Cavalry, Charging and the Takeda

[Nitrogen Trichloride]

I am currently on a hard campaign with the Takeda, and I am faced with a fullstack yari ashigaru + yari & bow samurai Oda army. I have noticed that my cavalry charges have extremely low impact (even on almost flat ground), so much that it barely kills any of the enemy units, even when flanked from the sides or rear ! I knowingly do not use the wedge formation to maximize the charge's killing potential, but now I'm left wondering if trying to break their formation and aiming for a rout would work better (when facing the Oda at least).
It's surprisingly difficult to deal with that army... Even routing a single unit is extreme amounts of work : one of my four-unit cav charge against oda's bow samurai ended with one of my units routing, and the two others being left in bad shape ! This was only against bow ashigaru and a bow samurai unit ! I'm seriously puzzled, they didn't even receive any support from the nearby yari units. It didn't seem like they had received upgrades from a blacksmith or anything of the sort either.

I'm more used to using infantry than calvary, so even general tips from cavalry experts would be very welcome ! Currently all my cavalry is light cav (which partly explains the aforementioned issue), because I don't have the necessary buildings to recruit yari samurai cav yet.

Lastly, I would also very much welcome tips from more experienced Takeda players. Although it's been very easy to manage economically due to the warhorse ressource from Kai, I find myself having lots of trouble with the battles themselves. I have a hard time micro-ing cavalry, especially with battle realism.

[Sn3z]

It sounds like you're up against a high level enemy general/daimyo, maybe they have a monk in the army...

light cavalry is only good for crushing bow ashigaru and rear charging in early game pined units, they are also great at killing general units(inspire them)which is a really good way to use them, also countering other light cavalry first), they will win you battle's.

HOwever you never recruit alot, have only like 4 max per army and some of these slots will simply placehold for better cavalry later. light cavalry fall off having very small model count, they are only really effective in armies in first 25 turns, they will become dead weight in mid to late game, what I do with with high rank units I can't bear to disband is use them to just bodyguard my general or support the better cavalry.

You are at the point where you just need yari/fire cavalry with 60 models, there's no cutting it. I would be careful how many cavalry units you have per army the most I would go to is 8, if you have too much the slot usage starts to become inefficient since there's so much anti cavalry on field generally.

[Malkiah]

Well in that situation, I would put light cavalry either hidden to the side or in the rear until the infantry is engaged in melee. At that point, I would tell my cavalry to reposition behind the enemy yari ashigaru and charge at at them while being in stretched formation for maximum charge damage, then quickly order them to disengage so that the yari ashigaru don't have enough time to retaliate. Done sucessfully the yari ashigaru will rout.

In regards to micro, I would say using just 2 units and putting them in just one side, makes it easier to micro manage.

In regards to bow ashigaru, yeah the bastards don't rout easily, I usually need to charge at them 2 or 3 times until they rout.

In regards to bow samurai, there is no point in charging them without katana or yari cavalry.

Pro tip, if you just wanna use cavalry to fight the bow units, katana samurai are the best for that. Since you can just charge and forget.

Last, but not least, always charge with a stretched out unit. Stretching them out, makes them deal more charge damage but makes the unit more vulnerable in prolongued combat if they are outmatched.

[Nitrogen Trichloride]

Originally posted by Sn3z:

It sounds like you're up against a high level enemy general/daimyo, maybe they have a monk in the army...

You're correct in your assessment : The enemy daimyo is Oda Nobuhide, and he is currently a four-star general and one battle away from graduating to his fifth star. It's a decisive battle that I have to win in order to stop their sweep to the south, but everytime I managed to get Nobuhide and a close victory, my very own Takeda Shingen ends up dying somewhere along the way ! Sometimes I even blunder enough to lose my other general who wields the sword of Amaterasu...
Unfortunately, this is only the 17th turn. I never played the Oda so I didn't know they started at war with the Tokugawa and by extension the Imagawa, so I didn't notice their advance until they were right beneath Kai.

Originally posted by Malkiah:

Well in that situation, I would put light cavalry either hidden to the side or in the rear until the infantry is engaged in melee. At that point, I would tell my cavalry to reposition behind the enemy yari ashigaru and charge at at them while being in stretched formation for maximum charge damage, then quickly order them to disengage so that the yari ashigaru don't have enough time to retaliate. Done sucessfully the yari ashigaru will rout.

