Something Monk didn't really touch on is that cav in the early game really makes the most of your manpower. The 1k manpower used on a cav unit is going to be far more effective than the 1k manpower used on an infantry unit. If manpower is a bigger bottleneck than money then investing in cavalry is a good choice at the start.
ALSO they keep more drill after each battle as they suffer a lot less losses in mp, i find it funny when guides say "delet cav to save money NOW LOOK FOR THE MERC COMPANY THAT HAS THE HIGHEST SIEGE ALSO FREE COMPANY :)))))))", although i recomend if possible to get the free company but to save your own mp to reinfoece battles and to siege, as they are at the end of the day cheaper slightly shittier infantry
Well, the reason for the merc companies is because in early wars, especially in small nations, they a) have larger armies than you can hope to field, and b) have significantly more manpower. Its not about saving money during war, its about saving money in between wars. That being said, most guides are shite or incredibly outdated
@@benito1620 he plays to have fun, and he has fun playing inthe.most optimal way. World conquest is the logical conclusion of trying to pçay as optimally as possible
Detaching cav to train is probalby the best advice I've gotten in this game 2k hours in. I love using cav for the flanking bonus, but I def will still delete my cav when I'm doing a slow start nation with a weak eco.
i use it more often as small nations because you are limited by forcelimit and i rather go 1 or 2 units over forcelimit with cav than 4 with infantry because it is cheaper and at least as effective throwing 25 or 50 ducats and 2 k manpower with a small nation away is surely a waste of resources but i mean for players who dont know the game well saying dont use cav at all insted of going into detail in which circumstances you should is probably an easier advice than trying to explain everything
@@bossenes5020 As Trebizond that starts out with 1 cav I just delete it and buy the free merc company. With that I'll still go over the force limit and it is barely enough to fight against Imereti. The free company is something everyone should use. Cost no manpower and it has lower upkeep than your regular troops.
@@Vincrand i did the same but kept the horse why deleting when i can use it in the war? And cav in the early game is way stronger than inf it just does not make sense to delete 1k manpower at the start and a unit worth of 25 ducats Never delete units in the start of the game And not to forget your enemy will always have cav which means he has a quality edge above you in same sized battles İf you dont like savescuming battles than use early game cav And dont forget its way more manpower effective cav will lose less man and kill the enemy faster which means better manpower efficiency which will add up
@@bossenes5020 Not deleating that cav would mean you already have to start taking loans before the war starts. Keeping that cav doesn't only bring it's own high upkeep with it, but also another over force limit. AI doesn't recruit the free company in peace times, so by recruiting the free company and deleating the cav you'll outnumber your slightly bigger neighbours. As Trebizond vs Imereti the first fight is pretty much always in the mountain were you get the -2 to the roll and even without that cav you'll always win it.
@@Vincrand bro loans as an opm trebizond for the first war is like mandatory İts a game not real life Watch florrynomics for this and you will understand why And it changes nothing about that it is not a good idea to delete a unit at the start of the game Again not only the money but also 1000 k manpower + the more loses down the drain I have nearly 9 k hours on this game you can be sure its not worth it And as trebizond you have to take cav because you will have manpower issues early game as you will fight outnumbered most of the time and need strong units to kill your enemy piecemeal
I've always used cav, it's super underrated, even later on. Any country can achieve big income relatively easily, which pretty much removes the only reason you'd have to not use cav. Breaking the enemy flank and getting those cannons into the front row for massive damage can be really decisive late game.
Everyone can achieve big income easily mid to late game but if you save money earlier you will reach this stage earlier as well. And cavalry isn't that good later because they get outclassed in terms of pips i think
@@noriantiri9310 iirc, there are some tech levels where cav lags behind inf, but that's well after you get improved flanking and they always catch up eventually, getting it back to being worth it. If you then stack a few modifiers like picking aristocratic ideas and getting loyal cossack estate, you'll save a fair bit of manpower in the long run.
@@plebisMaximus the thing about flanking ability is that it's most usefull for fights early game when you and your opponents are below the combat width. The only time it will be usefull otherwise is at the end of a battle when most troops have already retreated. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about this
@@noriantiri9310 You're not wrong, I just disagree. In a game where manpower matters as much as it does this patch, being able to crack those flanks a little quicker and maybe even get cannons on the frontline where they take double damage can be huge if you ask me. It'll crack enemy manpower and money, which can send them into a debt spiral that makes future wars easier. I don't think you should underestimate how important the end of the battle can be for making the enemy take big losses.
Cav are elite shock troops and are not intended to be directly compared to infantry. The debate is between using a few expensive elites or none at all. 60% Professionalism you gain 100% manpower when deleting units. This is an interesting option when ramping up for war deleting Cav Afterwards. Alternately, ramping up and consolidating after battles as you make progress throughout the war. Either tactic would be best used after recently unlocking new tier Cav units.
Oh snap I never thought of using that 60% bonus for reassigning units at the start of a war. That's wicked! I always thought that bonus highly highly situational for maybe building overseas armies quickly, but I'll use this trick going forward.
@@jorisschaltegger2131"200,000 Streltsy units are ready, with a million more well on the way" Oh yes, the famous Russian cloning facilities like Kamino or Red Alert 2 Cloning vat 😉
Funny thing is, if my nation has any bonuses to cav combat ability, aristocratic is my second favorite military idea group. I find the siege pip huge, the monthly autonomy change is hug when you have low crownland, it gives you an extra diplomat for lowering AE, and dev cost for deving institutions.
Yeah, but Aristocratic is kinda like Humanist where you're NIs have to play into the idea group. Otherwise you kind of get a grab bag of ideas that aren't the best all-around, though with the AI hard focusing on forts in the last two patches, that extra siege pip really comes in handy.
@@EbonySaints I find humanist ideas to be extremly good when playing wide. I know some people say "let then rebel" but being able to basicly ignore rebels with humanist offensive is just so relaxing.
Aristo is basically a better Quantity, it gives you +15% manpower as well as cheaper generals for slackening, in addition to all the horse bonuses and the dev cost stuff. In my recent Ottoman WC/one faith run, I took Aristo as my 6th idea group (took Diplo, Admin, Religious, Humanist and Offensive as the first 5) and it was very nice to have, as I was short of manpower around the time I was taking it, and its cav bonuses dovetailed nicely with the Ottoman national idea bonuses.
@@psychic_beth Why would you ever have manpower proplems with Otto by tech 22? Still agreeing with you that aristo ideas are often better than quantity though. Especially in the late Game.
@@eragonshurtugal4239 Because I was rapidly expanding my army to try to get military hegemon (ditched eco hegemon in 1687 and switched to mil hegemon in 1707) and was constantly at war. This manpower problem didn't last that long though, I eventually spammed enough soldier's households to deal with it and by the end I had plenty of manpower.
You didn’t mention it but cavalry also loots faster so when I’m sieging in the early game I’ll have my infantry siege while my cav loot the rest, if you’re going heavy cav it can make the wars really profitable with decisive battles and lots of loot and taking the buckets of ducats in the peace deal
Do you actually make any money from looting? I mean, you loot on the monthly tick, right? and cavalry loot .3, infantry loot .1. but that's almost the maintenance cost of the units (cav are .25, infantry are .1) If you loot, you are just making your maintenance back really, cav can slightly outpace this, but not by much, but if you are conquering the land, you then have to deal with the devestation you caused by looting. While there are ways to increase looting, none of them are amazingly powerful, and I believe most of them are locked behind the traditions of the nation you play. I don't really see how this scales up significantly. Naval looting is incredibly powerful (because it not only seems to give you a lot of money relative to the boat maintenance, though I don't know the formula), but also because it gives massive trade power penalties to your trade competitors). but I don't see how people are making money foraging their troops. It looks like it's mostly either break even, or slightly better than break even.
@@timmietimmins3780 If you siege a non-cobelligerent you're not taking the land., might as well loot it. In that case you put your siegestacks on the forts, while your units can be placed on the non-fort provinces where they can pay for themselves by looting. So if youre warring a lot in the early game, the cav maintenance isnt as big either because the increased looting strength lets them offload some of that cost onto the nation youre trying to separate peace. (also its generally good practice to let the inf siege and keep the cav separate, since they are more expensive to reinforce when they take attrition and disease rolls.)
A problem with cavalry flanking tho is that they the cavalry units get put on the flanks of the battle and when the enemy's units die off, the cavalry usually ends up idle
That's why in the current state of the game you need to stack all the cavalry bonuses if you want them to be actually really useful. Infantry can be really strong by just stacking discipline and morale but for cavalry you also need to stack flanking range, cavalry cost and cavalry to infantry ratio. That way you will not pay too much maintenance and your cavalry will be able to contribute to the battle for nearly the entire duration because your frontline will largely be cavalry and by the time combat width hits 40 you will have 10 to 15 flanking range. If you are ever bored, there is ways that you can create a Zoroastrian Siam with Horde ideas and Eastern technology group. It's the highest damage I have ever seen units do in EuIV with some battle ticks incurring over 20000 casualties. Considering the hoops you have to jump through to get that Siam, you probably won't be able to restrict the Europeans or Ottomans from becoming strong, which is all the better because I literally stackwiped some 200k stacks from the Ottos.
@@micahbonewell5994 Bug? As an English cavalier in the 1640s, I take great offense to that, good sir! WE NEVER PUSH IN, WE CHASE THE ENEMIES AWAY AND LEAVE THE BATTLEFIELD GLORIOUS, HUZZAH!
@@micahbonewell5994 Its been almost 10 years and the game is at the end of its life cycle. Paradox has released many changes, yet they have not fixed this bug in the core mechanics? This would be very disappointing.
