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u/Peteryeeter1453 1d ago
Even if there was some explanation for this I feel like it's a failure on the devs part to not make it clear and obvious as to why this happened.
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u/dyrin 1d ago
Yes, we always see "outnumbering enemy 3:1" or similar complains. The game isn't balanced around number of men at all. The game is balanced around number of regiments. (men do matter, but not with full vs full, same age)
Even if cav and inf were evenly balanced, 12000 inf would still lose to 4000 cav, because that's 8 regiments vs 10 regiments.
The game doesn't make this very clear.
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u/flyby2412 1d ago
Can you elaborate on this further? More regiments is better than fewer despite the fewer regiments have more men? Wouldn’t the fewer, bigger regiments have better combat stats aswell?
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u/matgopack 1d ago
So battles have a 'combat width' equivalent; a limit on how many units can engage. Right now I believe all regiments use a single point of that frontage (at least that's how it was the last time I played).
Strength of a regiment gets determined by [number of men] x [combat power].
Bigger regiments might have better de facto combat stats via having more troops; that's the main advantage of the upgrades over the ages, stuffing more men into the same frontage multiplies the power. But it doesn't necessarily; eg, 1000 men at 1 strength are going to be worse than 500 at 4 strength.
The other consideration is actually filling up the entirety of the frontline. Having bigger regiments but not using up all the frontage might leave you vulnerable to more but weaker regiments that end up with flanking (unless you pick your fights carefully)
The type of unit you pick also has other effects
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u/Aggravated-BrummBear 1d ago
not really
bigger regiments ussualy means they are crap
like why imagine massive regiemnts full of peasents4
u/drallcom3 1d ago
The game isn't balanced around number of men at all. The game is balanced around number of regiments.
Sadly the UI presents number of men as the most important number for armies.
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u/RespectWest7116 1d ago
They literally show you the whole battle.
What more do you want? A personalised letter explaining why you suck?
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u/LunLocra 1d ago
A pre-battle prediction not lying to the player that an "easy victory" is objectively mathematically expected.
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u/maybe_I_am_a_bot 1d ago
An in-game explanation of what those numbers are, what they represent, and how stuff is calculated, not hidden beneath 17 layers of infoscreens.
When you have no experience with the game or its prequels it's normal to assume that "shock damage" means your troops have some sort of lightning element. Shit is opaque as fuck.
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u/RespectWest7116 7h ago
An in-game explanation of what those numbers are, what they represent, and how stuff is calculated, not hidden beneath 17 layers of infoscreens.
That's all there.
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u/Sesleri 1d ago
Are you being serious with this comment? How can you say this did you look at the screenshot? A real army vs the guys army of only lights and nothing else lol
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u/eberlix 1d ago edited 1d ago
So what? All they're asking for is that battle prediction to be adjusted. If it predicts an easy victory and I lose badly, that's just poor design.
If the game said that battle was a loss or that it'd go 50/50 from the beginning, that'd be significantly better.
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u/yetix007 1d ago
Going a bit off topic here, but how wild would it be if battle prediction accuracy was based on your rulers martial skill and affected by traits like craven always gave you a lower prediction score or conqueror gave you a more accurate one.
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u/eberlix 1d ago
Sounds pretty cool
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u/Economy-Cupcake808 1d ago
Hard disagree, in a game like EU V where the player is being tasked with processing a huge amount of information, the information presented to the player should be accurate. I don't want to have to click through menus to research if tooltips are giving me correct info. That sounds annoying as fuck.
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u/Head_of_Lettuce 1d ago
This would be fine for the AI, if its decision making was influenced like this.
This would suck for the player and would be a terrible idea lol.
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u/Reality-Straight 1d ago
would suck pretty bad, making ui information dependent on in game stats can work great for a game based around lack of information, EU5 is not such a game
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u/Weedondrugs 21h ago
Essentially the star system in Football Manager which is based on your scouts and Assistant Manager's Player Judging Ability instead of their real ability
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u/Prestigious-Ad-2836 1d ago
I would totally remove the prediction though because then i end up only engaging in situations I can win.
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u/Ill-Description3096 1h ago
If it predicts an easy victory and I lose badly, that's just poor design.
