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Cavalry charges

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Velax:
I was wondering, are hits from cavalry charges distributed differently than hits from other unit types? During a recent battle between Perdan and Aix on the East continent (where I fought on the Perdan side), a large number of Aix cavalry (some 350) seemed to waste a lot of hits through concentrating on one unit each, rather than distributing hits amongst several enemy units as is normally the case. In fact, of the 10 cavalry units that charged (from both sides), only 1 scored hits on more than a single enemy unit.

The most obvious example is this:

Arrakis Heavy Cavalry (4) score 4191 hits on SADA's Brewmasters (35) that scored 55 casualties (the entire Brewmaster unit).

Lesser examples:

Knights of Cymru (8) score 2832 hits on PMW - Zoomer Frame Riders (31) that scored 57 casualties (the entire unit)
Mounted Death (25) score 1169 hits on Holy Chargers (6) that scored 25 casualties (also the entire unit)

Using the average number of hits it took to cause a casualty during that battle (roughly 39), the Arrakis Heavy Cavalry scored less than half the number of casualties it could have. Is this something specific to cavalry charges? If so, it seems to significantly lessen the entire point of using cavalry.

Anaris:
There's a big difference between charging across the field at a line of enemies and crashing into them, and standing and fighting against enemies all around you.

However, it's possible that the distribution could be looked at a little.

fodder:
is it affected by formation? for that matter... any type of troops in melee combat, not just cav...

Indirik:
Also, you have to look at it this way: Hits are not apportioned so that you do just enough to a guy to kill him, then move on to the next guy. If you hit one guy with 5 lances, five guys aren't going to drop dead just because one guy took enough damage to kill five men.

That Arrakis Heavy Cavalry unit had 63 men in it. The SADA's Brewmasters unit they hit had 61. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume a 1-1 targeting from a cav charge to a line of soldiers. The SADA's Brewmasters were completely wiped out by that charge, and the cav unit only took 10 casualties.

Cav units tend to be smaller than infantry units due to expense and the fact that it's hard to be able to command a huge cavalry unit.  That means they are going to tend to only damage one or two units at a time, unless their enemy has a lot of small units.

Velax:
I get the IC rationale for it - that one lance can't pierce five guys at the same time. But cavalry are expensive to recruit and maintain and the main benefit from that is they do extra hits on a charge. If you lessen that by wasting half those hits, then what's the point of recruiting cavalry?


--- Quote ---Cav units tend to be smaller...That means they are going to tend to only damage one or two units at a time, unless their enemy has a lot of small units.
--- End quote ---

That makes sense, but doesn't actually seem to happen in battle. The only cavalry unit that hit more than one enemy unit in the initial charge was by far the smallest one. And there were a number of examples of smaller infantry units (15-30 men) hitting more than one enemy unit.

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