Open Plains

[Overdriven]

ofc there are different views of organised cav. If your view on disorganised cavalry is they charge in 1 by 1, then ofc the infantry wins. But i think in by far most situations the cavalry would win. One video kinda shows it, although the author claims  its because they broke formation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8ABQ1PPCNo

I don't think y'all can really understand how overwhelming a force of 50 cavalry can be. MaHud puts it in perspective:


Also:

What makes you so certain? You must have a lot of proff lying around 

That video is also native. And notice they are all pikes, no real shielders and no ranged. Plus the majority of the cav is heavy. It's also 50 cav vs 50 infantry. Honestly I'd be amazed if I saw such a fight in pubby seeing as the vast majority of players are infantry. On open plains battles with 100 people. I think you could probably safely reason about 15 cav per team. That leaves plenty of infantry on either side to deal with it as well as the cav fighting each other on top of that.

Lorenzo explained away any other doubts.

[Seawied]

Maybe you simply don't like a map where you can't go rambo alone.

Actually, Seawied=Level 30 Cavalry Lancer. If anything, open maps are the one place where I can go rambo.


Thanks for playing though 

[Overdriven]

Actually, Seawied=Level 30 Cavalry Lancer. If anything, open maps are the one place where I can go rambo.


Thanks for playing though 

Not against organised cavalry and infantry you can't.

[Seawied]

Not against organised cavalry and infantry you can't.

Pubbies=unorganized 90% of the time. It does not matter how you slice it, pubbies will consistently be disorganized

Strategius is a different story.


and for the record: organized team with cavalry will beat an organized infantry with little or no cav on an open plains level field map. It is the best environment for cav. If you deny this, then there is absolutely no hope in debating with you. If you deny this simple fact, you are unequivocally wrong.

[Overdriven]

Pubbies=unorganized 90% of the time. It does not matter how you slice it, pubbies will consistently be disorganized

Strategius is a different story.


and for the record: organized team with cavalry will beat an organized infantry with little or no cav on an open plains level field map. It is the best environment for cav. If you deny this, then there is absolutely no hope in debating with you. If you deny this simple fact, you are unequivocally wrong.

Ah you skipped over my argument for that then? We have so many clans, the majority of the time I play probably at least half the server is formed of various clan groups. Many of them senior and leaders within their groups. All it takes is probably 2 guys to take charge in each team and you have organisation. Trust me when I say, cRPG players can be considered pretty dumb if plenty of other games can achieve this regularly on pubby servers. It's not like you'd have to do it map after map, round after round. I'm arguing for a few extra open plains maps. Not an entire server dedicated to them. You'd only have to play it for one team winning 5 rounds for it to shift to a usual cRPG map.

I would dispute that. An organised infantry group could easily beat an organised cav group. Simply depends on tactics from then on. Yes open maps can arguably be cavalry biased, but the only reason they will flat out beat infantry is because some infantry will decide to go off and be lone heroes and ultimately die for no reason. In a pure, tactical battle with infantry and cavalry fully, properly organised, cavalry and infantry will be relatively even.

Fact is though, few open plains maps in public will ever see one team heavily cavalry biased. Such is the nature of auto balance and banner balance. It will always be relatively even, with maybe only a slight difference in cav/inf numbers except on exceptional, rare occasions.

[Lorenzo_of_Iberia]

Pubbies=unorganized 90% of the time. It does not matter how you slice it, pubbies will consistently be disorganized

Strategius is a different story.


and for the record: organized team with cavalry will beat an organized infantry with little or no cav on an open plains level field map. It is the best environment for cav. If you deny this, then there is absolutely no hope in debating with you. If you deny this simple fact, you are unequivocally wrong.

1. The mentality of nothing will change is the kind of thing that keeps 90% battles on public servers disorganised. You just have a lack of imagination and lack of faith in a community which is one of the few capable of changing this.

2. Just blindly claiming that infantry teams will fail to win in the presence of cavalry just is wrong. If pikes can even deter the cav from attacks for maybe a minute and a half then the superior numbers in infantry will allow a smaller infantry body to be mobbed. From that point the cavalry wont be able to make any impact (as long as infantry stay tight).

You can't just give up, accept something and kneel waiting for the 'inevitable'

[Overdriven]

Sigh...typical that this got highjacked into another 'anti-cav' thread.

Seawied...are you arguing against variation? If so then make your arguments for that. Because that is essentially what you are saying. Variation in maps is never a bad thing. If you consider variation a good thing, then you have 0 reason to vote no unless you just want to turn this into a 'cav is op' thread.

[Jarlek]

On Topic: Having more varied maps is great. There are way too flat maps and way too many town/village maps. The few random "plains" are really just big clusterfucks of hills. I always love it when those flat maps on the Shogunate server comes up. What i really would love, would be a few battlefield maps aka like some of the maps you can find in Mount and Musket. Sort of a big field with some trenches/houses here and there. That would be nice.