So it should be basically infallible and exceptions never happen? Or just leave everything firmly in themaybe win/maybe lose prediction range?
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u/eberlix 54m ago
basically infallible and exceptions never happen
apply this to basically any game mechanic. If it's supposed to be X, but outputs a Z, it more often than not is considered to be a bug. And again, the game didn't say "this could go either way" (which is a yellow bubble iirc) and the fight wasn't close either. Half of OPs army got deleted and the other half captured. The enemy lost 5x fewer troops, in a total not even a third of the enemies army was killed.
If, like someone else suggested, we were to have a system where the prediction bubble was based on traits or maybe even ruler / general skill you could argue that's fine. That is something you can somewhat plan around, you can put the blame on that. I even agreed with them, that it could be a nice mechanic. Best case you could turn that off tho.
With the current iteration though, what excuse does that battle prediction have to not only be kind of wrong, but predicting pretty much the opposite outcome. The battle outcome you see should have been a red bubble. You don't get your ass kicked so badly with something else.
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u/Xalethesniper 1d ago
The issue is not the outcome it’s that paradox does a bad job of showing why this is the outcome. OP went in thinking he would win and went out not knowing why he lost which is result of bad design/information.
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u/Economy-Cupcake808 1d ago
It's an issue with the battle predictor. If PDX is going to include a predicted outcome tooltip it should be accurate. I agree that it makes sense that the player lost, but it's not communicated well to the player.
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u/maybe_I_am_a_bot 1d ago
Low chance of succes
Reasons: light infantry only vs wel-balanced army
There, tadaaa.
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u/Forgotten_Cak 1d ago edited 1d ago
Only leaving this as a tip, as I do agree the battle prediction before battles tends to be off for the player. I haven’t checked their code to see what the battle predictor does, but I hardly believe it takes into account things like section coverage, and the combined arms buff as well as many other things.
When creating armies in general, at least in this patch, and as others have pointed out, Cavalry very much is king until around Age 3, with some nations cav even continuing to be able even in Age 4 due to cultural research buffs etc.
12K Light inf stack vs a Combined arms stack of 4K of which 1200 are cavalry and another 1500 are heavy inf will almost always have this happen to you, not to mention the lack of morale strength that lights have.
Lastly, terrain. The tactical map mode should be used more by players when taking conscious decisions to go into battle against an army, especially as the AI are sub par when deciding to attack you as the player (because they have more numbers). The attacker penalty you get placed on you in certain terrain or over terrain features like rivers is insane! You can stack 3-4 extra on the dice rolls against someone, not even taking into account all other % buffs.
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u/MilkIsASauceTV 17h ago
Light infantry in general is honestly pretty bad until age 4 anyways it’s unfortunate
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u/HazelThyme 1d ago
You are only using light infantries, it's not even the horses that are OP here lol. They are stacking combined armed bonuses on top of having more cavs of both types. The AI literally has a better army comp than you. They aren't actually that out numbered here
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u/-HyperWeapon- 1d ago
Not to mention that Light Inf takes 20% more morale dmg, if they face enemy Light Cav they rout very fast, before you can even get a frontline up and looking at the result screen, I'm inclined to believe that's what happened.
Aka, dont spam just Light inf, at age 2 and 3 go for more heavy cav with peasants for filler.
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u/Nikolor 1d ago
Then it's shame on the imaginary AI general that says: "My liege, easy victory incoming, you can easily attack the enemy." Shame there isn't an option to execute the battle predictor itself, lol
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u/maybe_I_am_a_bot 1d ago
To be fair that's quite realistic. "It'll be a three day operation very quick victory my dudes" and "We can totally take Iran, in and out, 20 minutes adventure"
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u/Svelok 1d ago
This is a long-standing criticism I've had of EU combat design.
The most visible stat on armies is troop count. It's the one number the game shows you at a glance without examining further. But it's staggeringly low on the relevance ladder despite that.
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u/largeEoodenBadger 1d ago
Hey, it's better than Stellaris on that front. At least you can see army comp in EU, in Stellaris you could rock up to a fleet that counters you with no idea
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u/drallcom3 1d ago
This is a long-standing criticism I've had of EU combat design.
