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 Grey Templar wrote:

And those are actually the horses that were originally bred for war, and later repurposed to be work horses.

That's still being debated by historians. While larger horses were used to pull artillery and wagon trains(larger horses have a better disposition towards loud noise and unfamiliar sights), we're not sure if Destriers(which are a medium weight breed of horse, actually) and other Cavalry breeds actually got that large. Consent is actually leaning towards Heavy Cav using medium weight breeds rather than heavier breeds that became Draughts. We do know that the Percheron(which is the lower end of heavy breeds) WAS used for cavalry, it's just unclear if it was across the board for cav.

But yeah, Draughts are plenty fast compared to medium breeds.

Also, improperly trained horses wouldn't touch a mass of armed people. They can be pretty skittish towards new situations. There's a couple accounts of Roman Cav Auxiliary refusing to go near Carthaginian war elephants when they first encountered them due to terrified horses. Once they'd faced them regularly, it wasn't a problem.

Draft horses were bred for work. That's where their very name draft comes from. If you have a drafting table that's not a war table... The biggest aren't as easy to ride as smaller horses as they are so wide. Also, they are so tall that it's harder to hit people on the ground. Especially short, malnourished foot sloggers.

They were bred for powerful, low-end torque. Like plowing and pulling heavy loads.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Why are you trying to break Slaves?

You ignore the slaves and go for the other stuff.

Because to GET AT the other stuff you have to GET THROUGH the slaves.

A halfway competent Skaven player will have his expensive stuff behind slave blocks. You want to get at it? Only way to get there in six turns is through at least one slave unit.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

DukeRustfield wrote:
Has anyone wondered how an animal as heavy and as fast as a horse doesn't constantly get broken legs/hooves as it clomps around uneven terrain and such?

I have. So I asked some people and they said that horses do exactly like we do. If you're walking around your apartment barefoot and you step on a plastic 40K figure with his power chainsword fist pointed directly at your heel, you immediately shift your weight to your other foot and interrupt your gait to lessen the ouchness. Horses do that too when they sense they aren't stepping on nice firm ground. Except they got 4 legs and can switch weight a lot easier.

Horses have spindly little legs compared to their mass. With super high centers of gravity (compared to humans). If they start smashing through the jell-o that is a human body putting all their weight on our guts as we fall down, they're going to also fall down and/or start hurting themselves as they lose their footing.

They can knock people aside with no problem, but they simply aren't good at grinding people underfoot as you might think. They aren't bulldozers. Maybe draft horses with those hooves like watermelons, but those are super slow.

Try a Clydsdale sometime. And remember that by historical standards of warhorses, they would be a MEDIUM horse, and not even a 'war'horse breed. Heavies would be 3-5 hands higher and significantly stronger. There are no survivng breeds of heavy warhorse. Once heavy cavalry faded from the field of battle, there was no need to keep them anymore.

I guess i'm not that great of a skaven player but i find it odd everybody thinks it's super easy to buy infinity million of those little b*stards (skaven-slaves) to cut out and model after my day job (i got a screaming bell as my big purchase in months with my last couple purchases during one day being a couple modular movement trays, more dice and skweel gnawtooth for when i got at least 8 rat ogres together if that's even a good plan). Points-wise they're good and esp. with island of blood they're good but it's like people telling you to get lots of skeletons. You can't get 3 boxes and have a decent army like with warriors of chaos or ogres. With skaven i need like 200 clanrat/slave models just to get things going and it's time consuming scooping those little f*ckers out to put on the table for forever before a game. Apparently every 'competent' skaven player has a good 1.5k USD to throw down for their army and knows exactly what's good before they've used it.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
I guess i'm not that great of a skaven player but i find it odd everybody thinks it's super easy to buy infinity million of those little b*stards (skaven-slaves) to cut out and model after my day job (i got a screaming bell as my big purchase in months with my last couple purchases during one day being a couple modular movement trays, more dice and skweel gnawtooth for when i got at least 8 rat ogres together if that's even a good plan). Points-wise they're good and esp. with island of blood they're good but it's like people telling you to get lots of skeletons. You can't get 3 boxes and have a decent army like with warriors of chaos or ogres. With skaven i need like 200 clanrat/slave models just to get things going and it's time consuming scooping those little f*ckers out to put on the table for forever before a game. Apparently every 'competent' skaven player has a good 1.5k USD to throw down for their army and knows exactly what's good before they've used it.

Have you tried unit fillers? They can cut down the number of slaves you have to buy and paint by a considerable number (same goes with any large unit). And since it's such a big unit, you can make really large ones and no-one will mind and you won't have any shenanigans with not being able to make up the right number.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
I guess i'm not that great of a skaven player but i find it odd everybody thinks it's super easy to buy infinity million of those little b*stards (skaven-slaves) to cut out and model after my day job (i got a screaming bell as my big purchase in months with my last couple purchases during one day being a couple modular movement trays, more dice and skweel gnawtooth for when i got at least 8 rat ogres together if that's even a good plan). Points-wise they're good and esp. with island of blood they're good but it's like people telling you to get lots of skeletons. You can't get 3 boxes and have a decent army like with warriors of chaos or ogres. With skaven i need like 200 clanrat/slave models just to get things going and it's time consuming scooping those little f*ckers out to put on the table for forever before a game. Apparently every 'competent' skaven player has a good 1.5k USD to throw down for their army and knows exactly what's good before they've used it.