IMO people need to make a bigger deal of the flanking. When fighting a smaller stack, two units of cavalry adds, as you pointed out, FIVE more infantry units' worth of damage. When people just can't seem to get stackwipes in the early game? It's from deleting their cav.
Why would cav help stackwipe? They only attack units on the edges of combat width. Destroying the core of their units is always left up to infantry, and practically always takes the same amount of time. Unless you're fighting an enemy with a unit size drastically under combat width, and you yourself are willing to lower the amount of units you have in fights and put in cav instead to *match* their stacks, it's not great.
@@minoxiothethird it helps to stack wipes smaller stacks that don't fill the combat with. Once you are two more infantry than them, anymore infantry does not do damage. Adding Cavalry increases your damage by more than two more infantry units. That extra damage further reduces their morale, increasing the likelihood that you will get a stack wipe.
When I got to cav-only with my latest teutonic horde run, I had flanking up to something insane like 12, and something insane like 75% Cav combat ability. It cut through other armies like a buzzsaw even late game. Even when you don't main it, it is nice to have 2 or 4 in your stacks.
@@MyUsersDark Poland can get over 200% and siam can also get over 160% (if they focus on it). The +1 cav fire can works a bit like a multiplier of combat ability ( will call it from here ca). I think it's something like x1.25 (been a while since I tested it, but that's the number that now sticks with me). That means that at 100% ca the +1 fire performs roughly equal to a 125% ca without the fire. At 160% ca the +1 fire it performs roughly equal to a 200% ca. Ca isn't the main modifier you want to go for anyway. Fire damage reduced > Morale & discipline > land leader shock (> land leader fire if tradition is low) > shock damage dealt & ca.
I also always use offensive, the siege reduction is so good to reduce atrition and the time of the wars, the better generals also reduce manpower consumption, and you don't need to spend all the extra money in new troops. So you end up spending less manpower and less money in faster wars. I just have problem with manpower at the start in some games with bad luck, but at the start you just need to create a mercenary army.
Offensive doesn’t give army tradition though, if your country has tradition in it or you stack quality and another then you can roll better generals without guaranteed pips.
@@mrfreeman2911 if you stack tradition you can roll 80 or 100 generals while needing less wars to build it up, is it better to get one more pip across the board for your generals or to increase their max roll capacities? Should be obvious
The issue with Cavalry isn't that it's worse than Infantry; it's that it has diminishing returns the longer a battle goes on. When Cavalry deploys, that's their position, period - once they've beaten their matchup, they sit there and twiddle their thumbs, rather flanking/moving towards the center of the enemy line. Arumba did a video explaining his reasoning on this and the relevant section is at 23:00. ruclips.net/video/h-62B7GiwDw/видео.html Essentially, they deploy and beat their matchup, but instead of moving center to keep the flank damage going, they just sit there.
When i played as the teutonic order, i stacked so many Cav bonuses from idea groups and the mission tree. I absolutely destroyed every opponent in every battle with favorable terrain.
Cavalry are important for battles because of the cascade effect. It’s common to hear that the flanking isn’t good even if your army is larger because cavalry on the edge will stop fighting. But since the cavalry fight on the flank those units break sooner and because of that your infantry start flanking sooner. That’s specifically what he means when he says cavalry are decisive and will save manpower.
If I drill I usually drill my cannon. Sure it's expensive, but they also don't take casualties. Which means they'll retain the bonuses through the entire game.
@@bartysp2599 That is exactly how it works. Your units lose drill values passively over time, or when they take casualty and receive reinforcements. The passive loss rate is pretty low, so if you're fighting a lot the casualty loss is the main factor. Your cannons only really take damage if the front row is depleted, which is something you should be avoiding in any case. Granted, they also only benefit from the fire damage bonus when in the back row. Shock damage bonus, shock damage received reduction, and fire damage received reduction are all moot bonuses if your cannons never leave the back row.
@@cascadian4250 True, but attrition also factors into losing drill and what are cannons used for that's a massive attrition drain? Sieges. Though it's capped at five percent, a cannon sitting on a siege for a year loses six hundred troops in that time assuming you don't get a disease outbreak. Reinforcing that along with the natural loss causes them to lose approximately 61% of their drill in that year alone. Even at the base rate of 1% you're going to lose about 13%. No modifiers drilling gets you about 10% a year. Having maxed out professionalism and Ambras Castle maxed out bumps that up to 25%. Tag switching to Prussia and Provence and completing the missions give 30%. None of those come close to making up for that one year of sieging on a max attrition fort. Professionalism is worth it for the manpower and the siege ability, but drilling is pretty much only good for the first fight or two. People should really read the ledgers of their games and go to the casualties page. Almost every nation, even yours, is going to be losing way more manpower to attrition either from sieges or standing around on one of the ten tundra tiles in game rather than to combat.
Cav feels like a "win more" unit. The most important thing in battles is to not get outflanked. Cav makes it more punishing when you *do* outflank your opponent, but money-wise it makes it harder to get the flank in the first place. But "winning more" helps you save money due to less reinforcement costs. It's once you know your frontline will at least not be smaller than your opponent, then it becomes okay to grab cav to try and more decisively win battles. ("not being smaller" can happen either because you know your opponent is smaller or because you're at combat width).
If you were going to pick two groups to go for just for the policy, inno offensive with the +1 Leader siege and 10% siege ability is superior imo, and combined with the 20 in offensive, means you always win siege races. Absolutely broken, and definitely one of the best adm/mil combos
"cavalry is too expensive" always seemed fairly silly to me because in the part of the game where money is a problem, youre not gonna be building more than 4-6k cavalry in general, maybe 8k for larger nations (hordes are different), and that represents such a small portion of your income
Cav are at their strongest when you have constraints in certain areas of your nation. You touched on this slightly, but to make it clear cavalry are more efficient per base unit in both manpower and forcelimit. So if you are a nation that is at forcelimit with limited manpower, cavalry are going to be good. This usually will only happen in the early game, likely pre 1550, so in the grand scope of an entire game cav do fall off very quickly. There are plenty more factors to take in, such as each stack running a max of about 4 cavalry if your nation has no inherent bonuses to cavalry, because after 4 cavalry you get largely diminishing returns from their flanking ability, making them worse pound for pound than they otherwise should be. Cavalry should likely start getting phased out when you start fighting opponents that can fill the combat width, because again the flanking ability gets neutralized when the combat width is filled, and it is more important to have reinforcements for cannons instead of one cavalry unit (this is at the point in the game where manpower and forcelimit limitations get lifted and the biggest limitation is money, especially with cannons starting to do real damage). I think overall the gecko MP community demonstrates the strength and weaknesses of cavalry the best. Watching some of Habibi's videos, you can see how some nations are very cavalry focused due to inherent modifiers, whilst most other nations go pure infantry because they fill the combat width so early and usually don't care about going over forcelimit to win wars. This also makes a big show of how important specific techs are towards the effectiveness of cavalry based vs. infantry based nations. Entire wars can shift based on what tech they are on in the game.
100% cav as a horde is so much fun. It's probably far from optimal but depending on the terrain it can be really strong, you stack wipe left and right, and can easily win against armies 2 or 3 times your size (at least you used to, haven't done this since before combat changed)
You still win if my Teutonic Horde gameplay is anything to go by, but what ends up happening is that the enemy completely routs from the battle, but it still goes on for a few more days to where your army just sits there hitting air until the twelve day limit is up and they finally run off. The combat/stackwipe changes really annoy me.
I’ve done some testing and tried 125% combat ability with 100% cavalry inf ratio with the 50% bonus flanking policy from horde idea vs just normal disciplined infantry army that went all discipline, the cavalry got obliterated without a chance every single time, even with alot of polish winged hussars in it. Discipline is the meta no matter what this patch and i’d say cavalry is a complete waste of time and resources. Wasting mana and idea groups on uppgrading cavalry is a waste of resources when you should be focusing on discipline.
Always bothered me that people say cavalry is useless when they're swimming in ducats in the mid/late game. The only downside is cost, if money is not an issue there is no reason not to have cavalry. Great video.
i think offensive is far better than quantity & quality.. siege ability wins wars.. you dont even need to fight battles if u siege quicker than the enemy.. which means you dont lose much manpower.. a lot of people think espionage is bad. but combined with innovative and offensive its op as hell.. starting wars with tons of claims and +100% spy network with amazing siege ability & - advisor costs meaning u can afford more cavalry & artillery etc.. and better generals & more forts for army tradition.. i found i was sieging down forts quicker than the ai and we know how much the ai cheats on sieges.. with those combined ideas u dont even need to save scum.. i was winning wars consistently without even needing to fight battles.. sieging quick is key to success..
@@craigstephenson7676 i usually go quality as the second military idea later on.. i always go offensive now unless im a horde... i might go horde ideas or offensive depends
@@tigrecito48 yeah offensive is a much better first military idea but quality is usually worth it later in the game, good policies and having a good navy is helpful.
