Cavalry and artillery advantages

[unmerged(2025)]

How much extra cavalry need there be to gain an advatage in combat? 2 to 1, or something less? How much advantage exactly is gained?

What about cannons? Do you have to have artillery support tech level? When I have cannon but the enemy has none, but greater numbers of cavalry, the advantage seems to lie with the enemy? Is this true?

 

[unmerged(2437)]

Calvery is good against infantry even when you are 1:1.
The advantage of infantry is when you are seiging a fortress. Artillary is also good mainly for stroming fortresses. I find that it is much better if you have one unit of artillaries and a separate unit of infantry and calvery. The infantry and calvery units can go ahead and attack the enemy first. Once the enemy is dead, the artilary can come in and storm the fortress together with the other two units.

 

[unmerged(2437)]

Sometimes it is better if you have a large unit of calveries only. When you know that an enemy unit is coming to one of your provinces to attack, you can intercept then half way and kill them off. Since your unit is Calvery only, it is faster than the combined units or infantry units.

 

[unmerged(1255)]

Yes, a 2:1 cavalry advantage gives a shock bonus (read Huczics FAQ for detailed info). But this only works in plain terrain.

 

[unmerged(548)]

Actually the 2:1 ratio comes (as it sais in the FAQ) from the BG rules. I personally believe that the CG is much more detaild about this and have several levels. However since I don't even have anything resembling some numbers, I can't give any further info about this. Thus, I also suggest you don't quote me on this ... =)

If someone would like to research this a bit, I suggest using multiplayer with two nations at war and setting all sourrounding factors equal. Meet with two armies in a plains province with the same skilled leaders etc.


Theoretical procedure to test:

Pick an early tech level with inf shock 1 and cavshock 4

send 4000 inf & 1000 cav against equal force for reference
send 8000 inf against 2000 cav and see if something is changed.
send ...
etc, testing a lot of different cav ratios, but with the same total combat power.