Dogs......bowmen and cavalry

[Cruizer]

There are way too many dogs in the medium and hard camps. There are so many in fact, that bowmen and cavalry are useless. It is too expensive to build cavalry in the numbers needed to counter dogs. Therefore there is no point ever making cav or bowmen once you have cleared out the easy camps.

Either dogs need to be changed and/or most removed, or cavalry needs to be a heck of alot easier to build. until then, spam Recruits and militia. dont bother with the cav or bowmen.

[Marius]

Thanks for the heads up Cruizer, lets hope they look into that soon.

[Silvanoshei]

Actually, the dogs were designed with the sole purpose of preventing you from only building up recruits/militia without having to replenish bows or cavalry. They in essence are by design to slow you down. There is a reason for this.

If you ignore all adventures at level 26 and only destroy the camps, you will reach level 31(Source German Version) after defeating the final bandit leader Wild Mary. Now from levels 16 -20, you had to defeat 3.5/4 easy camp sectors gaining you those 4 levels. However there are only 28 camps remaining once you hit level 20 that includes the leader camps. Essentially you will find that the camps will literally lead to a 1-3 ratio to level up, with the bosses causing greatest jumps. If you only needed to focus on recruits/militia, without replenishing the other two you'd speed by much faster then the current leveling intentions.

As an aside if you look at the combat section of the wiki: Translated From German to Broken English
You can see what people use for the camps with success estimations of min/max losses.

Looking at the hard camps section, you will notice, several cases where large scale cavalry (ie ~200) are used to kill off dogs, and then a follow up army is sent in after to fight the remaining mobs/boss.

[Cruizer]

Actually I disagree with this. The dogs make recruits and militia more useful the bowmen and cavalry. Cavalry is way to expensive and time consuming to make to throwaway countering dogs. I lose less guys against large groups of dogs just using recruits and militia. Bowmen and cavalry are useless to me now.

[Silvanoshei]

I can see where the disagreement comes from on apparent speed and a personal level, my opinion is also derived from my own readings and doesn't make it any more correct then your own, though some may argue on the cost of one resource vs another on the expensive nature of the units which I do, the overall production rate for iron swords vs horses and bows leads to longer overall production times or larger production chain requirements. However you are not as likely to have built up your bow or cavalry compared to the bronze or iron production chains.

Total production times(cumulative resource time):: Raw materials (Source Siedler Online Wiki)
Again this is the overall time spent amongst all the materials for creation for level 1, this is the base production time not including work yard/clean up times affected by storage location/proximity to resource.

Horses : 42 minutes
Bows: 42 Minutes
Iron: 3 hours 6 minutes
Beer 24 minutes.

Resources Required:
Bow x 1 = 8 fir logs
Horses x 1 = 2 wheat, 4 water
Iron Sword x 1 = 24 fir logs, 12 coal, 4 Iron ore, 2 iron bars

1 Milita = 10 swords , 10 beer => 35 cumulative hours
1 Bowman = 10 bows, 10 beer => 11 cumulative hours
1 Cavalry = 30 beer, 40 horses => 40 cumulative hours

Costs:
Cav = 80 wheat, 160 water
Bow: 80 fir logs
Iron: 240 fir logs, 120 coal, 40 iron ore, 20 iron bars

Now, it's clear to see bows are the cheapest/fastest of the 3, however they do not have any special ability and will be rocked by dogs allowing 1 attack. Militia though slightly faster to produce eat up a large portion of a production chain used heavily by other areas. In my case cavalry comes off cheaper given that only the farm portion(of which I have a focus on in production) requires licensees, the water is a joke to account for.

The second benefit to cav also comes to their ability to attack the weak targets first. This is a major thing come hard camps when you can't attack the weak hp targets first till beating down the large number of heavy hp targets, but their weak targets go about eating up your damage dealers.

[Thunder]

I was also appalled looking at the time it requires for cavalry. It stretches even "video game logic" as to how one dog = one horseman with slightly lower accuracy.

[Cruizer]

I agree with your calculations Silvanoshei, but now add in hit points, as cav are the first attacked by dogs. when you factor in unit survivability, they are way too pricey in terms of materials and time to build. Of course that is my opinion, cav might be a great choice. I just don't see it yet.

[Sigmar]

maybe they should either boost the hp of the cav a few points or lower their build cost instead of 30/40 make it say 15/20 or 20/30 to lower the time cost and resource cost on Cav units.. making them a better dog/cav soak then mass recruits or bowmen.. i havent even started my horse production but if they are infact useless.. whats the point of investing in 1-2 farms for horses :/

[Biff]

See, im not worried about the wheat and water cost to make the horses. its the long build time and the fact that they take 30 beer each.

[Selak]

guys one thing to keep in mind.

Cavalry and dogs have first strike. That means they will attack first. After all units that have first strike have attacked, any loses the dogs and cavalry cause will be removed.

After that all normal units get their chances to fight (assuming they are still around). Then the loses from those attacks get removed.

Then after the normal units are done, Slow units get to attack (like bandit bosses). then losses from the slow units are removed.

this big important thing to remember though is that Dogs and cavalry will attack and cause loses before any other unit gets to attack.

For those that have attacked and defeated "Skunk" or "One-Eyed Bert" you can see this in your battle replay in game. Skunk and One-Eyed Bert both have the skill "Initiative: Last Strike" making them "slow" units