Repels and the pike square

[Evil Dave]

Dhaeron said:
While pikemen could skewer charing cavalry, those 1000kg of horse, rider and armor didn't stop dead just because there were a few pieces of wood stuck in them. And a horse rolling over you hurts.

Yup, but strangely, few knights had much interest in becoming initimately familiar with a foot of pike head followed by 10-14 feet of pike. I think this is the problem with repel: it's not nearly effective enuf for very big differences in weapon length.

[Taqwus]

...reflecting the magnitude of the one-time charge bonus on lance-type weapons.

[Evil Dave]

Taqwus said:
...reflecting the magnitude of the one-time charge bonus on lance-type weapons.

It couldn't hurt, I guess. 'course, pikemen can charge too...

[Dedas]

I think the length of the weapon should play a role when calculating repel effectivness. Now the game (according to the manual) just checks if defenders weapon is longer than the attacker, and if true the repel check is initiated.
It would be nice if the difference in length could be added as a bonus to the defender, not just as a security to be able to repel at all.

[Wick]

Better then giving some weapons an attack & defense bonus against mounted troops would be giving mounted troops a penalty on the repel morale check. No matter how stupid the knight, the horse isn't that brave...

I think of a lot of nice things could come from recognizing that steeds and riders are separate creatures but that would be very developer-intensive.

[Folket]

War trained horses seldom diobied their masters, some even wear blindfolds not to get distracted.

[Dedas]

Well, maybe then the horses should have seperate morale to the rider. I mean, there are those units in the game that ride less than trained warhorses.

[Endoperez]

Dedas said:
Well, maybe then the horses should have seperate morale to the rider. I mean, there are those units in the game that ride less than trained warhorses.

Those troops already have worse morale than the Knights etc who have trained warhorses.

Dedas said:
I think the length of the weapon should play a role when calculating repel effectivness. Now the game (according to the manual) just checks if defenders weapon is longer than the attacker, and if true the repel check is initiated.
It would be nice if the difference in length could be added as a bonus to the defender, not just as a security to be able to repel at all.

This sounds like a really good idea. The length difference times two or three as a penalty to the moral check would maybe work well. then the attack could stay low, so pikemen wouldn't repel infantry too often (infantry has mostly better defense than cav) so increased so the really big moral penalty from a pike vs. a sword wouldn't imbalance them, but even a 2 or 3 penalty against knights would really improve the repel effectiveness.
This isn't moddable though i suppose, while changing att/def is.

[Endoperez]

Dhaeron said:
This sounds like a really good idea. The length difference times two or three as a penalty to the moral check would maybe work well. then the attack could stay low, so pikemen wouldn't repel infantry too often (infantry has mostly better defense than cav) so increased so the really big moral penalty from a pike vs. a sword wouldn't imbalance them, but even a 2 or 3 penalty against knights would really improve the repel effectiveness.
This isn't moddable though i suppose, while changing att/def is.

Natural attacks such as Claw or bite are length 0. Spears are length 4. Morale check at -8 for all animals seems rather extreme.

Also, cavalry often have better defense than infantry. The shield type might confuse you, as e.g. EA Ermor has Tower Shields and those appear to be really fantastic, but don't affect repel (or at least, I think they don't). Just being mounted gives +3 defense.