Figured I'd offer my critisms: 00:40 - This is false. Infantry can also flank -- cav just flanks a further range (1 flank inf vs 2 flank cav at early tech) 1:05 - "Fire isn't that valuable in the beginning of the game." Although this is somewhat true, this is due to the fact that infantry does more shock damage and cav only does shock damage. This makes absolutely zero sense in reference to comparing damage output of the two units, since fire and shock really ought to be treated roughly equally (minus certain biases in unit pips). 2:00 - I mean yes, but "objectively better" as is being used in this video is not an honest way to argue. A 100000 ducat/mo elite unit that does 2x damage as infantry would also be "objective better" than infantry with the same definition that is being used. Also it's worth mentioning that, infantry is better than cav in a hypothetical 1v1 scenario in certain situations too (like tech 6) 2:56 - Army upkeep at peace is not a very useful number to consider, since being at peace indicates poor play in the early game. Besides, a playstyle where one is at peace for a long time further encourages minimizing army maintenance, so this argument doesn't seem too convincing. Also, drilling is a meme. Furthermore, reducing price differential via a multiplicative 50% (minimum army maintanance) doesn't do anything for the cost argument since infantry would also be scaled by 50%. 4:05 - Not quite -- one has to be extremely rich AND deplete all available mercenary stacks. 4:40 - No, use mercs 4:50 - Mercs. This seems to be a common theme. 5:05 - False. Cav is more expensive. 5:16 - This is a reasonable point. There are other considerations such as force limit and desire to hire mercs for siege generals though which drives day one deleting of cav. I acknowledge that sometimes I delete cav day one partly for memes since I tend to attract the anti-cav crowd. 5:40 - Agreed, but... mercs. 7:12 - This is true but can be said of a lot of things in EU4 because of how interconnected modifiers are. For this to hold further weight "some" ought to be quantified (not necessarily precisely, since that would be practically impossible). 7:55 - This is true -- cavalry related modifiers are easier to access. 8:00 - Although I understand the gripe here, the "right" position to hold is to object only when one has to compromise important resources such as idea group slots (aristo/horde). Indeed, the bonus from cossack estates is mostly without opportunity cost if you are already eastern christian, so there should be no complaints about accounting for those numbers in calculations for certain nations. That being said, cav is still more noticeably expensive with just the price reduction from cossacks, so this does little to solve the cost dilemma. 8:35 - It is pretty good, but that doesn't mean it's better than other more important idea groups, so that does not seem relevant.
Cavalry was historically still a thing that could win or lose battles during the time. It was one of the reasons infantry fought in lines, so they could better protect themselves from Cavalry
If i remember correctly cavalry is not cost efficient for most nations BUT if you have a single modifiers (Poland is the most famous but there are many others) that instantly changes and it becomes worth going heavy on cavalry.
Yes, it is not cost efficient in terms of ducats. But that's not the only price you pay for units. Personally I find to bottlenecked on manpower much more often than on ducats. And it terms of manpower, Cav is much more efficient than infantry.
The cost efficiency argument was a misnomer that assumed army caps don't exist. Since all of us are bottle-necked by the steep multiplicative upkeep costs from going over unit capacity, cavalry are always a cost efficient way to increase our army's power, and they always have been.
I love using 2 or 4 cav in the early game when playing Serbia or any eastern tech country. The pip difference is also important before you get eastern militia at tech 5. That being said the two downsides not mentioned are that cavalry regiments do not shift+consolidate with infantry into full regiments in the late game when you want a full front line of 1000 regiments. If your force limit is early like 8 having 4 regular infantry and a free company of 4 merc infantry can be much better for manpower, while the price of maintenance of the free company is smaller than 1 (one) cavalry regiment.
Cav is bad, because: -It competes with infantry, which every nation must have (or suffers massive penalties). -Youll have a bad time trying to stack buffs of each one, youll need to focus on one or your army in general wont be as good as it could be. -The price is a thing too. I usually go for more cannons than building any cavalry (faster sieges + more damage from backroll). -Other thing is youll need to micro manage more things, youll have to pay attention on armies above the infantry/cavalry ratio. But of course, if youre Poland, youre practically compeled to build cav. In the same way, having cavalry as prussia or sweden is a waste (you get +20% inf combat ability, reducing the gap between the two) There are good uses of cavalry, but in general its not worth all the problems it have. Its more a deal of allocating resources where it matters than it being intrinsically bad But i never thought of not drilling expensive things, i'll start doing this.
I recently have done a teutonic order to pomerania to commonwealth run. Shifted early to pomeranian culture, vassalized poland, finished all the important mission of Teutons (crusader horde and military modifier), changed to pomerania for the chiv +10% ca mission, anexxed poland and turned to poland. With espionage and horde idea + modifier from teutons/gov, you get a broken chiv. Litterally broken, my game couldn't calculate right the damage i was doing bc of the super flank bonus i guess. Totally unnecessary and super fun
harrr i heard red hawk crying in the background as it was recommended, not to delete cav^^ i do agree though. i delete them after they reach 0 manpower (if i play a nation that can't actually afford them at that point)
With quantity you feel you can burn manpower which is just a waste.
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My favorite part is stacking cav combat ability as a horde nation and use cav only armies to decimate Ming :D At shock stage, you just deal so much damage in the early game that it's hilarious
If you really want to go full try-hard sweaty, you can match the infantry of your opponent with a full back row of cannons. Send that army in first with your best Fire General. Then make sure to send in a full flanking stack of cavalry (2,4,6, or whatever your flank range is) with your best Shock General 3 days later. I've seen that strategy used before and it slaughters the opponent. It is very micro-intensive though.
I don't delete my cav unless I have a ridiculous amount at the start. I try to consolidate them down but they take the least damage so it is frustrating. We need to have the ability to force them into the center.
Just got done with a Golden Horde game, and defeating the Ottomans, Muscovy, and the Commonwealth was relatively easy. The trick for cavalry will always be terrain. Not enough players pay attention to whether the battlefield is good or not for combat rolls.
This is unique to hordes though, as you receive +25% shock damage on open terrain, but -25% on "rough" terrain. For all other countries, terrain modifiers (i.e. bonus on rolls) will affect inf and cav very similarly.
At the full combat width the Cavalry does marginally better than Infantry with significantly higher costs. The Cavalry only peaks when the enemy Width shortens, but drastically drops off after it reduces past Flanking range, which by that point you are already winning the battle. The money saved could be better spent, barracks if you lack manpower, cannons to make sieges faster, mercenaries with their own manpower pool.
I do quantity because some of the policies are just so goddamn good. and I'm not talking about economic, never picked economic. the religious-trade-quantity combo is insanely good. I rarely pick offensive because some of the policies are not great and the ones that are, are with lackluster ideas or very specific ones
I know it's not related, here's a tip to save manpower for when besieging forts: Use an appropriate sized stack of cannons with your highest siege pip general. Keep the infantry and cavalry in nearby provinces where they wont suffer attrition, just to support your cannon stack incase they are about to get attacked. This also works with cavalry to an extent in the early game.
I partly agree with it. It's certainly true that you will suffer less from attrition. However having a bigger stack might persuade the enemy in not defending their fort, which would result in less battle casualties.
It works up until the late 1600's/end-game where you're constantly sieging everything and have multiple stacks on multiple continents to keep track of. All to often I'll forget an army exists and if I'm lucky, I'll pick them up from that little tiny island out in the Pacific where the Portuguese rump state used to be to do something useful. If not, they used to get doomstacked, though the AI is a lot more skittish about taking battles in 1.34. They pretty much only engage if they're absolutely guaranteed to win. I just find it easier to build a one size fits all army and detatch cannons from a nearby army to get any forts that are an issue. Also, siege ability is OP, especially as of late. Seriously, it's *the* reason to keep your professionalism high. Finishing a ten tick siege in 150 days as opposed to a year or greater does more to save on manpower than parking a bunch of cannons on a fort or blowing a hole in it and shift-consolidating.
@@EbonySaints for monarchies, do a inno-espio-offensive combo and their policies, with 100 spynetwork. if you have the mod for tutoring your heir, then tutor them on logistics. Then watch as you takedown lvl 4 or lvl 6 within less than 2 months by mid game.
@@sasi5841 That sounds kinda cool for that mod. Sadly, I'm a cheevo chaser, so I only play with graphical mods. Doing a Teutonic Horde run right now, but I'm trying to stack cav combat ability, but I'm lazy and don't wanna tag switch.
I'm now firmly playing VIC3. But my last games EUIV money never were an issue for me. I could have run huge Cav Armys if I've wanted to... Maybe I should go for a Poland run when I run tired of vicky. I never crushed the world with a huge cav army. It feels like something you should've done at least one time in your life. ^^
@@lukasralys6096 I tried it with Poland, got all maximum possible modifiers but infantry and cannon were causing so many casualties on them later on and reinforcement cost was just too much.
With cavalry you have to always watch the terrain. But if you are experienced player, you always watch the terrain anyway. Even when at piece. Even not your terrain.
@@Vincrand I'm not above running an overpowered army straight into a weak stack just for kicks, but if it looks like a close fight, I'm probably not going to try that naval landing into that mountain province. It's all fun and games until you're the one who got stackwiped. Unless of course you won the game already, at which point you just giggle at the thought of all those poor souls sacrificed for your bloodlust as you send five more stacks to finish the job.
I am addicted to playing the shittiest, smallest nations where my opening moves are usually to wage so many wars with a lot of commitment behind them that you're on the brink of bankruptcy for the first 15-20 years so what I tend to do is I keep the cavalry from the beginning on the game for these wars, if they die, they die, but they are some extra damage that could be the difference between winning and losing when fighting a bigger nation. Sometimes though, money is much bigger struggle and 1 ducat I pay a month for the cav can be spent of the free company which helps with manpower when sieging, and sometimes you need a bigger difference, one made by more men rather than better stats of 1 unit. But once I can afford some cav I always bring them back. 2 per army when just barely affordable, 4 if things are going okay; I keep this balance of 4 per army because it seems to me that it's the most effective with the base flanking range, the 3rd unit on the side isn't doing much with flank range of 2. Once I make big bucks though, I will throw some more cav in.
my main complaint about cavalry isn't the cost, but the micromanagement, which is just my laziness, lol. If I divide my stacks in 4 or more, I end up with random cavalry in some but not all stacks. Then I recombine, but because I had two or more full sets of stacks (ex: 36 inf, 4 cav, 40 canons), I end up having more cavalry in one stack than the other, and end up having to fix it. Lol. That's just my laziness, though.
