in small amounts horsemen wins, but in masses and kited, ironically archers wins , especially if it longbows / Zhuge Nu
the main issue is the fact archers can immedialty pick one target and run away, horsemen need to get close everytime to get a hit
a buff to their health or their bonus vs ranged would be nice
please reconsider the state of horsemen in the next balance patch, it would help alot with civs that are doing badly, such as abbasid & delhi
all melee units have horrible unit tracking, movement, attack range, and speed.
This is why they are get bested by ranged units.
I’d like to test this. I have 2 copies so I can run it on 2 PCs and micro the archers after attack moving the horsemen. I’ll use longbows, but what number of longbows and what number of horsemen are you talking about, and what upgrades for each unit? I’ll make the longbows fire at one horseman each time as you describe, so presumably you’re talking about having enough numbers for the archers to one shot each horseman, but not so many that it’s crazy overkill to do that.
honestly i dont know how much the number there are many situations when i try involving horsemen they fail terribly
around 30-40 longbow
also going horsemen / longbow vs pure long bow, pure longbow wins since it kite easily
Yes, archer can kite. Horsemen can go through, spread formation then attack movement. Archers dies so fast
If only the front line are attacking the archers it’s quite unfair, just inglobes archers into horsemen formation
Pretty sure if you have the same resources the horsemen win easily. Although there are undoubtedly issues of pathing, choke points etc.
I think my real negativity on feudal horsemen is how bad they are at killing villagers.
Because I find with Abbasid and Delhi you can easily win the opening skirmishes against someone going blind mass archer, longbow etc. But then you get say 4-5 horsemen into a bunch of vils - and they just waltz back to the TC as if nothing is happening. Compare it to say 2 knights or 6-8 archers etc. Sure you can get map control and start starving them out - but it feels like you should be able to inflict more severe and immediate punishment.
I just gave it a try, using feudal horseman and longbows, no upgrades.
First of all I fought on open land on dry arabia, still some obstructions, but as open as I could get. The horsemen won easily with 27 horsemen vs 36 longbows (equal resources, and 32 longbows will 1-shot a horseman). With kiting, the horsemen are still so much faster that they are on top of the longbows by the 3rd shot.
I then constructed two lines of houses with a 1 tile gap in between, so the archers could go into that and make it harder for the horsemen to attack them. The horsemen still won.
I then gave the longbows +1 ranged attack, taking the number needed to 1-shot a horseman down from 32 to 25, meaning they could 1-shot the horsemen for longer. The horsemen still won pretty comfortably.
I think you need to look at a replay of where you lost to archers and look at the exact numbers on each side and the upgrades.
bro its not work like that in game longbows produce too much faster than horseman so they get the number advantage quicker and when they rush you and if you try to answered it with horseman they snipe it down and with equal resource longbow can kite them back to their safety of their tc which they get faster attack bonus dont forget that also raid with horseman is little bit hard but if they make it any more powerfull it could be broken
Can you try longbow + network of castle?
I took the comments so far into account as well. I made a line of outposts for the longbows to run past, so they always had the network of castles effect. The horsemen attacked only the longbows not the outposts. I used Abbasid for the horsemen, and produced 22 horsemen, as these can be produced from 2 stables in the same time as English can produce 36 longbows from the Council Hall. This represents a lower cost for the Abbasid army, if the cost of units plus cost of production buildings is compared against just the cost of the longbows (22x120 + 2x150 = 2940 vs 36x90 = 3240).
The horsemen still won. Maybe someone more skilled than me could micro them better, but I tried it several times with different formations, and target firing, then once they could no longer 1-shot the horsemen I used attack move in between running away. I think there were at least 7 horsemen left alive each time I tried it.
Could you record the screen or share replay with us?
I’ll do it, but it takes a fair bit of time to set up because we can’t create saved scenarios like in 2 DE. So to avoid having to do it all multiple times can you describe how you see the best way to micro the longbows? Formation, target firing vs attack move vs anything else, when to switch between different methods etc.
Horsemen beat range units cost for cost… but that’s not the real problem. The real problem is Horsemen do NOT counter range units, especially micro ed range units, when the range unit is in a lil composition.
I.e. 20 Horsemen vs 6 spears and 15 lbs. Heck even 8 archers and 20 Horsemen vs 6 spears and 15 lbs STILL cuases the Horsemen sode to do waaaaaaaaaaaaay more work to trade well.
