Using mounted bowmen

[tinkthank]

I did a search both under mounted bowmen and T'ien Chi, but have come up with nothing that helps me here. Your tips appreciated.

I like the idea of mounted bowmen, although they are expensive. But for what I am able to do with them with my poor skills so far, I am wondering whether they are worth it.

I love the description: heavily armored troops will meet their lances, others will perish under a hail of arrows. (Paraphrase, dont remember off the bat.) Sounds great. Flexible, quick, deadly. Yum.

But: I havent got them to work yet. What do I set them on? On "Hold and attack" they are kamakazie horsemeat, on "fire" they don't sink their lances into anyone.
I sort of want them to be able to fire a bit, then run around the approaching footies and lance the enemy vanguard.

Any tips?
Merci.

[Wauthan]

New patch solves your problem. Archers fire twice when on "hold and attack" then go into melee.

[Saxon]

Which patch is that which allows two rounds of fire before attacking? 2.08? I have not played with these recently.

I also have a rough time doing anything with these units. SOmetimes in a newly captured province, the cash/resource situation sees me building these as fodder to convince the AI not to attack. Not the best use of this unit...

[Chazar]

As stated before in an older (unsatisfying) thread, hold and attack does not solve the problem for horsebowmen: They are not using the speed of their horses sufficiently!

One would want that they move closer to the enemy, fire at the enemy while keeping some distance, and then retreat orderly (or engage in meele for a few rounds).

Hold and attack means that they will fire from their far away starting position, their cool horses grazing, and then charge stupidly...

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Aside, I'm quite new to the game, and I do believe that the game is kinda balanced, so there must be another good reason why this expensive unit is worth building?! Why is no one here giving this precious secret of cleverly using horsebowmen away?

I'd love to build an empire on horses...

[PDF]

Well, IMHO the main problem is that those horse archers/lancers are very inefficient as archers due to their cost (you can buy 3 foot archers for the price of 1 horseman), and not that good as lancers dur to relatively weak protection (and they are also costly as "lancers" due to their -useless- bow ...). They don't even have great morale ...

[Raz 24]

I have had great use of the tien chi barbarian horsemen . I just let them hold and attack and they first pepper and lower morale then charge and destroy the enemy front. Works great in hordes