57 hammers.
Horse archers: need 92.52 hammers, lose 21.76 hammers.
C2 Horse archers: need 86.00 hammers, lose 28.80 hammers.

This calculation is right on the mark.
Stronger units rather than flanking mean less hammers and thus time to prepare for an attack to be succesful.

This to me is by far more important to actually reducing your loses or getting a high number of promoted units in most situations.
I find that unless i try to mess with an opponent that has a huge land mass under his control reinforcing isnt really that tough.
Plus promoting above level 4 usually has redudant payoff.

Ofcourse your limited calculations include fully promoted defenders (unlikely) and much more importantly fail to consider that CR3 swords widen the gap further than the 20% yuo calculate.
Not to mention that in BTS one is very likely to have counters to deal in the 2nd target city. The AI doesnt seem to take UU well into acount though, i.e. i have seen it whip holkans to deal with my axes consistently.
Add to this that IW is a bit cheaper and has necessary production boosting techs (BW,mine) as prequisites, and you easily conclude that a succesful early offensive based on swords can come faster.

100% cultural defense:
Swordsmen: need 83.22 hammers, lose 43.22 hammers.
Horse archers: need 119.05 hammers, lose 35.69 hammers.
C2 Horse archers: need 97.82 hammers, lose 38.26 hammers.

Now if we are talking well into the middle ages, one cant ignore the devastating effects of cats. Which makes decisions easy really.



That is not ot say HA are without uses.
A flank mounted unit is the best approach when a secondary city is defended by a couple really strong defenders acompanied by more lesser (somewhat osbolet or green) ones.
However the question in every game is will they see enough use to make getting HR worth it.

@kcmarkwell:
Offcourse they are great because of their speed when everything is early, but then you are not attacking you are just trying to mop things up quicker.

PS: Oppsitely from HA i find chariots lovely rushers excactly beacause you can have enough for an attack early cause they cost less than axes and move 2, even if they are weaker.

 

[Roxlimn]

The calculation also fails to account for speed in movement and the presence of counter-units. A Swordsman-only assault is more likely to take cities nearby but is less likely to proceed quickly and decisively because the enemy has more time to make Axemen. An HA force can quickly take out an enemy's Copper and Iron (where feasible) and almost completely block the presence of any counter-unit - a major advantage against the use of Swordsmen.

Having used large amounts of both, I can say with some experience that HAs pack a smaller punch individually, but are more resilient as a force and sustain less casualties, largely because you "pad the fat" with Flanking HAs, allowing the Combat HAs to mop up relatively easy battles and win a lot (and thus get a lot of promotions).

The Combat HAs tend to be more useful because you can use them to support a bunch of Catas and regular units as well as a bunch of Flanking HAs. If you have extra HAs, it makes sense to give them Flanking to lessen casualties and create more promotions, as well as for attacking enemy stacks with siege in them.

I'd say that the HAs are definitely worth getting early if some conditions are true, and absolutely worth building in the late Classical and Medieval eras for the extra flexibility and power they provide.

 

[futurehermit]

^^^Well said

 

[oyzar]

For those that haven't i would advise to play gotm 25 and read the first spoiler as bables have some very good things to say there .

 

[duende29]

I think I haven't researched HBR since I played Hannibal in Warlords... Someone ends throwing it in a late trade. I usually don't build many cavalry units at all, but I guess I should; my reasoning is that less cavalry = more siege/infantry = easier city taking. And I don't particularly like the Horse Archers, I think they're kinda sucky, but I guess I'll force myself to build them next random I play and see for myself.

 

[futurehermit]

less cavalry = more siege/infantry = easier city taking

the tradeoff is:

more cavalry = less siege/infantry = faster city taking

 

[duende29]

I dunno, the scary units are still there. And those beakers on HBR seem kinda better placed towards Construction... HAs seem more like a gamble. I rather trade and go for the "better" cavalry.

 

[MyOtherName]

If you take a 50/50 gamble 100 times, you can be virtually certain that you will win nearly half the time.

 

[lukep]

An update on my German Horse Archer game:

I won domination in 1890, which is about 4 decades or around 20+ turns faster than my average. My final score was over 100,000 for the first time in BTS. It was by far my best game I've played in BtS yet.