First Horsemen like javelin throwers need even more range resist ( increase to 3 range resist in feudal). Next since its likely the Horsemen will only get in a few strikes before archers pull away and spears encroach, Horsemen should be able to kill an archer in 2 to 3 strikes instead of 4 strikes; add more bonus damage.
I’ve found out that best way to attack archers with horsemen is just circle them and attack, so they can’t kite or at least making the kite more difficult.
Problem is, as some users said, it’s easily to mass the archers than the horsemen, and at the moment your horsemen are in range of archers, you will starts to get punished.
If only a few pikes are mixed with archers then you can’t engage with horsemen and can’t get in range, so you have to maka archers too and your archers will get snipped by their archers.
Horsemen should get a cost increase and be buffed like i suggested. Notice 2 things. Spahi which are more expensive than Horsemen still mass effectively with or without MS.
My idea is increase all Horsemen like units (spahi Horsemen sofa) range resist in feudal to 3 range, then 4 in castle and 5 in Imperial.
This go from requiring 42 archer shots (32 lb shots) up to 62 archer shots (42 lb shots). Which in practice means a mass of 20 lbs would 2 volley Horsemen but with said upgrade would require 2 volleys plus a 3rd micro volley. And in an even better scenario if you have range resist upgrade before lb attack upgrade, those 20 lbs would require now 3 volleys plus a micro volley.
Horsemen should not be afraid of archers and i believe the trade should be as lobeside as horseman vs spearman.
Next i think the horseman bonus dmg vs archer should be on the border of a 2 strike kill with a bsm attack upgrwde advantage pushing it to 2 strikes. So that means feudal horseman base attack is 9 dmg and range attack bonus should be 25!! This without an bsm attack advantage would result in an overkill 3 strike on standard range.
This would make horseman knight mix a thing again!!!
To balance all this out the standard horseman will cost 140 (110f 30w) resources. Spahi will cost 150 (120f 30w) resources. And sofa will cost 190( 120f 70g).
Sofa buff will be different for the attack. They will go from fedual +3 against all infantry to +5
i think horseman cost is already too much it is %50 more than archers and hey created %50 slowly i think best thing to give them is more damage bonus to archers
I just played out that scenario and got slapped. Had about 8 archers and 12 sipahi vs 35 longbows and like 7 spearmen. Maybe I didn’t have enough but I was producing out of 4 buildings compared to the English landmark + 1 barracks. I was trying my best but it was a stomp. I don’t think it’s possible to produce sipahi faster than English longbow, especially when they mix in a few spearmen so you have to spend resources on archer too. It could have been much worse too if English was harassing my villagers on the way to 35. I had to erect 3 towers just to give myself a chance at production.
that their main problem, spears super counter horseman, and horseman just slightly counter archers, and plus as you said it it very slow to produce, and more costy compared to archers & spears
35 is a big number of longbows - with even blacksmith techs about 33 can oneshot sipahi. Enough horsemen can win, but spears counter horsemen harder than horsemen counter archers so even the 7 spears is a pretty big deal alot of the time. You have to land a good engagement despite having a technically better army.
Something I found a bit more effective was to make about 5 horsemen and then commit to mass archers. My archer army would stay home to fight with the english death ball near my base - the english army should have a some spear that absorb archer fire and let the longbows take a small lead, but the fact that reinforcements are close should turn the fight in the end. Key is to have the horsemen out on the map to snipe english reinforcements and sweep back for cleanup if youre losing the main fight too hard. That way you’re ahead when the armies trade out.
Yea, they were one-shotting alright. They had me pinned from the start tho. They rushed me with 5/6 villagers and their scout, started shooting my villagers on gold then building a tower. I had to sacrifice 4-5 villagers to burn it down and build my own. Then they retreated and things were cool for a few minutes until they built their landmark on the edge of my gold tower’s range and followed it up with a town center. I managed to cancel their TC once but had to back off once 5-6 longbows were out. Then they just held the army advantage until the 30s and built a ram to force my reaction.
Both of Ottoman’s feudal landmarks are economy based, maybe that’s a problem. Would be nice to have a landmark military academy that generated 5 units at once or something. I had two academies, stables, archer range, blacksmith upgrades, but it was altogether too slow.