What is the purpose of Heavy Cavalry?

DeletedUser948

Guest
I ask the question - What is the purpose of Heavy Cavalry - because as it stands, their stats in comparison to all the other defensive units make them pointless to train. With the Heavy Cavalry sitting at a 6 people requirement, one can build two of all the other defensive units and have a far superior defense in all categories. Why would I build this unit?
 

DeletedUser936

Guest
Heavy Cavalry is very effective against all types of infantry. They still have a higher movement then infantry, concluding easier support, too. If you play with crowns, the faster movement obviously drops out because of the tacticain.
 

DeletedUser831

Guest
Back in TW1 the heavy cav and spear defensive combo was an alternative to the standard spear and sword combo. It had less fighting power, but the advantage was that with it being faster, you could get more defensive armies to a village under attack. This spread the loss over more villages and overall gave you more flexibility on the defence - you could redeploy your defence faster once it was no longer needed. Given also that heavy cav and spears came from 2 different buildings, the rebuild was also faster.
However, as I said, a single army of heavy cav and spears had less fighting power than the spears and swords (and archers on archer worlds) - the advantage was speed. Given that the tactician means that your superior spear and swords force moves faster than the spear-heavy cav, then heavy cav is rather obsolete. Even more so when you consider that all the units are generated from the same building.

Maybe that is something that the developers could look at? The current situation will make defensive forces rather one dimensional. Heavy cav might be more usable if they had more fighting power or cost less population?
 

DeletedUser936

Guest
The last sentence describes the problem... And thats the reason, why you couldn´t compare TW with TW2 and try to find a new defensive gameplay.
 

DeletedUser831

Guest
-K2-;n7930 said:
The last sentence describes the problem... And thats the reason, why you couldn´t compare TW with TW2 and try to find a new defensive gameplay.

The units are generally pretty similar between TW and TW2 . Man for man, spears and swords were still better than heavy cav on TW. The reason heavy cav are less useful on TW2 is because the tactician robs them of their superior mobility. Spears, swords and archers are not only more effective they are also faster when you use the tactician.
 

DeletedUser948

Guest
OK, thanks - your feedback definitely helps (mobility to defend other villages), nevertheless, Heavy Cavalry DO still seem rather weak. It would make more sense to me if they were obscenely expensive units that gave bigger kick per population point than other units.
 

DeletedUser936

Guest
They are not pretty similar. In TW2 Spearman are more effective against infantry than in TW1. But the most difficult parts are the archer. They are now more or less useless against infantry and weaker than cavalry, but dealing more damage (?). All Offensive Units (especially light cavalry) are, fortunately, stronger in TW2, I hope this leads to a more aggressive gameplay than in TW.

Infos from the Wiki...
 

Dravigas

Squire
In Defense HC/SP 1:4 ratio ( 1 hour 49 mins) recruitment is faster than SP/SW/ARCH 4:3:3 ratio ( 2 hours 12 mins), (used whose ratios to fill up 10 farm spaces, with close enough balance).High rax/ Hall levels will make difference smaller, yet it's still considerable.
In offense HC can exchange LC with loos of 1/3 cavalry attacking power and gain in defense which can moved fast to support even from offensive village in some cases that loss in offense is worth it.
I see lots of uses of HC out there.
 

DeletedUser831

Guest
-K2-;n7950 said:
They are not pretty similar. In TW2 Spearman are more effective against infantry than in TW1. But the most difficult parts are the archer. They are now more or less useless against infantry and weaker than cavalry, but dealing more damage (?). All Offensive Units (especially light cavalry) are, fortunately, stronger in TW2, I hope this leads to a more aggressive gameplay than in TW.

Infos from the Wiki...

On the whole, the units in TW2 perform the same roles they did in TW1. Spears are still best vs cav, swords are still best vs inf. The stats are slightly different, but they perform the same roles. The exception are the archers, who are basically anti-MA weapons as far as I can tell. The archer defence for spears and swords is reduced so this makes sense.
The axes are slightly more powerful, but Lcav are actually identical to the lcav in TW1, which incidentally, means per farm space, axes are more powerful than Lcav (than they were in TW1), and this is without discussing the berserkers.