Off Topic: The whole "50inf can't beat 50 cav" and the "yes they can duh" is pretty useless here. Please go make a new thread and maybe link it here. Otherwise, stop it. Altough I would like to point something out that I learned from a discussion about Empire: Total War. A guy was asking about whether or not the square formation was as useful as it is ingame and a guy replied by saying something like this. "Basically the square formation was a big game of chicken. It all depends on who brakes first, ether the cavalry charging or the infantry charging. It was all about the discipline." Can't find the exact thing, just wanted to say it.

[Casimir]

Well we were playing on eu1 the other day.

Gk and a load of pubbies against templats and aload of pubbies on an open map.

They were easily able to out manouver us as we had almost no cav.

Banner balance screwed us pretty bad, was one of those maps that just couldnt be won...

[ToxicKilla]

1. It promotes teamwork. This morning on eu 1 we had an open plains map, completely flat, possibly the first I've ever seen in rotation. It also happens to be the first time in CRPG pubby that I've ever seen teamwork with 100 people. On both teams the infantry banded together, formed shield walls and slowly approached each other. The cavalry took up positions on the flanks and covered the infantry in the advance before finally charging eachother. It was well organised and what a real battle should feel like. Honestly the only thing that threw this off was the appearence of flags one round, so both teams had to charge the flags down.

I remember that. It was serioussly very fun. I took charge of our teams small band of cavalry for a few rounds and led them to there doom in an attempt to flank the enemy, they had much more horsemen, and I managed to run away on my champ charger with 1 hp for both me and my horse back to the main infantry group and joined the cavalry protecting our flanks.

I'm all for more flat maps. I could maybe even make some if the servers want them. Just open maps with some fields and maybe a hut off to the corner of the map where nobody goes. Also, a map with a forest to one side would be really cool for ambushes.

[Glyph]

but lets not forget that if in a game it's 100 vs 100, there will be about 30 cav on each team. the cav(atleast most of them) will first go for the other teams cav. so that leaves not much cav left to kill the infantrie

[Camaris]

If for example every second map would be an open plains map it would only lead to
a cavnerf cause people would get sick of those riding bitches.

[Kafein]

With the pikes being the new super-OP-nerf-everyone-use-thingy, I doubt that any cav formation can take out a double pike square with archers/xbow in the middle.

Don't forget that in cRPG, we have 300 reach pikes and the cavalry is super light compared to these guys. Furthermore, in the video the pikemen seem not aiming for riders but for horses. If someone is attacking you with a couched lance, the best thing to do is to kill the guy directly.

[Elerion]

Flat plains maps are interesting when they pop up once in a while, because you see forced coordination with shield walls and "formations" (also known as "Big clump of people behind shield wall").

The problem is that it just isn't fun for any length of time. Given balanced teams, the optimal strategy is to have your infantry remain stationary in a big pike studded shield wall formation, with archers in the middle. Moving that clump is discouraged, since it breaks up the formation, making you more vulnerable to enemy archers and cavalry.

The end result is nearly always like Gurnisson explains: Infantry sits on their ass for 4 minutes, while archers and cavalry work to achieve cavalry superiority against the opposing team, at which point the armies clash due to time limit, low ammo or boredom. In the ensuing chaos, the team with cavalry superiority is almost guaranteed to win, as they can weave back and forth through the broken lines picking off enemy infantry.

As cavalry, this series of events is exciting. They get to start out doing cavalry duels and trying to identify weak spots in enemy formations. Towards the end, they get to run rampant in broken lines of enemy infantry. As infantry, it's about as much fun as watching paint dry. Once the initial excitement of "Woo, formations!" wears off, you're just sitting on your ass for 4 minutes watching other people play the game, before partaking in a short chaotic melee that ultimately isn't even that crucial.


Even ignoring the obvious balance problems if one team gets more/better cavalry (in which case they're almost guaranteed to win), flat plains maps just aren't fun in the long run.

Disclaimer: I've played such maps as lancer, as shielder and as archer. Only the lancer had fun after a couple of rounds. (But indeed: The lancer had a ton of fun.)



The variety we should strive to have in our maps should be in-map variety, like Sieweed explains. Maps that are mirrored and allow all types of players to succeed. In my eyes the best example of this is THIS MAP. It is mirrored, and has well suited fighting positions for all styles of play. It has favorable positions that are worth fighting to reach, but aren't unbreakable once attained. The deciding factor is the sum of all the team's strengths, not only cavalry (or archers, or melee infantry).

[SkyrayFox]

Obviously 2h infantry will prefer town maps, archers will prefer maps with hills and rooftops and cavalry will prefer open fields.

I see no reason why flat open fields maps shouldn't be in rotation. What are we talking about exactly?