Help me about Dominions 2

[Targa]

If I had to guess I'd say that your archers were hitting your heavy cavalry and though they didn't get hit often enough to kill them, it demoralized them enough to make them rout. I also agree with Phil that heavy cavalry tends to rout fairly easily. In general, I find that any units with less than 12 morale are almost useless after the first few rounds of a battle. But I'm still a newb myself....

[PDF]

Undoublty the Ulmish crossbowmen shot their own cav in the back (they love to do that, they just killed their Raterik hero this way in my current pbem !), but Ulm Knights have a pretty good morale, never saw them routing against what seems to be a Cardaces defense militia !!
Indeed your troop organization was correct in terms of commanders/Groups, I can't find how such the army routed in this situation... Maybe a very unlikely failed "morale check" by the cav that propagated to the crossbowmen ...

[General Tacticus]

Strange. Ulm's crossbowmen are tough enough to take on light infantry in melee if need be, and their knights shouldn't rout that easily...

What is sure, however, is that Ulm's crossbows (arbalests, actually) are very, very powerful, and can easily kill their own knights with friendly fire. Which can cause the knights to rout.

I think you got a very unlucky stretch of failed moral rolls, that's the only explanation I can think of...

[aldin]

The more times I read your example the more confused I get. If you had about 50 Heavy Cav and they were divided into three Groups (say 17/group) and all the losses were in the center group (roughly 1/3 of that force, say 6) and your prophet wasn't casting Sermon of Courage (I presume the priest was the prophet based on the "three fire" comment), then two things are true. First is that all those losses were almost certainly friendly fire. Second is that a rout at that point wouldn't be unusual in my Ulmish experience.

The "fix" for the problem is twofold. First is to have Ulm's prophet cast Sermon of Courage like it was going out of style, Ulm needs it. Second is to offset Ulmish X-Bows such that there are no Ulmish troops twixt them and the enemy. I often build "neutral" archers/longbows to accompany my armies as Ulm because they don't do much damage to my heavily armored troops.

~Aldin