I also enjoy being somewhat lazy in my management. I tend to build units in multiples of 4 so that the stacks remain identical when split into 4. Since each of the split stacks is identical, you can combine any of the smaller stacks and end up with the correct proportions. Also, a quick trick for getting two stacks as close to the same composition as possible is to split each one (using 's') and swap the half-stacks. Rounding messes with it a bit, but half of A plus half of B is going to be the same as half of B plus half of A.
BudgetMonk as always with my favourite maximizing everything in eu4. Everything well explained. But please do full quality army Zoroastrian Theocracy Mewar (yes no one ever tried this beside me and i can say its the best nation which i love more than prussia)
the main point is it gets better as battle progresses calv can always flank and its going to be hitting from the side so if u get 1 good roll and a inf disengages calv is going to start steamrolling. a 100% inf army never gets that effect u should always have 4 calv just for this effect
I always have a little cav in every army. Useful for flanking, even in the late game. Definitely do a core of infantry and cannons however. I also play in India though pretty commonly, so money is rarely a problem.
you should always fill up infantry and cav as your combat width enables you. rest is cannons, because cannons get more damaged in front row. so you want front row filled with infantry and cav.
In summary, cavalry is expensive, but is very manpower, force limit, and combat width efficient. Use cav if you're rich enough and can benefit from the extra punch it packs
I only take quantity if I'm really strapped for manpower and money. Otherwise you can just build buildings to get more manpower. The supply limit though is amazing in quantity.
I completely agree with cringing over immediately deleting cav, In most cases early game manpower is more of an issue than money, debt scaling is easy early game in most cases where people would argue to delete cav. Hence yk, keep it around, delete it / use it to carpetsiege until it eventually dies etc. until manpower isn't an issue for you or having it in the army is more annoying than not. And it isn't hugely more expensive compared to it's effectiveness anyway, and then also throwing in potentially being over force limit where essentially one higher value limit is worth more and yeah, Cav is much better than what a lot of people would recommend. Aristo is really good and often it's weak point is the fact that later game often the cav bonus can be wasted, but if you can easily get even a smallish modifier for it it becomes pretty damn worthwhile. Personally I tend to have it to start with in small degrees parcelling out the starting cav and stuff from integrating vassals and building some to make it most effective, then Phase out as I don't tend to take aristo early and the management of the troops is a bit more annoying than having cav is worth, and then phase it back in later when you get some bonuses and have plenty of eco to just better secure victories in battle - especially nice since I tend to try leave a big enemy to fight later game to demonstrate national development, before either dropping the campaign or continuing on to get insane eco etc.
When you barely reach your max force limit cav is a waste of that tight budget, but when your problem is manpower its quite the oposite (for instance merchant republics or countries with gold mines)
Cav if you truly go balls to the walls building around it can be so damn powerful, did a Lan Xang into Siam into Tibet into Koshuud run where I had something like 100 cav to inf ratio and 90ish % both cav cost and cav combat ability, were so damn fun completely stack wiping anything you went up against. :D
@@MuppetLord1 I've done the testing on this. Siam with cossack special units, around 90% cav combat ability and either 10 or 15 % bonus to shock still lose against Prussian infantry. The test battle was with same generals on grassland without crossing penalty and same dice rolls. I don't remember the cost side of the test, because it wasn't what I wanted to know from it, but I don't think you reach the 90% reduction in cost, probably somewhat close though. However Prussia also has cost reduction (not as much). This was also tested in later tech, because of all the idea groups that are required. In that era the total pips from infantry and cavalry are similar.
For me I like to delete the cavalry after a few techs because I find not having cav in my armies actually saves me manpower in the long run. I tend to do the trick where i dont upgrade my cavalry units from the start of the game which enables me to defeat rebel stacks easier. Helps especially if you are provoking revolts alot.
Breaking out the spreadsheet is more of an Arumba thing. The next level is Lambda X.X doing proofs on why alternating your general between two forts in perfect sync between siege ticks is perfect play.
Youve missed on very strong argument in favor of cav! Engagement width means that even if you have "more infantry" the amount of it being "used" is a different story. So to get as much as possible out of each actively engaged unit in a fight cav is simply better as well
But on the other hand, courthouses no longer take up a building slot, so more barracks means less value to manpower, therefore more comparative advantage to infantry. It all depends on national ideas...
There is a big downside to cavalry which you glossed over, and it’s their absence of fire damage. This means that during the fire phase, cavalry takes damage without dealing any. That means that regardless of the situation, your cavalry is never gonna be fighting at a 100% strength once it actually deals its damage. Unless you micro it so they only join after the first fire phase. I don’t disagree with the fact that cav is better early if you have the economy (or the will/ability to debt) to make it viable, but it still is something to be aware of.
If fire and shock values are equall, then fire will do more damage. Let's say your troops do .1 damage in each roll and the enemy has the exact same army. A 1k infantry stack will have the following damage numbers: Fire 100, 90, 81; Shock 72, 65, 59. That's also the main reason that cav is weaker than infantry in the late game.
Not early on because the fire damage is just too low. It's starts mattering later when canons and infantry gain a lot of fire pips. So cavalry becomes very bad after like tech 22.
I think people try to find a singular rule for EU4, such as always focus on trade or never use cavalry. Problem is it depends entirely on the time period within the game, your nation, your idea choices, who you are fighting etc. Nice video explaining it though, glad to see I'm not the only person that hates the no cav nonsense.
You hinted at decisiveness of battles. How does flanking and the extra shock at the start of the game contribute to having a stackwipe? The AI running around avoiding engagements and trying to carpet siege you while you run after them is just annoying gameplay. You can prevent that by decisively stackwipe the enemy. I loathe the AI's ability to negate fort ZOC and just run around unimpeded while you sit on a fort with your starting army till you hit 99% siege progress...
"Cavalry is bad" is just a meme first popularised by Arumba back in the days and then people who kept parroting him. Cavalry is not "universally good" but there has always been nations in every version of the game that could make it strong.
Something Monk didn't really touch on is that cav in the early game really makes the most of your manpower. The 1k manpower used on a cav unit is going to be far more effective than the 1k manpower used on an infantry unit. If manpower is a bigger bottleneck than money then investing in cavalry is a good choice at the start.
ALSO, being a rich nations, means you can afford cavalry.
Manpower is the biggest bottleneck early game, so anything that helps is worth it.
ALSO they keep more drill after each battle as they suffer a lot less losses in mp, i find it funny when guides say "delet cav to save money NOW LOOK FOR THE MERC COMPANY THAT HAS THE HIGHEST SIEGE ALSO FREE COMPANY :)))))))", although i recomend if possible to get the free company but to save your own mp to reinfoece battles and to siege, as they are at the end of the day cheaper slightly shittier infantry
Well, the reason for the merc companies is because in early wars, especially in small nations, they a) have larger armies than you can hope to field, and b) have significantly more manpower. Its not about saving money during war, its about saving money in between wars.
That being said, most guides are shite or incredibly outdated
@@goldenhate6649 and mercs can be very cheap early game (-25% merc cost) and help with manpower.
Dude, who the hell has the money to maintain cavalry??? Cav is useless
Some players know the meta, Monk understand what makes the meta. Thats why he is the best
He also has a very narrow view on the game, SP world conquest.
@@benito1620 he plays to have fun, and he has fun playing inthe.most optimal way. World conquest is the logical conclusion of trying to pçay as optimally as possible
@@benito1620 he did a SP WC on VH. I'd say he's credible
Doesn't play multiplayer. His opinion about what the meta is is irrelevant.
@@SouL1Jacker why do you think your opinion is relevant to anyone
Detaching cav to train is probalby the best advice I've gotten in this game 2k hours in. I love using cav for the flanking bonus, but I def will still delete my cav when I'm doing a slow start nation with a weak eco.
i use it more often as small nations because you are limited by forcelimit and i rather go 1 or 2 units over forcelimit with cav than 4 with infantry because it is cheaper and at least as effective
throwing 25 or 50 ducats and 2 k manpower with a small nation away is surely a waste of resources
but i mean for players who dont know the game well saying dont use cav at all insted of going into detail in which circumstances you should is probably an easier advice than trying to explain everything
@@bossenes5020 As Trebizond that starts out with 1 cav I just delete it and buy the free merc company. With that I'll still go over the force limit and it is barely enough to fight against Imereti. The free company is something everyone should use. Cost no manpower and it has lower upkeep than your regular troops.
@@Vincrand i did the same but kept the horse why deleting when i can use it in the war?
And cav in the early game is way stronger than inf it just does not make sense to delete 1k manpower at the start and a unit worth of 25 ducats
Never delete units in the start of the game
And not to forget your enemy will always have cav which means he has a quality edge above you in same sized battles
İf you dont like savescuming battles than use early game cav
And dont forget its way more manpower effective cav will lose less man and kill the enemy faster which means better manpower efficiency which will add up
@@bossenes5020 Not deleating that cav would mean you already have to start taking loans before the war starts. Keeping that cav doesn't only bring it's own high upkeep with it, but also another over force limit. AI doesn't recruit the free company in peace times, so by recruiting the free company and deleating the cav you'll outnumber your slightly bigger neighbours. As Trebizond vs Imereti the first fight is pretty much always in the mountain were you get the -2 to the roll and even without that cav you'll always win it.