I'm not saying the horse archers were 100% responsible (Panzers rule!), but they were quite effective and getting the land base pictured above went a long way to securing the victory

My best game was with keshiks (98000+ in warlord/monarch), second best game with Cirrus (win before 1500), and it boiled down to 2 things imho :

- reinforcements are fast on the front line
- the surviving FlankII ones get quickly insane promotions (Non warlord unit level 10 anyone ?, GG cav lvl 15), and so steamroll anything in sight. You need 2 MASH units to be really effective (one with the stack, the other in last city conquered with healing units).

I builded during this game almost only mounted units (at one time i think i had around 100 and was able to have 3 attack stack) with only a few cats for the strongest cities on hill, and often they did not have time to reach the spot. the trickest part of that game was that i needed the money from cities taken to keep my economy afloat, so needed to stay at war.

However i found in the Cirrus game that the best first prom is C1/Fl1 and only if the unit survive FlankII. This way, the first attackers do more damage on a strong defender.

 

[Wodan]

When you have a mounted attack force, I think that using spies to take down city defenses is vastly superior to using siege units.

The whole advantage of HAs is speed. Having to make your HAs wait while your cats dink along makes their biggest advantage useless. Plus, you have to wait 2-4 turns while the cats knock down the defenses. Even worse.

Much better: plan ahead, build up espionage points against your opponent, and/or get and use a great spy as needed. Spies have move 2, and you can pre-position them so that they wait the 5 turns to make it cheap. (I'd send 2 spies to each city so that if they discover one of them, the other is your backup.)

For sheer blinding speed, nothing like it. I did this trick with HAs one game and rufkm the war was over before I even had any weariness at all.

Wodan

 

[futurehermit]

The thing that sucks is that when you declare war spies are spit out of the enemy empire now. By the time the slow-moving spies get to the cities your horses have been waiting impatiently for awhile. It's kind of annoying.

However, yes, having spies tear down defenses with a mobile force is devastating. Better than any other approach imo. It's just difficult to pull off effectively now. You kinda have to have your spies on the other side of your enemy's empire so they can get to the back cities and preferably have a couple turns to fortify in time for when your horses get there.

 

[Wodan]

The thing that sucks is that when you declare war spies are spit out of the enemy empire now. By the time the slow-moving spies get to the cities your horses have been waiting impatiently for awhile. It's kind of annoying.

I thought Bhruic fixed that?

Wodan

edit: Yes, he did. I just checked the changelog. You need Bhruic's patch Futurehermit.

 

[futurehermit]

I'll look into it. Thanks.

 

[madscientist]

After being harrassed by Alexander and his Phalynx units, I can say HAs are one of the best counters to them!!! Pre-BTS HAs were dead against the Greek UU, now they save you!!

 

[futurehermit]

Good call!

 

[futurehermit]

I thought Bhruic fixed that?

Wodan

edit: Yes, he did. I just checked the changelog. You need Bhruic's patch Futurehermit.

Thanks, I installed it and it works great. the horse archers now mwhuhahahahahaha

 

[Wodan]

futurehermit. Enjoy! Bhruic fixed some other messiness as well.

Wodan

 

[duende29]

After being harrassed by Alexander and his Phalynx units, I can say HAs are one of the best counters to them!!! Pre-BTS HAs were dead against the Greek UU, now they save you!!

Playing KK, I just had Alex DoW (TWICE!) on me suddenly, I mean, I was miles from his cities and still. Anyway, Keshiks saved the day. They destroyed his stack of 4-5 units, Phalanx and Spears, then proceeded to destroy the closest civ, De Gaulle, netting me a capital and a bunch of gold, and now I'm pillaging Alex back to stone age, razing 2 cities along the way (Sparta and Corith?). Soon the entire continent (Continents) will me mine and the clock is still in the BCs.

Ok, those were Keshiks, not HAs, but still.

 

[Mr. Civtastic]

Play a game where you want/need to do an early rush but you have no metal. Then you'll learn the power of 15+ stack of HAs. Plus its nice to have one leveled up to give your first gg for that medic III.

 

[bardolph]

Swordsmen are all CR2, and valued at 40 hammers.
Horse archers are an appropriate mix of FL2 and C2, and valued at 50 hammers.
C2 Horse Archers are purely combat 2 horse archers.

One more consideration: in a Classical-Era war, you are unlikely to be able to build twice-promoted Swordsmen. More likely, they will be CR1 only.