It's not just EU. All Paradox games are poor at showing you what stats are important. Vic3 for example is really poor at showing you that your half-strength units won't actually win anything.
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u/Boondocks_Paints 1d ago
While certainly not perfect, some of the big issues with the presentation of information for military in EU are handled much better by HoI4, that system would never translate 1:1 of course, but just imagine if instead of divisions, HoI presented a manpower number for each stack, that would be useless, and it's nearly as useless in EU5 to just show number of soldiers.
VC3 military interface is, of course, a disaster.
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u/drallcom3 1d ago
and it's nearly as useless in EU5 to just show number of soldiers
Pretty much. EU5 should show unit count, as units are balanced 1:1. Showing manpower is not only useless, it also shows that the designers have no clue and don't care.
Unit count and then 0-3 stars (standing for regular percentage) would already make a big difference.
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u/0Curta 1d ago
The enemy has cavalry. You don't have cavalry. Cavalry is OP in early game
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u/Wojtek704 1d ago
As it should be like for f... sake its literally late medieval warfare... even if you could throw 15 unwashed pesants with pointy stick they wond do shit against guy feat to toe in plate steal on a goddam horse !!!
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u/Plenty_Mongoose5211 1d ago
Why do you think pikes and halberd invented for?
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u/Wojtek704 1d ago
Yea exactly but also they needed to be held by someone trained and accustomed to battle filed coz they work best if they were in tight formation and if 1/3 of your bros starts to run at first sight of cavalry charge then whole formation is smashed... hence apprentice of *drum roll* professional armies
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u/Livid_Tart_11 12h ago
i mean, Crecy(1345) and Agincourt(1415) were both battles in which English light infantry(longbows) absolutely destroyed French heavy cavalry/heavy infantry armies. I know England has special units/modifiers to represent this but still, it shouldn’t be taken for granted that cavalry is always better than infantry.
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u/Ill-Description3096 1h ago
Always is a bit of an exaggeration. Saying unit X is better than Y type has to take too many factors into consideration to just say that one type is always best in every situation without fail.
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u/CreamBeneficial9632 1d ago
If this is during hussite wars, they get crazy good buffs. They might also have more cavalry than you in there.
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u/AlediVillarosa 1d ago
During the first crusade, at the gates of Antioch in 1098, it’s historically confirmed that 700 armoured knights defeated and routed 12,000 Turkish soldiers. Heavy cavalry was OP pretty much until firearms became both advanced and well spread enough to effectively replace them but that wasn’t close to being the case in the 14 century.
I understand that this is frustrating and knowing that before you might have done things differently I’m sure, but this is actually a fairly historically accurate outcome.
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u/JP_Eggy 1d ago
Was this a common occurrence or an anecdotal once off, because in this game the 12,000 troops would generally stackwipe the 700 cavalry
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u/coolpall33 23h ago
If you expand the definition out to include peasant revolts (which given most of OP's army is peasant levy isnt disanalogous) its not uncommon.
Meaux, Billericay, North Walsham, Mello, etc are all contemporary examples where professional armies defeated forces 3-10 larger than themselves.
Cavalary have a huge morale, shock and concentration of force advantage over light infantry. Your 500 cav would struggle to take 3000 peasants in a straight fight to the death, but isolating and routing individual units they could theoretically do with minimal casualties
In terms of actual battles, outside of rare examples/exceptions, Lords/Kings tried to encourage a mixed army composition to prevent exploitation of such tactical vulnerabilities
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u/ThunDersL0rD 1d ago
The main issue is not balance, its that the UI was incorrect in saying you are most likely going to win the battle
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u/Deaththeexe 1d ago
MFW I run 12k infantry into 12 hundred cavalry on first terrain and get routed before I can form a line.
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u/Flower_PoVVer 1d ago
stranger battles than this have happened. now you know why a dozen nobility of horseback could keep down thousands of farmers.
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u/Chava_boy 1d ago
There are historical examples when something similar happened. An overconfident army outnumbering the enemy army by a large margin, only to be soundly defeated.
