The thread about hand cavalry

[Hazza54321]

Sometimes i find it difficult to justify making hand cav. Like is it really worth it in a high level game in certain MUs.

Its a big investment to even get a decent number of cav for a cav switch to actually work.
This means your opponent is gonna be constantly poking as the only reason youd cav switch is if you dont have the ranged inf advantage. Theres very little you can do to stop him poking except maybe trying to pressure somewhere else to distract him but even so you cant use your cav as it will give away your cav switch.
Also in theory scouting a cav switch should be obvious as hes trying to avoid engagements which either means hes got caving coming or just so far behind hes already lost.
Another reason why i think hand cav suck is that they almost always have pathing issues. You need more than 10 to make a cav switch work but if they’re constantly being caught on trees or inbases or even caught on each other and blocking each other from fighting. So basically you need the right amount to actually attack before they all die, and the right amount so they dont run around like idiots.

You may think trading off cav for skirms is good to get into the ranged inf advantage (and thats if the cav switch actually works) but in reality your investment in cav was way larger than his mass of skirms. Not to mention you need vet huss and cav combat for cav to be any good.

Additionally, they also seem quite shit vs ranged inf with high dps e.g. lb , yumi, jaegars, upgraded dutch skirms, forest prowlers, even fucking strelets seem to kill cav near cost effectively despite all these units supposedly should have big weaknesses to cav.

I played dutch mirrors vs cometk yesterday and everytime i did a 10 cav switch in early fort or a 20 cav later on, i just got behind and ended up just mass skirm ruyter and had to work hard with positioning to get back into it. Likewise vs turk i had a skirm + 20 cav combat vet huss composition vs turks 30 yumi 30 ashi (which should be the hard counter composition) and they melted without making a dent into his infantry ball.
Ofc theres some exceptions to what im saying like cossacks, nagis, axeriders and dog soldiers, germans somewhat (due to mass) but even then its easy to melt a uhlan mass so idk.

So maybe i wondered if im using cav wrong because some people like kaiser and rapha make it work, but to me it feels like im putting myself behind.

Wanna hear your thoughts

[kaister]

Pretty sure the best way to lose a Dutch mirror is to go for a hus switch once Inf combat is in and opponent has 50+ skirms and atleast 25 ruyter. But yeah seems like every time I play vs Japan yumis delete hand cav

[harcha]

I think @aqwer has something to say about this.

But in all honesty I think positioning and decisions to take/not take a fight become more crucial when you are getting cav/playing against cav. In the situation you first described it would seem that the skirm war leading player would continuously poke thus hopefully exposing a positional weakness for you to exploit which would then let you take a favorable trade.

[[Armag] diarouga]

Making a lot of cav randomly is not really good as you won't be cost effective against a skirm/goon composition.
The idea (and I think mankle explained it really well when he talked about this topic in fre mirror) is that at one point you'll do a big skirm/goon battle and the goons will fall. At that point, a cav switch can be game changing.

Of course if you train 10-15 huss and your opponent has 40skirms/25 skirms it will be a big waste.

[Kaiserklein]

Yeah cav switch after a fight where you sniped goons is good. But honestly overall having cav is just better than not having cav. Skirm/cav/goon > skirm/goon. Then again taking a fight properly with hand cav is a skill, because you have to go at once and position perfectly (can't hesitate when you're going melee). Need to get a good surround and to split fire skirms on goons.

I feel like I always have hand cav at some point in fortress, unless maybe my RI unit is really dominant (like with iro, japan, otto, dutch etc). And it usually it works just fine. Shitty pathing when opponent is going for full gay turtle is the only real issue

[chronique]

Idk i feel like iro have a good skirm/cav comp becouse kenya are realy tanky (and 11 upg kenya are realy good) and fp are better than other skirm too deal with all kind of cav.

[Hazza54321]

Honestly taking a fight correctly with hand cav is probably one of the hardest if not the hardest thing in this game. Need a good concave and positioning and not to send them too far forward before the rest of the army catches up but tbh how are you gonna catch up without snare. So you kinda have to suicide some to even fully engage after getting the snare off .