I tried that at first, but my ashigaru tend to break before my cavalry has enough time to circle around and sweep to the rear. That +1 morale really makes all the difference.
They were in very narrow, 3-4 column formation so I'll try widening it. Another issue I've encountered is that using two or more cav units on a single target results in collision, and even loss of speed during the charge ? I'm not sure about this (again, I never really used cav before), but that could explain some of the issues I've been having too.

Either way I'm thankful for all the help ! I'll try harder !

[Malkiah]

If you narrow your ashigaru units, they will survive longer.

[Sn3z]

wow a four/five star by turn 17... gg

can you retreat back to Kai???? the most efficient way of dealing with that stack to lure them on your home province and grind them down on the walls, you could kill the general outside with light cavalry, if you haven't,already - I always suggest to players they should rush lvl2 then lvl3 castle on home province, since you simply don't know what will happen, and its in these type of situations it can be used as an insurance policy to save your campaign, and its never wasted with the added buildings slots you could setup proper cavalry recruitment. goodluck

[Trebor797]

If your battle is on the normal game unmodified, you can send me the save file if you want and I can try my best to win the battle for you. It's hard to give advise on the battle if one doesn't know which unit you exactly have to work with and what enemies have. From what it sounds is that you got a very cav heavy army up against almost only spear and this rather sounds like avoid the battle if possible. Anticav bonus on Spears is very heavy and even better cav would struggle. Light cav is best use like shock cav so you gotta keep cycle charging, even against archers cause it's melee stats are so bad. Basically right after impact always pull out again unless unit is blinking then staying a moment longer can be ok

[Dou B Jin]

Light Cavs would die charging Ashigarus in the rear. They are worse than other cavs in sheer stats but they move faster and are more accessible. Their redeeming quality is their high anti-cav which make them a threat to generals early games.

Light Cav's main use for early game is chasing down routing units, counter other cavlary (for a cheap unit they can put up a decent fight against general and katana cav), and hunt down range units.

I would not charge them into any infantry that are remotely good in melee, dying to bow samurai is not that suprising given their it significantly higher melee stats and armor. If you have to charge into infantry against them try doing it with 2 or more cav from different angle. You want to inflict as much damage and break them as soon as possible. You will lose some models but any unit routing becomes free kill from them.

The more you can rack up from those routing unit, the sooner you can break the enemy army. They should be avoid direct combat most of the time.

When you have actual cavalry later (Yari and Katana), Katana will be great chasing down enemy bow or even katana sam (as they have a hidden bonus to all non-spear infantry). Yari cavalry will be significantly better at breaking enemy lines with their incredibly high charge as well as their ability to counter cav.

Breaking enemy formation is important because it lets you have more of your models in contact with more of enemy's model which is important because your ability to deal damage in comparatively short lived than infantry as your charge bonus rapidly fades.

Cavs in Shogun 2 is in an extremely weird place for me. They can be extremely effective and devastating the enemy ranks but also is in the game that has some of the most powerful anti-large bonus. Even the strongest cavs in this game will die to the basic ashigaru units if left in for too long. It requires a lot of managment and focus more on dealing moral damage and chasing down routing enemy than killing as many as you can in a fight.

[BastardSword]

Katana cav is the best against melee units. Send them in on a charge and you'll notice them literally exploding into enemy units, making men get bowled all over the place.

Light cav and yari cav are really only good against other cavalry, and the AI doesn't use enough of them to make it worth it. Katana cavalry are fine against enemy cavalry as long as they don't get overwhelmed.

If you want to kill off an enemy general, wait until midway through a battle and the enemy general will probably start running around behind the melee scrum, trying to give morale to his troops. Have all your bows target him and you can easily finish him off. Much easier than trying to micromanage light cavalry which will probably get hunted down and eliminated by enemy spears and cavalry before they can get to the enemy general.

[Sn3z]

Light cavalry can be treated as fully expendable units, and the reason is, they can literally win you battles in an instance, so the trade of killing a general and committing to just a big rear charge is acceptable for the loss of a light cavalry, provided it tips the fight back in your favor, its not hard to replace light cavalry,they are very cheap in terms of upkeep and not to bad in the costing, they rep quickly, it might make sense to view the units as expendable because you may need to cull numbers anyway since carrying many units into the mid game is not advisable.

If its possible always recruit light cavalry with either +2 armor or +1+1 from blacksmith this is the quickest stat modifiers you can get and all you need, the extra armor really helps tank a salvo from a bow ashigaru and thats enough time to close and rout because bow ashigaru reload speed sucks. the extra modifiers also helps when you have to fight other light cavalry it gives you an advantage in stats,.