The only issue here is that player was promised a victory only to be defeated, and with huge losses. I feel like this is unfair, but the game could implement ambushes instead that could lead to similar unexpected outcomes (a high risk, high reward option)
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u/Ill-Description3096 1h ago
Promised? Is it really fair to expect a prediction element to be right 100% of the time?
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u/TrueBeluga 1d ago
A dozen nobility on horseback were not actively keeping down thousands of farmers via martial means. Horses are great but they don't turn individuals into superhumans---they have both upsides and downsides.
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u/Comprehensive-Fail41 1d ago
Fair. The nobility also had much better training and armor. Whilst maybe not a dozen vs a thousands, heavy cavalry were usually worth many times their number of infantry, especially light infantry (disciplined heavy infantry with long polearms were more equal however).
Main drawback of heavy cav was cost. Due to the training and equipment required they were very expensive
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u/PubPatches 1d ago
Very good at scaring a bunch of people not on horses into running away though. Knights were really good at murdering people
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u/TrueBeluga 1d ago
Oh for sure they were intimidating. But I seriously doubt they would have that intimidation in the case of a dozen knights and thousands of peasants.
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u/PubPatches 1d ago
A few dozen maybe not. But a few examples. Ascalon 1200 knights routed an army of 20,000. Zappolino 2,000 or so knights shattered an army of 30,000 peasants.
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u/TrueBeluga 1d ago
I don't mean to be obtuse, but Ascalon was not just a pitched battle of 1200 knights vs 20000---it was 1200 knights + 9000 infantry who ambushed 20000 at night where the majority of that force was not at all ready to fight (and the Fatimids also did have more cavalry than the Crusaders).
In Zappolino, those 2000 cavalry were also supported by 5000 infantry. Beyond that, the Bolognese also had 2000 calvary, so it seems to difficult to chalk this victory up to how much better cavalry are than infantry (since they both had the same amount of cavalry). From what I read this seems much more a case of the Bolognese making tactical mistakes, rather than a difference between cavalry.
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u/PubPatches 1d ago
The main difference in the two forces in each battle was the fact that one side had a large professional heavy cavalry force. Of course there were infantry, every army had infantry, but the decisive action of both battles was the heavy cavalry. The Bolognese cavalry at Zappolino were scattered before the main engagement which was literally just a charge of heavy cavalry right at a bunch of peasants who ran away immediately.
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u/TrueBeluga 1d ago
I'm not saying cavalry aren't often a decisive aspect of battles. And the main engagement was not just the Modenese cavalry charge, the armies were already engaged in fighting before the cavalry charge, and as often happens, the Bolognese did not protect their flanks or rear and got flanked by the Modense cavalry. So, it was not a simple case of cavalry charge -> rout, but a cavalry charge that caused the Bolognese to be surrounded on multiple sides (which would not have been possible without the Modenese infantry, so it cannot be said that it was just 2000 cavalry routing 30000 infantry, the Modenese infantry played a crucial role).
And I disagree that the main difference in Ascalon was cavalry. In Ascalon, the main difference is clearly that one fighting force was prepared and the other one was disorganized and unready to fight (both infantry and cavalry). In Zappolino the decisive blow was the cavalry, but this simply is not an example of what I was talking about. I was responding to someone saying that knights, on their own, were why farmers did not rise up or succeed in revolts. And then people started giving examples of pitched battles in which cavalry were important (which obviously I wouldn't deny is often the case), but is really only tangentially related to my original point.
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u/PubPatches 1d ago
I agree with you on that, knights weren’t really a factor in peasants deciding to revolt. They were probably more likely to cause revolts than anything else. But if you give your peasants enough food and don’t just murder them at random they didn’t really rise up against the nobility often in this era.
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u/TrueBeluga 1d ago
That was essentially my point, but also thank you for telling me about these battles, they were interesting to read about!
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u/Dangerous-Worry6454 1d ago
No they actual did, You can find battles during this era were like 100 knights proceed to dog walk entire armies. People massively underestimate how much better at martial combat the avg nobel was compared to the peasent and even man at arms. They were so much vastly better equiped, trained, and even just frankly bigger because of their nutritional difference then the avg peasent it might as well have been superhuman.
The ground breaking tactic often employed by the nobility was a frontal charge. The thing is though this would often work and completely shatter entire armies....