Dravigas;n7956 said:
In Defense HC/SP 1:4 ratio ( 1 hour 49 mins) recruitment is faster than SP/SW/ARCH 4:3:3 ratio ( 2 hours 12 mins), (used whose ratios to fill up 10 farm spaces, with close enough balance).High rax/ Hall levels will make difference smaller, yet it's still considerable.
In offense HC can exchange LC with loos of 1/3 cavalry attacking power and gain in defense which can moved fast to support even from offensive village in some cases that loss in offense is worth it.
I see lots of uses of HC out there.

Firstly, we are assuming that the optimum SP/SW/ARCH ratio is 4:3:3. If we assume that most nukes will pretty similar to those used in TW1 (not necessarily going to be the case), then the 4:3:3 ratio is inappropriate, because archers are only best against other archers. They have a decent cav defence - far better than swords, but far worse than spears. Regardless, it would probably be more reasonable too suggest a purely infantry based defensive force that contains more spears and swords, and fewer archers.
It is difficult to work out the best combo without using a simulator, but fewer archers and more sp and sw, would result in reduced train time.

The main gain of heavy cav nukes, combined with heavy cav-spear defence is the mobility advantage. The tactician changes that. My spear-sword-archer defence is now just as mobile as the heavy cav forces, if we assume tactician is used for both. However, it is pretty likely that the spear-sword-archer force provides a stronger defence.
So I could just rely on defensive villages, which now have equal mobility, and stronger defensive qualities man for man, and also possess the strongest nukes.

In these circumstances, the use of heavy cav is rather limited. Provided you are willing to pay for some tacticians. If not then heavy cav remain a viable option, but you could be at a disadvantage, Having said that I have a suspicion that the tactician only raises the walking speed of an army en route to the village and not on the way back, which could change things. Will have to look into that.
 

Dravigas

Squire
Britanicus;n8016 said:
Firstly, we are assuming that the optimum SP/SW/ARCH ratio is 4:3:3. If we assume that most nukes will pretty similar to those used in TW1 (not necessarily going to be the case), then the 4:3:3 ratio is inappropriate, because archers are only best against other archers. They have a decent cav defence - far better than swords, but far worse than spears. Regardless, it would probably be more reasonable too suggest a purely infantry based defensive force that contains more spears and swords, and fewer archers.
It is difficult to work out the best combo without using a simulator, but fewer archers and more sp and sw, would result in reduced train time.

The main gain of heavy cav nukes, combined with heavy cav-spear defence is the mobility advantage. The tactician changes that. My spear-sword-archer defence is now just as mobile as the heavy cav forces, if we assume tactician is used for both. However, it is pretty likely that the spear-sword-archer force provides a stronger defence.
So I could just rely on defensive villages, which now have equal mobility, and stronger defensive qualities man for man, and also possess the strongest nukes.

In these circumstances, the use of heavy cav is rather limited. Provided you are willing to pay for some tacticians. If not then heavy cav remain a viable option, but you could be at a disadvantage, Having said that I have a suspicion that the tactician only raises the walking speed of an army en route to the village and not on the way back, which could change things. Will have to look into that.

My assumption of 4:3:3 ratio were to the building time, spears are fastest to build (best ratio for me is a mystery for now, without simulator and full nukes waking around all the time it's just a shoot to air ). We could put down spears to 3 and pop up arch or sw to 4, building time difference from sp/hc only increases in favor to sp/hc, and it's not TW1, here is "hall of orders" which decreases a building time of all riders, if you make a trebuchet village, which asks to be defensive, with possibility to destroy rams before they hit a wall.
As for tacticians speed increase, then i look at TW1 wars, were was quite a lot of movements in defense and if you start buy them (whose guys are quite cheap) in hundreds. It would start to hit in a pocket, not only speed of travel or build time in game.
Over all sp/sw/arch def is strongest, like full Axe nuke ( now it's berserker one), just whose will take so darn long time to build.
 