[harcha]

Honestly taking a fight correctly with hand cav is probably one of the hardest if not the hardest thing in this game. Need a good concave and positioning and not to send them too far forward before the rest of the army catches up but tbh how are you gonna catch up without snare. So you kinda have to suicide some to even fully engage after getting the snare off .

Yeah, setting up a successful forward-kiting fight is difficult (assuming slow skirms) and requires some cav flank for greater success.

[I_HaRRiiSoN_I]

#trainablespahis

[Kaiserklein]

Honestly taking a fight correctly with hand cav is probably one of the hardest if not the hardest thing in this game. Need a good concave and positioning and not to send them too far forward before the rest of the army catches up but tbh how are you gonna catch up without snare. So you kinda have to suicide some to even fully engage after getting the snare off .

Yeah, for example when obsing pr30+ games you usually see people hit and running okay (not always super well but decently), but often you see their cav going too far forward while skirms aren't here to snipe goons, some of their cav just lagging behind because of a bad z move (instead of z moving only once you have a solid surround), etc. And any extra cav unit wasted kinda makes your cav switch exponentially weaker, as even 2-3 more cav dpsing and tanking in a good position can swing a fight.

What I don't really understand is that you usually take fights well, so I'm not sure why you specifically would struggle with hand cav.

[Hazza54321]

Well can you tell me what i did wrong in this fight cos i have no fucking idea. 20 cav just melted https://www.twitch.tv/videos/539705445?t=11840s

[Hazza54321]

Or the fight at 2:02:35 , i know theres some trees but realistically 15 vet huss should kill more than 1 gurkha its fucking 3.4k res, its stupid that this game favours just spamming ranged shit like bots.

[Mosx]

Well can you tell me what i did wrong in this fight cos i have no fucking idea. 20 cav just melted https://www.twitch.tv/videos/539705445?t=11840s

im not good as u but from what i can see here u take bad fight/micro ,too many ashi /club for tanking and take a fight with huss whitout lose them,u lost free 4 huss agaisnt 4 club at the end because they was out of skirm range

[Garja]

Well can you tell me what i did wrong in this fight cos i have no fucking idea. 20 cav just melted https://www.twitch.tv/videos/539705445?t=11840s

To be fair your micro was shit there.
When you decide to engage like this you must commit with cav fighting anticav and you only micro the skirms to kill the anticav as fast as possible.
Even if you're a tryhard with pulling back cav it should still be just a small group, 2-3 of them, and they should drag away a significant part of the anticav. If you move the whole pack they do zero damage and don't even force the RI in meelee.

If he had yabusame, which just fire from behind with high dps, then I'd agree you can't really do much. In fact I don't think euro cav, especially huss, do much against proper amount of TWC-TAD units.

[Hazza54321]

Yeah I probably overmicro’d but honestly those clubs are so good vs cav that you kinda need to pull some back. I was still expecting to kill at least 1 yumi though for my 4.5k res investment, shoulda just made 5 falcs.

[Guigs]

Yeah I probably overmicro’d but honestly those clubs are so good vs cav that you kinda need to pull some back. I was still expecting to kill at least 1 yumi though for my 4.5k res investment, shoulda just made 5 falcs.

everything in his compo is good vs cav ahah just ridiculous how a mass of yumi dps all your cav while you can sack 80% of the anti cav

[tedere12]

you should pull back the hus and take free shots on the clubs that walk in front of yumi mass.

[Hazza54321]

Thats kinda what i did

[RefluxSemantic]

I personally like reinforcing a fight with hand cav. So when I know a fight is happening I start training hussars and shipping them. They're beastly at cleaning up at the end of the fight, especially compared to how hard it is to engage with them. That's probably also why it feels like you need a critical mass of hand cav before they start doing anything. You're just going to lose a bunch of them for free in the start of the engagement, but if you still have a bunch of them for the entirety of the engagement you usually clean up.

I must say that Dutch is particularly weak at going cav. Hussars are of course unspectacular to begin with. But Dutch also struggles from having poor cav shipments, and most importantly from having a 'busy' stable. Ruyters actually effectively have a much worse training time than goons do: 31 seconds for a ruyter vs 38 seconds for a goon. In terms of batches, a stable producing ruyters can spend 26 vs/second, while a stable producing goons will spend 34 vs/second; Now when you realize that you also need to spend time researching veteran hussars, that means that to effectively get a balanced triple unit composition you almost need two stables. But getting two stables is pretty undesirable until much later in the game. I often find that this causes me to rarely even attempt getting a good hussar mass and instead I just use hussars as reinforcements to a battle.