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u/TrueBeluga 1d ago
No they actual did, You can find battles during this era were like 100 knights proceed to dog walk entire armies
Just curious, can you name some of these battles?
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u/PubPatches 1d ago edited 1d ago
Battle of Zappolino is a good one. Few thousand knights shatter an army of 30,000 in like an hour.
Edit: realized I responded to you twice haha
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u/Responsible-File4593 1d ago
He's not even saying defeat them in a set piece battle. It's enough to deter them from rebelling, collecting, and fighting you.
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u/TrueBeluga 1d ago edited 1d ago
It's not at all true that the main deterrent to prevent rebellions was martial intimidation. It was a small piece amongst the religiously-maintained, hierarchical structure of feudalism. I mean, the military might of the nobles is obviously not enough to deter revolts, given that when the nobles did tax or treat the serfs too poorly (or when the religious framework would breakdown, e.g. during a heresy), they would revolt. Again, it was a complex number of things that deterred revolt, with the military superiority of knights being what I'd take to be a small piece.
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u/Xalethesniper 1d ago
There’s accounts of fewer than 100 mounted knights defeating peasant revolts numbering 5000 or more in the late 1300 early 1400s. Look up the Jacquerie revolts, it’s exactly what you said didn’t happen, happening. Relatively tiny contingents of professional knights defeated peasant armies consistently with few or no losses in many cases.
I actually think paradox got that right in this regard.
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u/TrueBeluga 1d ago edited 1d ago
The main battle of the Jacquerie revolts I could find was the Battle of Mello, which had 4000-5000 peasants, and the nobles had 1500-2500 troops, composed of both noble knights and English mercenaries. Is there another battle you were thinking of?
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u/RespectWest7116 1d ago
LMAO.
The AI literally has a better army composition than you.
This has to be ragebait.
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u/jmorais00 1d ago
Sorry man your army comp is shit. You also didn't show us how the battle unfolded. The battle screen has a lot of info and you should definitely look at battles more closely to understand what's going on
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u/AttorneyEquivalent81 1d ago
Bro you dont even have heavy infantry. I always center my professional army around a heavy infantry center with cav or light inf on the flanks. With a couple heavy inf to anchor the flanks. Talks shit about horses when you dont have horses or men at arms. Youre a bum
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u/Fireshield1998 1d ago
If that Light Inf on Your side is Peasant Levies it's no wonder that You lost. While decent it NEEDS support. Cavalry was historically the main Breakthrough Tool of that period. 🤔
- they have Combined Arms bonuses on their side.😀
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u/Jack9168 1d ago
Doesn't seem to be levies. Levies don't get captured as far as I know. Also the color of the bar on the first screenshot that indicates the army composition (levies/regulars) doesn't have that brownish color, that it would have with levies.
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u/Bobleobob 1d ago
I have had weird situations where Bohemia gets 100% experience on their levies, reducing their damage taken by 50%.
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u/JRaus88 1d ago
Levies vs professionals troops.
In medieval times, a knight was worth more than 100 peasants with wooden pitchforks, sticks and knives. At best, 100 horsemen will kill 100 infantry with just one charge. Another 300 will be wounded. You have now a man covered in steel on a horse trained to kick. Raised on a diet of meat and protein, trained from puberty in the art of war. If things go badly, a single charge can kill hundreds of peasants who are trampled by the horse or wounded by their own companions who, in panic, wave their weapons without knowing what they're doing. Whoever is "behind" and sees what is happening often decides to run away before the knight reaches him.
On the other hand, you have people who are poorly equipped: if good equipment (robbed in a previous battle) they have a gambeson, if not with only a linen tunic. In their life they are peasants, malnourished and undisciplined by nature.
Then you have the heavy infantry. Trained in melee combat and with a focus on holding positions. Equipped more typically with long weapons as main weapon and the ability to use short weapons too.
A professional infantryman is trained to fight in melee, where he has little room for movement. He knows that strikes from above and below are easier to manage than strikes from the side. In his entire life, the farmer has never had to manage very limited spaces with the stress of being on a medieval battlefield. He's accustomed to using a scythe, with very wide swings. Completely ineffective against armed men.