@@Vincrand bro loans as an opm trebizond for the first war is like mandatory
İts a game not real life
Watch florrynomics for this and you will understand why
And it changes nothing about that it is not a good idea to delete a unit at the start of the game
Again not only the money but also 1000 k manpower + the more loses down the drain
I have nearly 9 k hours on this game you can be sure its not worth it
And as trebizond you have to take cav because you will have manpower issues early game as you will fight outnumbered most of the time and need strong units to kill your enemy piecemeal
I've always used cav, it's super underrated, even later on. Any country can achieve big income relatively easily, which pretty much removes the only reason you'd have to not use cav. Breaking the enemy flank and getting those cannons into the front row for massive damage can be really decisive late game.
Everyone can achieve big income easily mid to late game but if you save money earlier you will reach this stage earlier as well. And cavalry isn't that good later because they get outclassed in terms of pips i think
@@noriantiri9310 iirc, there are some tech levels where cav lags behind inf, but that's well after you get improved flanking and they always catch up eventually, getting it back to being worth it. If you then stack a few modifiers like picking aristocratic ideas and getting loyal cossack estate, you'll save a fair bit of manpower in the long run.
@@plebisMaximus the thing about flanking ability is that it's most usefull for fights early game when you and your opponents are below the combat width. The only time it will be usefull otherwise is at the end of a battle when most troops have already retreated. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about this
@@noriantiri9310 You're not wrong, I just disagree. In a game where manpower matters as much as it does this patch, being able to crack those flanks a little quicker and maybe even get cannons on the frontline where they take double damage can be huge if you ask me. It'll crack enemy manpower and money, which can send them into a debt spiral that makes future wars easier. I don't think you should underestimate how important the end of the battle can be for making the enemy take big losses.
@@plebisMaximus it doesnt matter, its easy to get 100k+ manpower before 1500 with every nation pretty much
Cav are elite shock troops and are not intended to be directly compared to infantry. The debate is between using a few expensive elites or none at
all.
60% Professionalism you gain 100% manpower when deleting units. This is an interesting option when ramping up for war deleting Cav
Afterwards.
Alternately, ramping up and consolidating after battles as you make progress throughout the war. Either tactic would be best used
after recently unlocking new tier Cav units.
Do you mean army profesionalism instead of PP?
@@b52stealthbomber25 yes
Oh snap I never thought of using that 60% bonus for reassigning units at the start of a war. That's wicked! I always thought that bonus highly highly situational for maybe building overseas armies quickly, but I'll use this trick going forward.
@@SeverusFelix One of the most satisfying uses of this feature is to raise Streltsy and delete immediately for free manpower :p
@@jorisschaltegger2131"200,000 Streltsy units are ready, with a million more well on the way" Oh yes, the famous Russian cloning facilities like Kamino or Red Alert 2 Cloning vat 😉
Cossacks also can give you Land Leader Shock +1 which synergizes well with the CCA.
Funny thing is, if my nation has any bonuses to cav combat ability, aristocratic is my second favorite military idea group. I find the siege pip huge, the monthly autonomy change is hug when you have low crownland, it gives you an extra diplomat for lowering AE, and dev cost for deving institutions.
Yeah, but Aristocratic is kinda like Humanist where you're NIs have to play into the idea group. Otherwise you kind of get a grab bag of ideas that aren't the best all-around, though with the AI hard focusing on forts in the last two patches, that extra siege pip really comes in handy.
@@EbonySaints I find humanist ideas to be extremly good when playing wide. I know some people say "let then rebel" but being able to basicly ignore rebels with humanist offensive is just so relaxing.
Aristo is basically a better Quantity, it gives you +15% manpower as well as cheaper generals for slackening, in addition to all the horse bonuses and the dev cost stuff.
In my recent Ottoman WC/one faith run, I took Aristo as my 6th idea group (took Diplo, Admin, Religious, Humanist and Offensive as the first 5) and it was very nice to have, as I was short of manpower around the time I was taking it, and its cav bonuses dovetailed nicely with the Ottoman national idea bonuses.
@@psychic_beth Why would you ever have manpower proplems with Otto by tech 22? Still agreeing with you that aristo ideas are often better than quantity though. Especially in the late Game.
@@eragonshurtugal4239 Because I was rapidly expanding my army to try to get military hegemon (ditched eco hegemon in 1687 and switched to mil hegemon in 1707) and was constantly at war. This manpower problem didn't last that long though, I eventually spammed enough soldier's households to deal with it and by the end I had plenty of manpower.
You didn’t mention it but cavalry also loots faster so when I’m sieging in the early game I’ll have my infantry siege while my cav loot the rest, if you’re going heavy cav it can make the wars really profitable with decisive battles and lots of loot and taking the buckets of ducats in the peace deal
Do you actually make any money from looting? I mean, you loot on the monthly tick, right? and cavalry loot .3, infantry loot .1.
but that's almost the maintenance cost of the units (cav are .25, infantry are .1)
If you loot, you are just making your maintenance back really, cav can slightly outpace this, but not by much, but if you are conquering the land, you then have to deal with the devestation you caused by looting. While there are ways to increase looting, none of them are amazingly powerful, and I believe most of them are locked behind the traditions of the nation you play.
I don't really see how this scales up significantly. Naval looting is incredibly powerful (because it not only seems to give you a lot of money relative to the boat maintenance, though I don't know the formula), but also because it gives massive trade power penalties to your trade competitors). but I don't see how people are making money foraging their troops. It looks like it's mostly either break even, or slightly better than break even.
@@timmietimmins3780 If you siege a non-cobelligerent you're not taking the land., might as well loot it. In that case you put your siegestacks on the forts, while your units can be placed on the non-fort provinces where they can pay for themselves by looting. So if youre warring a lot in the early game, the cav maintenance isnt as big either because the increased looting strength lets them offload some of that cost onto the nation youre trying to separate peace. (also its generally good practice to let the inf siege and keep the cav separate, since they are more expensive to reinforce when they take attrition and disease rolls.)
These little videos are super helpful, thank you Monk. Really helps an average player like me understand some important nuances of this game
Players turn their army maintenance down at peace?
I wouldn't know. I'm always at war.
Also never drill because of same reasoning lol
meWar
Not drilling cannons is something I will remember
A problem with cavalry flanking tho is that they the cavalry units get put on the flanks of the battle and when the enemy's units die off, the cavalry usually ends up idle
Yeah that is a bug on paradox's part, the cav should push in ideally. Arumba did a video on that.
That's why in the current state of the game you need to stack all the cavalry bonuses if you want them to be actually really useful.
Infantry can be really strong by just stacking discipline and morale but for cavalry you also need to stack flanking range, cavalry cost and cavalry to infantry ratio. That way you will not pay too much maintenance and your cavalry will be able to contribute to the battle for nearly the entire duration because your frontline will largely be cavalry and by the time combat width hits 40 you will have 10 to 15 flanking range.
If you are ever bored, there is ways that you can create a Zoroastrian Siam with Horde ideas and Eastern technology group. It's the highest damage I have ever seen units do in EuIV with some battle ticks incurring over 20000 casualties.
Considering the hoops you have to jump through to get that Siam, you probably won't be able to restrict the Europeans or Ottomans from becoming strong, which is all the better because I literally stackwiped some 200k stacks from the Ottos.
But so would infantry. That's very dumb point.
@@micahbonewell5994 Bug? As an English cavalier in the 1640s, I take great offense to that, good sir! WE NEVER PUSH IN, WE CHASE THE ENEMIES AWAY AND LEAVE THE BATTLEFIELD GLORIOUS, HUZZAH!
@@micahbonewell5994 Its been almost 10 years and the game is at the end of its life cycle. Paradox has released many changes, yet they have not fixed this bug in the core mechanics? This would be very disappointing.
You have become my favorite channel on EU4
Its just very calm and rationl, love it!
IMO people need to make a bigger deal of the flanking. When fighting a smaller stack, two units of cavalry adds, as you pointed out, FIVE more infantry units' worth of damage.
When people just can't seem to get stackwipes in the early game? It's from deleting their cav.
Why would cav help stackwipe? They only attack units on the edges of combat width. Destroying the core of their units is always left up to infantry, and practically always takes the same amount of time. Unless you're fighting an enemy with a unit size drastically under combat width, and you yourself are willing to lower the amount of units you have in fights and put in cav instead to *match* their stacks, it's not great.
@@minoxiothethird it helps to stack wipes smaller stacks that don't fill the combat with. Once you are two more infantry than them, anymore infantry does not do damage. Adding Cavalry increases your damage by more than two more infantry units. That extra damage further reduces their morale, increasing the likelihood that you will get a stack wipe.
Every budget monk video I watch has at least 2 'Mindblown' moments in where I contemplate why I never even considered it.
When I got to cav-only with my latest teutonic horde run, I had flanking up to something insane like 12, and something insane like 75% Cav combat ability. It cut through other armies like a buzzsaw even late game. Even when you don't main it, it is nice to have 2 or 4 in your stacks.
The most powerful cav build I could come up with (100% ratio, Siam ideas and cossack units) still loses to the most powerful infantry build (Prussia).
@@Vincrand but it's Prussia it's not fair comparison tbh
@@antonseoane9092 It's also Siam with cossacks. Have you seen it's national ideas.
@@Vincrand Poland can get like 160% combat ability
@@MyUsersDark Poland can get over 200% and siam can also get over 160% (if they focus on it). The +1 cav fire can works a bit like a multiplier of combat ability ( will call it from here ca). I think it's something like x1.25 (been a while since I tested it, but that's the number that now sticks with me). That means that at 100% ca the +1 fire performs roughly equal to a 125% ca without the fire. At 160% ca the +1 fire it performs roughly equal to a 200% ca.
