Do I need artillery in my full cavalry army, as horde Oirat?

[John]

My armies consist of 16 cav and 4 artillery each but artillery doesn't seem to do anything other than burn my money, should I just have 100% cavalry armies, with one sieging army with 6 cannon 4 cav, or something else maybe?

[John]

For example a full 20 cav army costs 2.57 gold, with 4 cannons it goes to 4.74

[bri]

It depends on what military tech level you're talking about. Early cannons aren't worth much except when used for sieges.

[John]

Originally posted by bri:

It depends on what military tech level you're talking about. Early cannons aren't worth much except when used for sieges.

I'm about to get tech 14, I think the cannons still don't have many pips

[Totally Innocent Chatbot]

For the first couple iterations, artillery has terrible pips for combat, and is only useful for sieges. 2k is the bare minimum you'll want for sieging armies if you're dirt poor, but if you have a dedicated army just for sieging down forts you'll ideally want to work your way up to 10k artillery, which is the exact number needed to give you the maximum siege bonus against a level 2 fort.

Later on, though, artillery are going to become vastly more influential in battles. The first big jump is at military tech 16, where artillery receives +1 Fire damage, followed by military tech 22 where they receive a further +2 Fire damage. At this point, armies with a good complement of artillery are going to utterly obliterate any army they encounter which lacks artillery. From mil tech 16 onwards, you'll want to start investing in artillery for your combat armies as your economy allows, with the goal to have a full combat width of artillery (protected, of course, by slightly over a full combat width of infantry/cavalry) in at least your "main" combat stack by the time mil tech 22 arrives.