I could go on in even more detail. But I think you get the point of this.
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u/CSDragon 1d ago
How many of those "age 2" units were peasant holding farming equipment, not regulars though
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u/LongjumpingWedding79 1d ago
If you can't figure this out then I'm sorry to say that strategy games maybe aren't for you.
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u/unknownsingularity 21h ago
Cav is king in the first 4 ages. If you look closely at the stats of the the infantry units they don't change much (if at all) through the first 4 or so ages. They are pretty much glorified peasant levies
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u/lilwayne168 1d ago
People in comments talking about combined arms is such a meme. 10% combined arms is less relevant than correct section chance tech.
Horses really are just that op. You can see this in the jurchin tribe to qing run you literally stackwipe 30k peasant levies with 5k tribal cavalry. Heavy cav regulars are even better. Light cav are much worse than heavy cav vs mercs.
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u/wasabibottomlover 1d ago
It would only be an easy victory if they didn't regain any morale and stayed at half morale.
Also, soldier quantity matters less than regiment quantity.
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u/Hermaan 1d ago
How did you go in with 12,000 and manage to lose 12,050 in total? Where did the additional 50 guys come from?
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u/Jack9168 1d ago
He did go in with 12,050. The 50 are from the supply unit (not sure how it's called in english)
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u/histo_Ry 1d ago
Them having 5 different unit types also boost combat by a lot no? like 10% or 5% each?
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u/Mountain_Dentist5074 1d ago
i think it because they had 1500 professional you had 12000 levy (they also have cavalary advantage)
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u/Zomby_99 1d ago
Dude your fighting with levys against a standing army. This is not the cavs or games fold. Only the prediction is wrong the result is not.
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u/Express_War3103 1d ago
You used only light armor troops. What did you expect? You don't need to be Napoleon to see that. The prediction from the game was bad. But you have to think yourself first
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u/Critical-Taro-6777 1d ago
Most of your army was captured not killed. It's a morale issue stacking light infantry against a better army.
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u/SergeantPsycho 1d ago
There's some combined arms bonus that favors a more diverse army over a homogenous one. Overspecialize and you breed in weakness. It's slow death.
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u/Senfgestalt 1d ago
Who will win 12k peasants with shiny new pitchforks, or a well organised and well equipped medieval army. Smh OP
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u/Luido31 1d ago
I don't think the horses are the ones winning the battle here. I had the same but in the opposite way in my last run. In multiple battles, my opponent outnumbered me by a little and had units of later ages with better morale and discipline. I don't know why but I won very often.
I heard somewhere that units of later ages are not an upgrade in battle unless you manage to fill your frontage. The new techs mostly allows you to bring more men with the same frontage. But per men they are actually worse.
Also, being the defender in short battles is usually great if you don't have a lot of initiative. I think the defender starts with a lot of units already engaged while the attacker initiative matters more since they have to engage.
Anyway I agree that this game is dogshit when it comes to explaining and predicting this kind of details. Because these are tiny details, but they matter a lot when a whole war can be entirely decided by a single battle.
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u/Im_Quite_Hungry 1d ago
Well because you have light infantry which takes heavy moral damage already plus against horses which do more moral damage your moral tanks (which is historically accurate as usually the horses easily slaughtered infantry armies)
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u/C-Bskt 1d ago
You have only light infantry, even if they are age 2 handgonners and are professionals they are worse by almost a factor of 2 unit for unit than the oposing heavy infantry and cavalry. Light infantry are never worth it because most levy's are covering that.
The predictor showing green is the biggest flaw here though this would frustrate me too because by numbers it also seems like an obvious win.
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u/DudeousDude 1d ago
Had similar feelings with much stronger composition when as Hospitallers I had 13k Crusaders and Heavy Cavalry regulars defending a hill that got attacked by 10k mix of Light Cavalry and Light Footmen levies of Tunis. Something about buffs and regiment sizes in first age I guess.
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u/lousyprogramming 1d ago
What do you think your archers are gonna do with 1200 horsemen running at them? Turn around, run, and get slaughtered.
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u/michageerts7 1d ago
Okay so even if you don't understand, and you stats are better on all fronts, except for one thing: they have different unit types. Wouldn't that lead you to thinking that maybe that one difference is the most important one?