Ca isn't the main modifier you want to go for anyway. Fire damage reduced > Morale & discipline > land leader shock (> land leader fire if tradition is low) > shock damage dealt & ca.
i love these analysis type videos, i would love to see them across other pdx games such as imperator invictus
I’m so happy someone finally said this. People have always gave me crap for keeping Calvary but I gave them all the reasons you said
I also always use offensive, the siege reduction is so good to reduce atrition and the time of the wars, the better generals also reduce manpower consumption, and you don't need to spend all the extra money in new troops. So you end up spending less manpower and less money in faster wars. I just have problem with manpower at the start in some games with bad luck, but at the start you just need to create a mercenary army.
Quantity got nerfed. Def got nerfed ages ago.
Offensive is really the way to go now.
Offensive doesn’t give army tradition though, if your country has tradition in it or you stack quality and another then you can roll better generals without guaranteed pips.
@@charlescook5542 offensive gives pips...... Much better than tradition.....
@@mrfreeman2911 if you stack tradition you can roll 80 or 100 generals while needing less wars to build it up, is it better to get one more pip across the board for your generals or to increase their max roll capacities? Should be obvious
@@charlescook5542 the pips count as more....
Pretty obvious, no?
The issue with Cavalry isn't that it's worse than Infantry; it's that it has diminishing returns the longer a battle goes on. When Cavalry deploys, that's their position, period - once they've beaten their matchup, they sit there and twiddle their thumbs, rather flanking/moving towards the center of the enemy line. Arumba did a video explaining his reasoning on this and the relevant section is at 23:00. ruclips.net/video/h-62B7GiwDw/видео.html
Essentially, they deploy and beat their matchup, but instead of moving center to keep the flank damage going, they just sit there.
When i played as the teutonic order, i stacked so many Cav bonuses from idea groups and the mission tree. I absolutely destroyed every opponent in every battle with favorable terrain.
Cavalry are important for battles because of the cascade effect. It’s common to hear that the flanking isn’t good even if your army is larger because cavalry on the edge will stop fighting. But since the cavalry fight on the flank those units break sooner and because of that your infantry start flanking sooner. That’s specifically what he means when he says cavalry are decisive and will save manpower.
If I drill I usually drill my cannon. Sure it's expensive, but they also don't take casualties. Which means they'll retain the bonuses through the entire game.
thats... not how it works
@@bartysp2599 That is exactly how it works. Your units lose drill values passively over time, or when they take casualty and receive reinforcements. The passive loss rate is pretty low, so if you're fighting a lot the casualty loss is the main factor. Your cannons only really take damage if the front row is depleted, which is something you should be avoiding in any case.
Granted, they also only benefit from the fire damage bonus when in the back row. Shock damage bonus, shock damage received reduction, and fire damage received reduction are all moot bonuses if your cannons never leave the back row.
@@cascadian4250 You lack reading comprehension, friend.
@@bartysp2599 Not really. You just lack intelligence. He's exactly right. You'll have a more or less permanent fire damage bonus for your backline.
@@cascadian4250 True, but attrition also factors into losing drill and what are cannons used for that's a massive attrition drain? Sieges. Though it's capped at five percent, a cannon sitting on a siege for a year loses six hundred troops in that time assuming you don't get a disease outbreak. Reinforcing that along with the natural loss causes them to lose approximately 61% of their drill in that year alone. Even at the base rate of 1% you're going to lose about 13%. No modifiers drilling gets you about 10% a year. Having maxed out professionalism and Ambras Castle maxed out bumps that up to 25%. Tag switching to Prussia and Provence and completing the missions give 30%. None of those come close to making up for that one year of sieging on a max attrition fort.
Professionalism is worth it for the manpower and the siege ability, but drilling is pretty much only good for the first fight or two.
People should really read the ledgers of their games and go to the casualties page. Almost every nation, even yours, is going to be losing way more manpower to attrition either from sieges or standing around on one of the ten tundra tiles in game rather than to combat.
Cav feels like a "win more" unit. The most important thing in battles is to not get outflanked. Cav makes it more punishing when you *do* outflank your opponent, but money-wise it makes it harder to get the flank in the first place. But "winning more" helps you save money due to less reinforcement costs.
It's once you know your frontline will at least not be smaller than your opponent, then it becomes okay to grab cav to try and more decisively win battles. ("not being smaller" can happen either because you know your opponent is smaller or because you're at combat width).
Really do agree, my new fav combo to start with atm are just aristo + inno for that sick 20%prod eff policy aswell
If you were going to pick two groups to go for just for the policy, inno offensive with the +1 Leader siege and 10% siege ability is superior imo, and combined with the 20 in offensive, means you always win siege races. Absolutely broken, and definitely one of the best adm/mil combos
@@DanielRBW thats the nr 3, followed by espionage as 4 or trade depeding on income :D
"cavalry is too expensive" always seemed fairly silly to me because in the part of the game where money is a problem, youre not gonna be building more than 4-6k cavalry in general, maybe 8k for larger nations (hordes are different), and that represents such a small portion of your income
5:53 Did I just hear this man right? He has 11k hours on EU4? God that’s some dedication
I prefer my strat of forgetting I even have them and never building anymore for the entire campaign lol.
Cav are at their strongest when you have constraints in certain areas of your nation. You touched on this slightly, but to make it clear cavalry are more efficient per base unit in both manpower and forcelimit. So if you are a nation that is at forcelimit with limited manpower, cavalry are going to be good. This usually will only happen in the early game, likely pre 1550, so in the grand scope of an entire game cav do fall off very quickly. There are plenty more factors to take in, such as each stack running a max of about 4 cavalry if your nation has no inherent bonuses to cavalry, because after 4 cavalry you get largely diminishing returns from their flanking ability, making them worse pound for pound than they otherwise should be. Cavalry should likely start getting phased out when you start fighting opponents that can fill the combat width, because again the flanking ability gets neutralized when the combat width is filled, and it is more important to have reinforcements for cannons instead of one cavalry unit (this is at the point in the game where manpower and forcelimit limitations get lifted and the biggest limitation is money, especially with cannons starting to do real damage).
I think overall the gecko MP community demonstrates the strength and weaknesses of cavalry the best. Watching some of Habibi's videos, you can see how some nations are very cavalry focused due to inherent modifiers, whilst most other nations go pure infantry because they fill the combat width so early and usually don't care about going over forcelimit to win wars. This also makes a big show of how important specific techs are towards the effectiveness of cavalry based vs. infantry based nations. Entire wars can shift based on what tech they are on in the game.
100% cav as a horde is so much fun. It's probably far from optimal but depending on the terrain it can be really strong, you stack wipe left and right, and can easily win against armies 2 or 3 times your size (at least you used to, haven't done this since before combat changed)
You still win if my Teutonic Horde gameplay is anything to go by, but what ends up happening is that the enemy completely routs from the battle, but it still goes on for a few more days to where your army just sits there hitting air until the twelve day limit is up and they finally run off. The combat/stackwipe changes really annoy me.
@@EbonySaints what exactly did they change, is there exact patch notes anywhere?
I love cav based nations when I try and rp. My favorite custom nation traditions and ambitions are the cav ones.
I’ve done some testing and tried 125% combat ability with 100% cavalry inf ratio with the 50% bonus flanking policy from horde idea vs just normal disciplined infantry army that went all discipline, the cavalry got obliterated without a chance every single time, even with alot of polish winged hussars in it. Discipline is the meta no matter what this patch and i’d say cavalry is a complete waste of time and resources. Wasting mana and idea groups on uppgrading cavalry is a waste of resources when you should be focusing on discipline.
Always bothered me that people say cavalry is useless when they're swimming in ducats in the mid/late game. The only downside is cost, if money is not an issue there is no reason not to have cavalry. Great video.
i think offensive is far better than quantity & quality.. siege ability wins wars.. you dont even need to fight battles if u siege quicker than the enemy.. which means you dont lose much manpower.. a lot of people think espionage is bad. but combined with innovative and offensive its op as hell.. starting wars with tons of claims and +100% spy network with amazing siege ability & - advisor costs meaning u can afford more cavalry & artillery etc.. and better generals & more forts for army tradition.. i found i was sieging down forts quicker than the ai and we know how much the ai cheats on sieges.. with those combined ideas u dont even need to save scum.. i was winning wars consistently without even needing to fight battles.. sieging quick is key to success..
Yeah the nerfs to quantity’s manpower and force limit really make it underwhelming, and quality is only worthwhile if you need a good navy.
@@craigstephenson7676 i usually go quality as the second military idea later on.. i always go offensive now unless im a horde... i might go horde ideas or offensive depends
@@tigrecito48 yeah offensive is a much better first military idea but quality is usually worth it later in the game, good policies and having a good navy is helpful.
Figured I'd offer my critisms:
00:40 - This is false. Infantry can also flank -- cav just flanks a further range (1 flank inf vs 2 flank cav at early tech)
1:05 - "Fire isn't that valuable in the beginning of the game." Although this is somewhat true, this is due to the fact that infantry does more shock damage and cav only does shock damage. This makes absolutely zero sense in reference to comparing damage output of the two units, since fire and shock really ought to be treated roughly equally (minus certain biases in unit pips).
2:00 - I mean yes, but "objectively better" as is being used in this video is not an honest way to argue. A 100000 ducat/mo elite unit that does 2x damage as infantry would also be "objective better" than infantry with the same definition that is being used. Also it's worth mentioning that, infantry is better than cav in a hypothetical 1v1 scenario in certain situations too (like tech 6)
2:56 - Army upkeep at peace is not a very useful number to consider, since being at peace indicates poor play in the early game. Besides, a playstyle where one is at peace for a long time further encourages minimizing army maintenance, so this argument doesn't seem too convincing. Also, drilling is a meme. Furthermore, reducing price differential via a multiplicative 50% (minimum army maintanance) doesn't do anything for the cost argument since infantry would also be scaled by 50%.