That being said, in a Dutch mirror this also means that you can reasonably go pure skirm/huss with no ruyters or only ruyters from shipments, as it's pretty unlikely your opponent can efficiently get a triple unit composition. But I think it's just weak if you're trying to mix hussars and ruyters, as that ends up being pretty inefficient compared to just massing a bunch of skirms and getting skirm upgrades (something that Dutch really does excell at).

[Kaiserklein]

Well can you tell me what i did wrong in this fight cos i have no fucking idea. 20 cav just melted https://www.twitch.tv/videos/539705445?t=11840s

Well first, you engage while some cav (your new batch) are lagging behind. So basically these cav will get pull tricked by the front ones, which in return means the said front cav will be slower. Make sure you have a nice group of cav, all standing in lines, before you try to go in.
Then you z moved too early. Some cav started attacking his explo, while some other cav just had pathing issues. So like said earlier, it's about surrounding before z moving. To be fair you fixed it nicely right after, but still.
Then you split some of your cav (on top of the screen) on the wrong side of his army, where your skirms can't snipe the clubs, making this small group of cav essentially useless. That was the biggest mistake I think, you had to pull them back towards your skirms instead.
Could maybe split skirm fire more on the ashis and clubs too.

If you didn't do these mistakes you'd probably win the fight. Then again, it's of course much harder to micro all this for you, than for a jap bot to z move his infantry ball.

[Kaiserklein]

Ah and in the second video, it's mostly that you z moved too early. You have to surround before z moving really, otherwise half your cav just runs around trying to connect

[RefluxSemantic]

Thats kinda what i did

I have some thoughts about that fight:
It didn't really seem like your army was much stronger than his to me, but that might inherently confirm how weak hussars really are

You did run into clubs and ashis too much. You tried to pull back but this didn't really seem to go well and you took a lot of damage on your hussars that way.
Because you took so much damage on your hussars, you didn't have the hussars to clean up the yumi. But thats the entire point of the composition you went for, skirms dps down anti cav and then hussars are there to clean up. If your skirms dps down his clubs/ashi but then in the process you lose all your hussars then you won't be able to clean up anymore, right? I think you were applying some of the skirm/goon composition logic to the fight, where the goal is to end up having the skirmisher advantage. So what you tried to do was to trade your hussars with his units, so that you would end up winning the remaining skirm/yumi battle and clean up. But I don't think that's how you're supposed to approach the skirm/hussar comp. Instead you should trade your skirms to deplete his anti-cav mass, so that you have a bunch of hussars leftover to clean up the fight. So I would suspect it'd have gone better had you been more careful about your hussars and more willing to have yumis crap on your skirms while your skirms crap on his ashi/clubs. This is all on a more tactical level, in terms of micro I have no clue because I suck.

[RefluxSemantic]

Or the fight at 2:02:35 , i know theres some trees but realistically 15 vet huss should kill more than 1 gurkha its fucking 3.4k res, its stupid that this game favours just spamming ranged shit like bots.

To be fair, what's also going on is that you have a bunch of essentially useless ruyters here. Also, India had really strong Gurka, with a 10/10% upgrade and a mansabar unit in the mix, which made the fight deceptively close. If all those ruyters had been skirms and hussars you'd have cleaned up though. I think this is also partially an example of just not having the critical mass of hussars.

[Guigs]

you should pull back the hus and take free shots on the clubs that walk in front of yumi mass.

Every time you do that you lose 2 huss to yumi dps

[Hazza54321]

Thanks this was the kinda shit i needed. Yeah i see about the z moving too early. I think in that fight i had more resources invested which is why i took it, was also the “counter composition” but yeah. What you were saying jerom makes perfect sense but its hard to get the balance right because if you let yumis crap on your skirms too much you wont have enough to snipe anticav. This is why i think hand cav usage is the hardest thing in this game.