sleep deprived sperging time, here we go.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm feeling pretty shocked and dismayed as to how much of a step backwards mass infantry combat in this game is and I have always been pretty reserved with my expectations for this game - I can only imagine how the people who were on the hype train for years must feel (although everyone seems to be praising the pretty graphics and looking forward to doing the same grind they have been doing for years in warband so maybe my interests don't align with those held by the majority of the fan base.)
Here are more findings from just a few more minutes of custom battles:
1. Infantry uses spears exclusively against cav now. They will always switch to their sidearms when approached by other infantry. This means that features of classic modded formations from M&B (as seen in Viking Conquest), such as shield walls putting shield-bearers to the front and polearm or twohander-wielding soldiers to the backlines, are gone - but it doesn't really matter because of the below finding.
2. Even if the AI used spears against infantry, you wouldn't want them to, because the spastic collision (or lack thereof) means every engagement is in the raping distance where spears lose their one advantage. There is no need for backline weapons such as long spears, two-handers, and polearms because there is often no back line at all, but a single line compromised of a screaming, churning mass of chimeric men.
3. Because there is little to no space between individual characters in a melee, the (enabled by default) option to show your banner above friendly troops ends up covering half of your screen in glowing shit. Disabling this option, you will find that you still can't distinguish friend from foe, because once two infantry lines are engaged in melee they look like a mass of swarming termites. Your choices are to see fuck all or to see fuck all else.
4. Characters don't know how to fight in formations. Taleworlds supposedly released a beta patch in February specifically to address this! I can put my guys in a shield wall or a square and the individual soldiers will only fight back against enemies attacking them directly. The whole point of a formation is that its individual soldiers should be able to cover each other, such that a single foe faces multiple weapons at once. As it stands now they are incredibly conservative and get swarmed easily.
5. As a combination of all of the above, cavalry is even more OP in this game than in warband. Historically realistic? Sure. But historically, the counter to heavy cav (besides other heavy cav) was of course a tightly packed infantry formation armed with long spears and polearms. Because of all of the above findings, however, infantry has an icecube's chance in hell of holding up against significantly fewer numbers of cavalry. In custom battles I tested empire vs empire match ups of an increasingly smaller number of heavy cav (from 150 to 50) against 250 infantry, in ideal conditions for infantry (tight formation, spears, holding their position, etc) and every single time the cavalry completely trounced my infantry. Out of the initial charge a handful of horses may be stopped in their tracks by the wall of men, but when half of them aren't interested in attack, the mass advantage ends up not mattering at all.
The sad thing is that Viking Conquest did all of this not simply better but very competently indeed and it wasn't even developed by the core Taleworlds team. The sadder thing is that original warband - and, fuck, the legacy M&B versions - did some of these aspects, such as unit cohesion etc, noticeably better.
Eight fucking year, lads. Oh well - carry on discussing how its cool that there are children in the game and how pretty the towns look now (because both of those things are indeed nice additions, though they only feel me with greater resentment, and a yearning for a game that has all that in addition to an improved core combat experienced).
