-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.