DeletedUser831

Guest
Dravigas;n8032 said:
My assumption of 4:3:3 ratio were to the building time, spears are fastest to build (best ratio for me is a mystery for now, without simulator and full nukes waking around all the time it's just a shoot to air ). We could put down spears to 3 and pop up arch or sw to 4, building time difference from sp/hc only increases in favor to sp/hc, and it's not TW1, here is "hall of orders" which decreases a building time of all riders, if you make a trebuchet village, which asks to be defensive, with possibility to destroy rams before they hit a wall.
As for tacticians speed increase, then i look at TW1 wars, were was quite a lot of movements in defense and if you start buy them (whose guys are quite cheap) in hundreds. It would start to hit in a pocket, not only speed of travel or build time in game.
Over all sp/sw/arch def is strongest, like full Axe nuke ( now it's berserker one), just whose will take so darn long time to build.

Well if we are working with full axe or zerk nukes then why are we even bothering with spears and archers. Man for man swords provide the best defence in those circumstances, so the numbers of spears and archers should be limited. Those nukes might be more common...all the troops come from the same building, which means the build time differences are reduced.
Without actually having a simulator, you are right, it is hard to work out an optimum, but having so many archers, based on their TW2 stats, would not be effective against typical TW1 nukes. I was thinking of massively reducing there numbers, which would increase rebuild time, since archers are the slowest unit to train (out of spears, swords and archers).

Admittedly, buying thousands of tacticians will get expensive, but there will be players with that kind of money, and there is always the option to earn crowns
 

DeletedUser24

Guest
Hi,
we are watching the heavy cav. also what you need to keep in mind, that your Units are walking back with normal Speed. (so no tactician speed)

As you mentioned, all three def Units have a strong, weak and medium strength, so you will need to look, which Units your enemies has, to build the right defence. As archers are expensive, mounted archerd worked really well on the beta Server ;)
 

DeletedUser24

Guest
thanks for the Sub
i want to here more tactiacal discussion, so please go on ;)
 

DeletedUser1379

Guest
I'm more inclined to believe that if used correctly heavy cavalry can have just as much impact on TW2 as they do in TW it all boils down to how the individual decides to play them. For example if your going to use them solely as a mobile defensive force then use them as such and if needed use the appropriate tactician to get them to the village that you need to get them to on time. Seeing as it has already been stated that the tactician only effects the trip to a certain village not back you can still use him to get those beasts there in time and if done with all the other defensive troops it makes it alot harder to clear a village if you happen to have 2 - 3 k of h cav sitting in a village backing up 5 - 6 k of each of spear sword and archers
 

DeletedUser2086

Guest
I have a question regardin HC... Can it be used in attack also? With some success, of course :)
 

DeletedUser894

Guest
Compare their stats with other troops and work it out........ It's what we all have had to do and means you end up with a better understanding of the game.

Link to HC stats
 

DeletedUser1620

Guest
A lot of good observations brought up here.

While playing on Beta I have gained a bit of experience with these ideas. Along with that experience, I also used Excel to work out a couple of things

So for a balanced infantry defense, the ratio is something like 5:3:3:
9000 Spears, 5500 Swords and 5500 Archers. This takes nearly 42 days with a level 25 barracks.

For balanced Spear/HC defense, it's maybe something like this:
6500 Spears, 2200 HC. This takes around 23 days and has more Infantry and Cavalry defense than the combination above (Although only 461k archer defense compared to 585k).

Ultimately, it comes down to time. Not time to support, but time to train the troops. With only a barracks, time is everything in TW2 :)

Edit:
I forgot to add that, a lot of people brought up the idea of Berserker nukes. I tried this and it's a terrible idea. The resources (Iron) demands of Berserkers leave nothing for HC, Coins or Nobles. ~2000 iron a piece and you need approximately 1k Berserkers to have fun, it's a ridiculous cost. The time saved it significant, though. 1000 Berserkers only takes 18 days to recruit, and is equiv. to over 6000 Axes.
 

DeletedUser1587

Guest
TheCrustyOne said it all, later in the game (200K+ points), you will look only at one thing, and thati s the time it takes to recruit a nuke (I also use 3.1K HC as nukes). That is if you have enough resources. What do I do when I see a mixed def, I nuke it with 4.1K MA... or 2.5K MA, 1K zerks (I really dont mind building them in every 20th villa), on the other hand, what do I do when I see HC villa, I destroy it with solo LC, Spear + HC, I destroy it with MA... this game is about offense :D :D
 
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