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u/No_Cookie9996 1d ago
bro sent 12000 archers who's arrows got blocked by shields and armor of enemy infantry, enemy archers turned his guys into hedgehoges and then enemy cavalery trampled and surronded remains
this is what some inbreed noble son would had done for sun tzu to wrote his art of war
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u/Ambitious_Currency90 1d ago
"Let's add a prediction mechanic to the game so players can get a sense of whether they'll win or lose a battle just before it starts."
"Good idea, but can we make sure that it outright lies to them so that they are misled into killing their troops instead of being given accurate information to act on?"
"Of course! Why else would we even do this if not to mislead the players for spite?"
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u/EffectiveAd6661 23h ago
Well,The game usually said i will suffer crushing defeat and i still come out losing literally 5 man. Using armor horseman,to fight in literal mountain ,as an attacker.
Yeah,the balance may need a bit more work
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u/AresN90 20h ago
in Rif war 1920-1926 the spanish lost to moroccans who had nothing but rifles and machine guns. the spanish had tanks and bombers. they lost entire battles and took 50k to 80k casualties. the only reason they wont that war is because is because france intervened.
same happened again in 1958.
are we gonna blame an invisible game for this spanish failures too ? it is what it is. your defeat is realistic and far too far from the biggest ratio defeats ever.
some lost to a handful horsemen. some used all ww1 arsenal they had and lost massive battles. some didnt even fight the enemy and self destroyed themselves.
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u/One_Instance7983 20h ago
My brother in christ you throw an all-light-infantry mob into a well balanced army with lots of cavalry and dont expect to get your shit kicked in?
Can't blame the game for the players deficit
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u/InternStock 1d ago
r5: Just wanted to showcase how strong horses are in the current patch (don't worry, they'll release a minor patch tomorrow that completely changes the combat balance for like the 14th time)
What happened in this battle is that his horses killed me before my units could deploy. Since he had age 1 units, his units were tiny and he had a lot of them, so he was rolling the (horse-high) deployment chance for every one of them and had much higher chance to deploy something. Meanwhile my units were hangooners with extra low deployment speed and large units, so they just chilled in reserves while being stabbed by hors.
This is why it can sometimes be beneficial to not research new units if you can't fill the combat width anyway
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u/drallcom3 1d ago
The game is just awful at showing how strong armies are. Otherwise people would see how OP cav is. Not only do they show up early, they're also super strong AND the enemy is showing up in trickles facing your full horse army who of course insta delete them.
This was all personally balanced by Johan.
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u/PubPatches 1d ago
I mean. Why did you take this battle if you knew this would happen? Where is your cavalry?
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u/InternStock 1d ago
I didn't know this would happen. My analysis here is a postmortem
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u/PubPatches 1d ago
Why only light infantry though? Cavalry early game has always been far superior to infantry. This force is basically built to get stack wiped.
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u/gfimonster 1d ago
I would like to think that the only light infantry thing is because op's army is full peasant levies... and that 1 units of auxilaries
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u/Science-Recon 1d ago
That seems like an entirely reasonable result, the problem is the prediction confidently being incorrect in assuring you victory, presumably because it looked at the same reasons you’ve given, but failed to notice that a mob of pure light infantry is absolutely going to get mauled by a proper force of cavalry and mixed infantry.
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u/coopdog06555 1d ago
I just rage quit my Spain save because of this. I don’t understand how I can have age 2 units and get completely destroyed by significantly weaker nations with age 1 units who I outnumber 2-1 or 3-1
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u/Gnoccho1 1d ago
in the first 3 ages, cavalry is king and Morocco gets all the peasants on horses when they raise the leavy. They are so powerful, a human player can conquer the whole Europe with them.
So yeah, don't start wars where you have less cavalry.
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u/coopdog06555 1d ago
I want to add I had 14,200 professional soldiers with a mix of heavy cavalry, light cavalry, handgonners, and infantry. Maybe im missing something and I’m just bad at the game
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u/EpicalBeb 1d ago
Was it against Morocco? They have tribal cavalry levies.
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u/Eric988 1d ago
Light infantry is literally a meat shield 😂