4:05 - Not quite -- one has to be extremely rich AND deplete all available mercenary stacks.
4:40 - No, use mercs
4:50 - Mercs. This seems to be a common theme.
5:05 - False. Cav is more expensive.
5:16 - This is a reasonable point. There are other considerations such as force limit and desire to hire mercs for siege generals though which drives day one deleting of cav. I acknowledge that sometimes I delete cav day one partly for memes since I tend to attract the anti-cav crowd.
5:40 - Agreed, but... mercs.
7:12 - This is true but can be said of a lot of things in EU4 because of how interconnected modifiers are. For this to hold further weight "some" ought to be quantified (not necessarily precisely, since that would be practically impossible).
7:55 - This is true -- cavalry related modifiers are easier to access.
8:00 - Although I understand the gripe here, the "right" position to hold is to object only when one has to compromise important resources such as idea group slots (aristo/horde). Indeed, the bonus from cossack estates is mostly without opportunity cost if you are already eastern christian, so there should be no complaints about accounting for those numbers in calculations for certain nations. That being said, cav is still more noticeably expensive with just the price reduction from cossacks, so this does little to solve the cost dilemma.
8:35 - It is pretty good, but that doesn't mean it's better than other more important idea groups, so that does not seem relevant.
Cavalry was historically still a thing that could win or lose battles during the time. It was one of the reasons infantry fought in lines, so they could better protect themselves from Cavalry
I always run cav early, the makes early game game so much easier. Important factor for stack wipes.
If i remember correctly cavalry is not cost efficient for most nations BUT if you have a single modifiers (Poland is the most famous but there are many others) that instantly changes and it becomes worth going heavy on cavalry.
Yes, it is not cost efficient in terms of ducats. But that's not the only price you pay for units.
Personally I find to bottlenecked on manpower much more often than on ducats. And it terms of manpower, Cav is much more efficient than infantry.
The cost efficiency argument was a misnomer that assumed army caps don't exist. Since all of us are bottle-necked by the steep multiplicative upkeep costs from going over unit capacity, cavalry are always a cost efficient way to increase our army's power, and they always have been.
So if i play Venice make 200 ducats a month and pump my army in to 17 Infantry and 10 Cavalry with 27 Cannons is that the optimal then?
EU4 bob ross
I love using 2 or 4 cav in the early game when playing Serbia or any eastern tech country. The pip difference is also important before you get eastern militia at tech 5. That being said the two downsides not mentioned are that cavalry regiments do not shift+consolidate with infantry into full regiments in the late game when you want a full front line of 1000 regiments.
If your force limit is early like 8 having 4 regular infantry and a free company of 4 merc infantry can be much better for manpower, while the price of maintenance of the free company is smaller than 1 (one) cavalry regiment.
Cav is bad, because:
-It competes with infantry, which every nation must have (or suffers massive penalties).
-Youll have a bad time trying to stack buffs of each one, youll need to focus on one or your army in general wont be as good as it could be.
-The price is a thing too. I usually go for more cannons than building any cavalry (faster sieges + more damage from backroll).
-Other thing is youll need to micro manage more things, youll have to pay attention on armies above the infantry/cavalry ratio.
But of course, if youre Poland, youre practically compeled to build cav. In the same way, having cavalry as prussia or sweden is a waste (you get +20% inf combat ability, reducing the gap between the two)
There are good uses of cavalry, but in general its not worth all the problems it have. Its more a deal of allocating resources where it matters than it being intrinsically bad
But i never thought of not drilling expensive things, i'll start doing this.
I recently have done a teutonic order to pomerania to commonwealth run. Shifted early to pomeranian culture, vassalized poland, finished all the important mission of Teutons (crusader horde and military modifier), changed to pomerania for the chiv +10% ca mission, anexxed poland and turned to poland. With espionage and horde idea + modifier from teutons/gov, you get a broken chiv. Litterally broken, my game couldn't calculate right the damage i was doing bc of the super flank bonus i guess. Totally unnecessary and super fun
harrr i heard red hawk crying in the background as it was recommended, not to delete cav^^ i do agree though. i delete them after they reach 0 manpower (if i play a nation that can't actually afford them at that point)
Keep the content coming brother, wish you well!
With quantity you feel you can burn manpower which is just a waste.
My favorite part is stacking cav combat ability as a horde nation and use cav only armies to decimate Ming :D At shock stage, you just deal so much damage in the early game that it's hilarious
If you really want to go full try-hard sweaty, you can match the infantry of your opponent with a full back row of cannons. Send that army in first with your best Fire General.
Then make sure to send in a full flanking stack of cavalry (2,4,6, or whatever your flank range is) with your best Shock General 3 days later.
I've seen that strategy used before and it slaughters the opponent. It is very micro-intensive though.
In reality, cavalry is so strong. Even though the cost is high, cavalry objectively does more damage.
especially early on, using cavalry could do easy stackwipe. All I need is the victory battles.
You ahould drill the cav/art if not drill all, since the line inf will lose their drill fast.
The most important takeaway is cav isn't bad, just expensive
I’m a bit of a noob i guess but the bit about not drilling cav and artillery is an awesome point thanks!
I don't delete my cav unless I have a ridiculous amount at the start. I try to consolidate them down but they take the least damage so it is frustrating. We need to have the ability to force them into the center.
Just got done with a Golden Horde game, and defeating the Ottomans, Muscovy, and the Commonwealth was relatively easy. The trick for cavalry will always be terrain. Not enough players pay attention to whether the battlefield is good or not for combat rolls.
This is unique to hordes though, as you receive +25% shock damage on open terrain, but -25% on "rough" terrain. For all other countries, terrain modifiers (i.e. bonus on rolls) will affect inf and cav very similarly.
I believe the bad rap is from when Arumba used spreadsheets to analyze cavalry.
At the full combat width the Cavalry does marginally better than Infantry with significantly higher costs. The Cavalry only peaks when the enemy Width shortens, but drastically drops off after it reduces past Flanking range, which by that point you are already winning the battle. The money saved could be better spent, barracks if you lack manpower, cannons to make sieges faster, mercenaries with their own manpower pool.
I do quantity because some of the policies are just so goddamn good. and I'm not talking about economic, never picked economic. the religious-trade-quantity combo is insanely good. I rarely pick offensive because some of the policies are not great and the ones that are, are with lackluster ideas or very specific ones
I know it's not related, here's a tip to save manpower for when besieging forts:
Use an appropriate sized stack of cannons with your highest siege pip general. Keep the infantry and cavalry in nearby provinces where they wont suffer attrition, just to support your cannon stack incase they are about to get attacked. This also works with cavalry to an extent in the early game.
I partly agree with it. It's certainly true that you will suffer less from attrition. However having a bigger stack might persuade the enemy in not defending their fort, which would result in less battle casualties.
It works up until the late 1600's/end-game where you're constantly sieging everything and have multiple stacks on multiple continents to keep track of. All to often I'll forget an army exists and if I'm lucky, I'll pick them up from that little tiny island out in the Pacific where the Portuguese rump state used to be to do something useful. If not, they used to get doomstacked, though the AI is a lot more skittish about taking battles in 1.34. They pretty much only engage if they're absolutely guaranteed to win. I just find it easier to build a one size fits all army and detatch cannons from a nearby army to get any forts that are an issue.
Also, siege ability is OP, especially as of late. Seriously, it's *the* reason to keep your professionalism high. Finishing a ten tick siege in 150 days as opposed to a year or greater does more to save on manpower than parking a bunch of cannons on a fort or blowing a hole in it and shift-consolidating.
@@Vincrand that's why you keep the non-cannon troop in adjacent provinces, then send them to the cannon stack if a big enemy army appears nearby.
@@EbonySaints for monarchies, do a inno-espio-offensive combo and their policies, with 100 spynetwork. if you have the mod for tutoring your heir, then tutor them on logistics. Then watch as you takedown lvl 4 or lvl 6 within less than 2 months by mid game.
@@sasi5841 That sounds kinda cool for that mod. Sadly, I'm a cheevo chaser, so I only play with graphical mods. Doing a Teutonic Horde run right now, but I'm trying to stack cav combat ability, but I'm lazy and don't wanna tag switch.
I'm now firmly playing VIC3. But my last games EUIV money never were an issue for me. I could have run huge Cav Armys if I've wanted to...
Maybe I should go for a Poland run when I run tired of vicky. I never crushed the world with a huge cav army. It feels like something you should've done at least one time in your life. ^^
BudgetMonk: Explain why cav is good and better than infantry.
Me: Laughs in Artillery.
I have never used cav apart from when playing as Poland or Mongolia etc, will definitely try it out.
dont bother
@@lukasralys6096 I tried it with Poland, got all maximum possible modifiers but infantry and cannon were causing so many casualties on them later on and reinforcement cost was just too much.
i see cav as an option when money allows, you can outflank your enemy army's and you have enough troops for sieges without the cav.
I thought the general consensus was that cav was good early game but then falls off late game
Infantry starts with 1 flanking. Cav starts with 2. It's not until much later in the game that cav gets 3 range (then up to 5) and 2 for infantry.
With cavalry you have to always watch the terrain. But if you are experienced player, you always watch the terrain anyway. Even when at piece. Even not your terrain.
Only have to watch terrain if you are horde.
