Who the hell finds it fun to either waste time trying to lure them into a trap or chase them down? And it’s so much worse against ai because they don’t need to micro manage the way humans have to so it seems whenever I use them they get wrecked under the first half assed volly from any unit. This applies to literally any game. Who has fun with this shit?
Pretty sure, historically, they were also pretty powerful. I remember at one point reading about several nations that had serious issues with horse archers. A ranged unit of constant mobility, of course they’d be difficult to deal with.
How effective they are does depend on what kind of game you’re playing, however.
In Age of Empires II horse archers are only really good in those civilisations that have adequate research for them. And then it requires a good deal of player skill to micro the units to make use of their enhanced mobility.
In Mount and Blade Bannerlord it all depends on terrain. Horse archers are deadly on any sort of open terrain, but introduce trees or even a mild amount of rockiness and those horse archers are in a serious disadvantage.
They were also rare. To effectively pull off horse archery, you needed good horses, good riders that also happened to be good archers (both of which weren’t trivial on their own, let alone combined) and good coordination. Bows are more effective the closer you are, so to get the most out of your arrows, you’ll want to close in, but then you also need to wheel off again without your riders getting in each other’s way, so you needed to drill maneuvers for that.
So you either need to have a sufficiently large body of soldiers with the leisure to train both archery and riding instead of working the fields, or you needed a society that treats them as basic skills anyway and only needed training in the military application. Nomadic peoples like the Scythians or Mongols often had the former, so they were notable sources of dangerous mounted archery, particularly where the raising and support of a professional army wasn’t feasible. Rome had the Equites Sagitarii, but they were part of the distinct social class we would call Knights, so not your rank-and-file soldier (and those were already more professional than later levy- or retinue-based militaries).
So if we were concerned about accuracy*, these units should be expensive and require good management to make the most of them, but be very dangerous too. The point about open / closed terrain certainly fits as well.
What’s a bit more foggy is how games usually handle bow effectiveness at range, but that’s its own topic.
*I do care about accuracy, but not at any cost - games need to be fun too, and that’s worth sacrificing some accuracy for.
Yeah, in Age of Empires II they’re more expensive than Skirmishers, who are archer-countering units. They’re also more expensive than regular archers, and that’s not going into the research that a good cavalry archer needs, as they’re also subject to some of the most expensive research options.
In Bannerlord you can get good horse archers only be recruiting young nobles. Then you have to spend time on levelling them up, because at the lower tiers they’re just not that good, and you risk a number of the dying before they reach a high enough level.
So between the two games I play that prominently feature horse archers, I’d say they’re managed pretty well, with the increased costs, slower training times, player skill, or levelling requirements.
Skirmishers as in “Light Cavalry”, designed to catch closing archery and ride them down? I’m not big on RTS (I suck at multitasking), but I’m always fascinated by gamified implementations of historical dynamics.
I don’t suppose they also support “recruit auxiliary specialists” as option?
Age of Empires II is honestly a somewhat strange combination of historical and not. Take, for example, the upgrade lines for certain units:
Militia -> Man-At-Arms -> Longswordsman -> Two-Handed Swordsman -> Champion.
So the skirmisher is a spear-throwing foot soldier with a shield. Historically a foot soldier would have a shield, a few throwing spears, and then a melee weapon. But in Age of Empires II the spear throwing and the melee are divided into two separate units.
Age of Empires II does have a light cavelry line, though, and they’re pretty quick. But only civs historically known for their good cavelry have bonuses towards them that make the viable (i.e. There are various steppe-civs in AoEII, as well as Mongols and Huns, and I’m sure Turks and Saracens have some benefit to light cav as well).
In this regard Age of Empires IV is more historically accurate, as that game can have completely unsymmetrical civs, whereas Age of Empires II has far more symmetrical gameplay.