You don't need any improvements on other cavalry, its not important.

[BastardSword]

Katana cav are noticeably more explodey when they crash into enemy melee units if you give them extra charge bonus. I don't think it matters for yari/light/fire cav because they already have really high charge bonus especially against enemy cav, and any extra charge bonus doesn't mitigate the fact that they're a bit hopeless against melee units.

And speaking of fire cav, if you are Takeda they are a very good unit. They are basically yari cav but with better stats, and you can use them more like katana cav because they're a bit beefier than yari cav. But they can still stand up well against enemy yari/light cav way better than katana cav.

[Nitrogen Trichloride]

In the end, the best I managed was a costly enemy victory with only two lost units on my side (one light cav and one bow ashigaru) after the battle. I managed to trade that defeat for Nobuhide's head, which in turn enabled me to quickly eradicate the Oda from the map ! I have also conveniently acquired the once-Hojo provinces of Izu and Sagami, which are very important given their gold mining and blacksmithing specialties. Now I'll have to turn my attention to the Uesugi as well as the growing Ikko menace...

I figure my main offensive will be mostly focused around cavalry recruited from Kai for its charge bonus, would it be wise to spec Sagami into armor ? I figure the longer my infantry holds up in melee, the more time I'll have to maneuver my cavalry around and into the flanks of preoccupied enemies...

I tried to apply as much of the advice here and I think it really helped in making a difference, especially the charge unit width and also understanding that they're expendable - thus committing them to their mission of slaying the enemy general. Being indecisive or too shy about committing units really proved deadly throughout the battles I played across all my campaigns so far.
I also have some katana cav in the queue now, so it's finally going to start looking like an actual Takeda force ! I'm so excited to play with Fire cav too, especially since they encourage nearby units, and bow cav look super cool with that swooping crane formation !

The Takeda are rapidly becoming my favourite clan to play as. Playing with cavalry is very hard and new to me, but it's really exciting. Just listening to the sounds of horses charging is simply beautiful.

Just before this campaign I played as the Date and as I made my way to Kyoto I had to fight a huge 4000-man strong Takeda army, which was about 1/3rd cavalry. Looking at the units moving very rapidly towards my hasty defensive formation was very intimidating (especially since all of those were expensive assorted samurai cavalry that I had never used or seen before), and I was so captivated that I almost failed to notice a flanking yari cav detachment near my core units. I ended up winning, but mostly thanks to the fact that their forces were moving in a diagonal towards me, so instead of facing an army twice my size head-on I faced small groups that my archers would wear down for my infantry to slay. Who knows what would have really happened if they actually gave themselves time to form up and march properly...

Of course, I'm very thankful for all the advice and help ! I hope this thread will prove useful to other new Takeda players, too !

Edit : I hadn't noticed some other replies in the thread (steam notifications are weird), I'll answer them later and provide details - I'll also try to provide my savefile so anyone can just look upon my yarimazing army composition.

[BastardSword]

Yep prioritizing Sagami as a high-armor recruitment spot for your melee infantry is a good idea, as well as using Kai as a charge bonus spot for cavalry.

[YaFilthy]

to me calv was never worth while because the AI always plays the same and generally on harder modes get more moral boost early game. If i would run calv i wouldnt keep them in my main stack but f0llow my main stack since if the horses can flank faster, they can also move farther on the overview map... but sometimes the ai will just chase your reinforcement which can be annoying. taking out the general is the best method to win a fight. for sure usually ill just use my bow units tho since it hard to manage the ai always charges my general and buffed...

[Nitrogen Trichloride]

Doesn't steam prevent posting links to exterior websites in threads ? I know a couple of filehosts but I'm not sure if there's a simpler or streamlined method here on steam (as I have never shared a savefile on the steam forums before).

[Sn3z]

Originally posted by Nitrogen Trichloride:

Having recruited near close to 40 units of yari,fire,katana cavalry in my last Takeda game I can say for sure, that katana cavalry are the last priority unit you need to recruit, the issue with katana cavalry is;

They can in effect become absolutely useless if the AI has yari cavalry and furthermore its a given the ai will have SOme kind of spear units on flanks, this means that the unit slots given over to katana cavalry are now in this situation completely wasted, you would wish you'd have any other unit of cavalry or infantry. so watch out...

Katana cavalry are a luxury and the most practical way of using them is to park them back behind your yari ashigaru, when fighting wait for part of the AI line to weaken and charge them though it...