@@Vincrand I'm not above running an overpowered army straight into a weak stack just for kicks, but if it looks like a close fight, I'm probably not going to try that naval landing into that mountain province. It's all fun and games until you're the one who got stackwiped. Unless of course you won the game already, at which point you just giggle at the thought of all those poor souls sacrificed for your bloodlust as you send five more stacks to finish the job.
@@EbonySaints I meant that only horde has a special penalty in rough terrain asside from the normal -1/-2 to the dice roll.
One cool thing is that in EU3 cavalry was the meta. You should put as much of it as you can and anihilate the AI's infantry armies
I am addicted to playing the shittiest, smallest nations where my opening moves are usually to wage so many wars with a lot of commitment behind them that you're on the brink of bankruptcy for the first 15-20 years so what I tend to do is I keep the cavalry from the beginning on the game for these wars, if they die, they die, but they are some extra damage that could be the difference between winning and losing when fighting a bigger nation. Sometimes though, money is much bigger struggle and 1 ducat I pay a month for the cav can be spent of the free company which helps with manpower when sieging, and sometimes you need a bigger difference, one made by more men rather than better stats of 1 unit. But once I can afford some cav I always bring them back. 2 per army when just barely affordable, 4 if things are going okay; I keep this balance of 4 per army because it seems to me that it's the most effective with the base flanking range, the 3rd unit on the side isn't doing much with flank range of 2. Once I make big bucks though, I will throw some more cav in.
my main complaint about cavalry isn't the cost, but the micromanagement, which is just my laziness, lol. If I divide my stacks in 4 or more, I end up with random cavalry in some but not all stacks. Then I recombine, but because I had two or more full sets of stacks (ex: 36 inf, 4 cav, 40 canons), I end up having more cavalry in one stack than the other, and end up having to fix it. Lol. That's just my laziness, though.
I also enjoy being somewhat lazy in my management. I tend to build units in multiples of 4 so that the stacks remain identical when split into 4. Since each of the split stacks is identical, you can combine any of the smaller stacks and end up with the correct proportions.
Also, a quick trick for getting two stacks as close to the same composition as possible is to split each one (using 's') and swap the half-stacks. Rounding messes with it a bit, but half of A plus half of B is going to be the same as half of B plus half of A.
I like watching people play EU4, but Monk is one of the few where I feel like I have soemthing to learn.
do you have link to the ultra lategame game you did?
BudgetMonk as always with my favourite maximizing everything in eu4. Everything well explained.
But please do full quality army Zoroastrian Theocracy Mewar (yes no one ever tried this beside me and i can say its the best nation which i love more than prussia)
I don't think cavalry is worth it unless:
1-You get it at the start of the game
2-You are a Horde
3-You have some nice cavalry modifiers
what happened to canons only :(
the main point is it gets better as battle progresses calv can always flank and its going to be hitting from the side so if u get 1 good roll and a inf disengages calv is going to start steamrolling.
a 100% inf army never gets that effect u should always have 4 calv just for this effect
I used to be a cavalry denier until BudgetMonk showed me the truth. Thank you Mr. Monk!
I always have a little cav in every army. Useful for flanking, even in the late game. Definitely do a core of infantry and cannons however. I also play in India though pretty commonly, so money is rarely a problem.
I always tended to run a 10/4 Calvary unit at game staqrt, not sure if thats good. Usually a 16/4/6 early when I have cannons into a mid of 24/2/20?
you should always fill up infantry and cav as your combat width enables you.
rest is cannons, because cannons get more damaged in front row.
so you want front row filled with infantry and cav.
Me who plays sich rada with 100% cav ratio and +150% ability "What do you mean cav is bad?"
In summary, cavalry is expensive, but is very manpower, force limit, and combat width efficient. Use cav if you're rich enough and can benefit from the extra punch it packs
An only in the early/mid game. Late game infantry actually beat cav.
I only take quantity if I'm really strapped for manpower and money. Otherwise you can just build buildings to get more manpower. The supply limit though is amazing in quantity.
I completely agree with cringing over immediately deleting cav, In most cases early game manpower is more of an issue than money, debt scaling is easy early game in most cases where people would argue to delete cav.
Hence yk, keep it around, delete it / use it to carpetsiege until it eventually dies etc. until manpower isn't an issue for you or having it in the army is more annoying than not.
And it isn't hugely more expensive compared to it's effectiveness anyway, and then also throwing in potentially being over force limit where essentially one higher value limit is worth more and yeah, Cav is much better than what a lot of people would recommend.
Aristo is really good and often it's weak point is the fact that later game often the cav bonus can be wasted, but if you can easily get even a smallish modifier for it it becomes pretty damn worthwhile.
Personally I tend to have it to start with in small degrees parcelling out the starting cav and stuff from integrating vassals and building some to make it most effective, then Phase out as I don't tend to take aristo early and the management of the troops is a bit more annoying than having cav is worth, and then phase it back in later when you get some bonuses and have plenty of eco to just better secure victories in battle - especially nice since I tend to try leave a big enemy to fight later game to demonstrate national development, before either dropping the campaign or continuing on to get insane eco etc.
Ive never even considered not playing with cav, I find it so foreign just thinking about it
When you barely reach your max force limit cav is a waste of that tight budget, but when your problem is manpower its quite the oposite (for instance merchant republics or countries with gold mines)
Cav if you truly go balls to the walls building around it can be so damn powerful, did a Lan Xang into Siam into Tibet into Koshuud run where I had something like 100 cav to inf ratio and 90ish % both cav cost and cav combat ability, were so damn fun completely stack wiping anything you went up against. :D
Same with my Teutonic horde run, it's insane. Even had flanking ability bonuses stacked so it just tore up the front line with terrifying efficiency.
It's kinda fun, but still not as strong as Prussian infantrie. And that Prussian infantrie is also cheaper.
@@Vincrand you can only do Prussian infantry with Prussia. You can do Cav builds with many more nations.
@@Vincrand way stronger than prussian infantrie. :) Done both, and also cav is cheaper when you reach 90% cav cost. :)
@@MuppetLord1 I've done the testing on this. Siam with cossack special units, around 90% cav combat ability and either 10 or 15 % bonus to shock still lose against Prussian infantry. The test battle was with same generals on grassland without crossing penalty and same dice rolls.
I don't remember the cost side of the test, because it wasn't what I wanted to know from it, but I don't think you reach the 90% reduction in cost, probably somewhat close though. However Prussia also has cost reduction (not as much). This was also tested in later tech, because of all the idea groups that are required. In that era the total pips from infantry and cavalry are similar.
For me I like to delete the cavalry after a few techs because I find not having cav in my armies actually saves me manpower in the long run. I tend to do the trick where i dont upgrade my cavalry units from the start of the game which enables me to defeat rebel stacks easier. Helps especially if you are provoking revolts alot.
Not agreeing to full cab stacks? That doesn't sound very Mongol of you, sir.
I have high hopes for an excel appearance in this vid
Beware! no excel appearance
Breaking out the spreadsheet is more of an Arumba thing. The next level is Lambda X.X doing proofs on why alternating your general between two forts in perfect sync between siege ticks is perfect play.
Youve missed on very strong argument in favor of cav!
Engagement width means that even if you have "more infantry" the amount of it being "used" is a different story.
So to get as much as possible out of each actively engaged unit in a fight cav is simply better as well
Meanwhile here I am using the same old 10-5-5 template since EU4 came out 😂
I always have 2-4 cav in my armies, unless I'm Prussia late game in which having a few more infantry and cannons is better.
But on the other hand, courthouses no longer take up a building slot, so more barracks means less value to manpower, therefore more comparative advantage to infantry. It all depends on national ideas...
There is a big downside to cavalry which you glossed over, and it’s their absence of fire damage. This means that during the fire phase, cavalry takes damage without dealing any. That means that regardless of the situation, your cavalry is never gonna be fighting at a 100% strength once it actually deals its damage. Unless you micro it so they only join after the first fire phase. I don’t disagree with the fact that cav is better early if you have the economy (or the will/ability to debt) to make it viable, but it still is something to be aware of.
I wonder if this all came from that one Arumba video😂.
That thumbnail lmao
Does the fact that fire goes before shock have any effect on the overall shock damage?
If fire and shock values are equall, then fire will do more damage. Let's say your troops do .1 damage in each roll and the enemy has the exact same army. A 1k infantry stack will have the following damage numbers: Fire 100, 90, 81; Shock 72, 65, 59. That's also the main reason that cav is weaker than infantry in the late game.
Not early on because the fire damage is just too low. It's starts mattering later when canons and infantry gain a lot of fire pips.
So cavalry becomes very bad after like tech 22.
I think people try to find a singular rule for EU4, such as always focus on trade or never use cavalry.
Problem is it depends entirely on the time period within the game, your nation, your idea choices, who you are fighting etc.
Nice video explaining it though, glad to see I'm not the only person that hates the no cav nonsense.
Well you just need to reduce the caw from 4 in the beginning to 2 in the end of you aren't horde
You hinted at decisiveness of battles. How does flanking and the extra shock at the start of the game contribute to having a stackwipe? The AI running around avoiding engagements and trying to carpet siege you while you run after them is just annoying gameplay. You can prevent that by decisively stackwipe the enemy. I loathe the AI's ability to negate fort ZOC and just run around unimpeded while you sit on a fort with your starting army till you hit 99% siege progress...
Yeah I dont understand Red Hawk who always disbands cav at the beginning of the game.
I like using cavalry, but only if I get some cav combat ability.
"Cavalry is bad" is just a meme first popularised by Arumba back in the days and then people who kept parroting him.
Cavalry is not "universally good" but there has always been nations in every version of the game that could make it strong.