nwg

I hear you both

Myself I can't stretch my imagination to the extent that the General unit is really just the General and his ADC's. The engine limits the smallest size unit I can use in CB and this is 24 models (+1 for the General himself=25). Given that this unit is a full squadron of 120 real men I'm quite happy to see my enemy riding about with his General unit doing whatever he wants.

The General unit at them moment is a bit underpowered as a cavalry unit though. It has the 'hardy' stat, but otherwise its easily beaten as its morale and fighting stats are quite low. Perhaps I could boost them up to that of hussars or even guard hussars, drop the hardy stat and end up with a 24-25 man unit which can actually fight and still costs <200f?? Any interest?

How cheap does this unit need to be to be attractive? <500? <300 <200?

Cheers, M.

Hmm we all have a slightly different view of what is happening when we take to field, for me the Gen in the battle is a representation of me the player, it is me in the NTW world controlling the army
That is why I'm not really comfortable with this unit getting to involved physically fighting the battle, gens fight the battles with there brains and not there sword arms.
Its just a gut feeling that i have and may understandably sound a bit silly to some
So I'm still in favour of the smaller sized cav unit.

I can't imagine why you seem reluctant to design a small sized cavalry, as suggest DJ. Seems neat and clear, no need to change the general.

I "see" the extra General (not the REAL one) as an understrenght Light Cavalry unit at the moment and use it as such, BUT, it is, as M says, not very powerfull, it say the least.

I'd be happy to pay around the 275-300 mark for a proper half strenght Light Cav unit with "normal" fighting stats, but no more than now for a "extra" General unit.

Note : I had an extra Cav unit of 11 men kill all the arty crew in my game with GP. They had used all the ammo and were sitting around having a cup of tee.....my Cav unit charged them about 3-4 times and slowly worn them down without losing any men !....very strange indeed.

Its because of my belief that the General Unit is a wasted unit and as we only have 20 unit slots maximum each wasted unit slot is a really painful thing. I am trying to explore opportunities to turn this wasted unit slot into something useful.

Now, I can well understand the reluctance to using the General Unit as a combat unit. Its a dangerous thing and your General can be killed. I'd personally like to have the choice however. A lot of folks like to keep their General well behind the action, however some folks (like me) have a tendency to keep their General reasonably safe but up with the front lines and I'm not adverse to sending in this unit in support of a melee.

The extra General units (that are not the Army General) have a morale effect on the friendly troops nearby and can be doubly useful because of it. If you imagine that they are a collection of elite Gendarmes or some other elite HQ level unit then perhaps the idea of them providing a morale boost -and- being able to get into a scrap if need be is not as hard to swallow (and it could explain away their fancy uniforms).

If we go the other way and create a new small light cavalry unit, which I am not against doing, then I fear they have less chance of being used as to use one means losing yet another unit slot. 1 for the Army General and at least 1 additional slot for the small Cavalry unit, leaving only 18 slots or even less for full sized units.

Hopefully my reasoning is a bit clearer now. Have a serious think about whether you really would choose a General unit -and- an additional small cavalry unit and if so for what reason / tactical purpose?

Cheers, M.

The final price will depend entirely on what sort of unit we want to use in this role. If we simply want a cheap cavalry unit then a half size militia cavalry unit could be extremely cheap. If its going to be Hussar however then its likely for most factions to be significantly more than 300 florins.




Heh Artillerymen are not great melee troops Your unit was probably too small to cause the normal fear that makes the men rout so they just sat their and took their punishment until they were all killed....strange eh? I've seen it happen as well.

Cheers, M.

Are we getting confused here ?....I would NOT buy an extra General AND a half strenght Cavalry unit, why would I ?.

IF there was a half strenght CHEAP Cav unit there would be no need to buy a 20 odd man extra General unit, or perhaps there would when playing with very small florins, perhaps ??????.

If the full size Cav unit costs 825 florins, then the "new" half strenght one should not cost more than about 350-375, if you build it and it cost's 400- 425 it might not get used.

No, but you'd buy 1x General Unit + 1 or more 50% cavalry units...which still means that the General unit is a wasted unit and you're down to 18 unit slots for making up the army numbers. However, as usual, there is more then one way to approach this to account for different tastes as I'll mention further on.



Ok. So, the florins cap on this scouting unit should be around 350ish. That probably means militia, lancer or possibly Dragoon for some nations. Hussars are usually a lot more expensive then this, but thats ok.

The correct way to approach this is to make the 2 squadron unit as we've been discussing at the price point which is likely to be attractive but isn't discounted either. In addition to this, make the General unit more like a normal unit as well, remove hardy and up their stats in line with elite line cavalry...but keep their 1 squadron size. This will allow those who don't mind using their General unit (or an additional General unit) as a cheap but effective cavalry skirmisher for one-punch type operations, after which they'll have suffered some casualties and probably be too small to be effective. I'll have to do the numbers of course but they would probably weigh in at about the same cost as now +-25 florins or so. If I'm careful to choose the appropriate cavalry type for the 2 squadron line cavalry unit then they should easily fit inside a price window of 300-350f

How does that sound?

Regards, M.

This sounds OK to me
M i understand your reluctance to provide a unit that you think may not get used very much, especially as your next release of CB will probably be the last.
I think about this way if and when we move onto LG and or ETW for our campaign fun, I'm sure we will all have very fond memories of all that CB has given us and the fact that the last version may have had a small cav unit that was rarely used, is not going to make any difference to how we feel about a great game

Sounds good to me as well.

Don't forget CB might live on after Empire and LG, so we may as well get it as good as possible in the next update.