Unit fillers, and bribing a friend to paint them for you.

I painted 100 slaves for someone once, $1 a rat.

I participate in painting challenges and 24 hour marathons over at Under-empire.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
I guess i'm not that great of a skaven player but i find it odd everybody thinks it's super easy to buy infinity million of those little b*stards (skaven-slaves) to cut out and model after my day job (i got a screaming bell as my big purchase in months with my last couple purchases during one day being a couple modular movement trays, more dice and skweel gnawtooth for when i got at least 8 rat ogres together if that's even a good plan). Points-wise they're good and esp. with island of blood they're good but it's like people telling you to get lots of skeletons. You can't get 3 boxes and have a decent army like with warriors of chaos or ogres. With skaven i need like 200 clanrat/slave models just to get things going and it's time consuming scooping those little f*ckers out to put on the table for forever before a game. Apparently every 'competent' skaven player has a good 1.5k USD to throw down for their army and knows exactly what's good before they've used it.

Unit fillers, and bribing a friend to paint them for you.

I painted 100 slaves for someone once, $1 a rat.

Which still amounts to 100 dollars total if i don't want to mass paint them all. After a point of playing horde armies i just got tired of painting them and keep them grey.

@The Shadow (was that from a D&D parody skit?): Not sure what unit fillers are but it sounds like blank bases with no models on them. It's a little hard to do that in a freaking GW that most likely won't allow that. Somebody's house is fine or a game store but it does get pretty annoying when somebody uses blank bases for half an army. It's just like how it annoys me when people say an army is an army when It's sisters of battle with weird modeling standing in for space wolves making it kind of difficult when they're not looking like they should or when somebody uses orks covered in bitz for armored nobz (maybe i'm just anal about this sh*t). I accept slight modification for like a unit or two standing in for another one but when an entire army is weirdly converted (and not in a way to make it look like a cooler version of what it once was) i'd just rather not face it. It's a personal thing. Hope that doesn't get under anybody's skin.

Sorry i guess i just like to rant about things but maybe that's just me. I'll see what i can do. Still though i think you guys fail to realize 300-500 skaven isn't as cheap and do-able as one might think esp. since it feels like it's infinitely easier to just use a freaking elite army like warriors of chaos or ogres. If i go on to an army after skaven i may choose to do dark eldar since i'm kind of tired of having to throw down 300 dudes every game. I played IG, currently skaven and i had to paint some of my previous roommates vampire counts which i'm actually really interested in. However if i do VC that'll be my 3rd horde army. I have like 3.5k of IG i think and even more of skaven so that's something to think about. I don't have a ton of money so my purchases have to mean something and after working in a factory where i cut excess plastic off plastic parts for 8 hours i don't exactly want to come home and build infinite waves of crappy troops that die in mere instants every game.

@Platuan4th: Sounds good and maybe i should give it a look. I actually have a skaven forum myself though somehow i need to find a way to make the guest color scheme of the forum less blinding. The forum's pretty much dead unless anybody wants to join. It's got a decent scheme when you've become a member i absolutely swear it. Almost sounds like a scheme but then it is about skaven ;P. Seriously though the colors are better when you are on a member account. After a while i stopped giving a crap because nobody showed up. If you want to join go ahead but i shouldn't advertise here. I'll try throwing it into my sig if that makes things easier and if anybody's interested.

 Sigvatr wrote:

Ragnar4 wrote:

 Sigvatr wrote:
They are, by far, not the greatest cavalry, neither by the rules nor by the fluff. They are normal humans and thus cannot be compared to stuff like Skullcrushers.

.

A standard block of grail knights would take pretty serious exception to what you're saying here. GK are the hands down best cav in the game. Tons of str 6 attacks... With the lance formation, they are point for point the best cavalry in the game.

T3, 1 wound per model. I don't see them having any problems at all!

Grail Knights can be devastating on the charge, and they are WS5, have a 2+ armor save, the Lady's Blessing save and 2x attacks that are magical and with every model being able to challenge in combat. Obviously, many people ask me why me and many other Bretonnia players don't take them over very little anymore as there stats are this good? Simply put, they are too expensive to run at 38 points a model, and with the name of the game being how many bodies and blocks you can put on the table, its not worth paying that many points for a Knight that expensive who is only a T3, 1 wound model, where the points for a unit of 6x Grail Knights adds up to a bigger unit of KOTR and KE. And even with there amazing stats, I find that in CC they still have a hard time breaking horde formations on the charge thanks to the steadfast rule by themselves, which again goes back to my point that it takes multiple lances to allow Bretonnia players a much better chance to break hordes on the charge, which many opposing players use to there advantage. Giving cavalry a rule that could help them against steadfast is what they need the most at the moment, and currently, the only way I can really see that is by:

1. Increasing the hitting power by giving them impact hits. Seriously, in a world where we have magic, demons, ratmen, and other crazy shenanigans, an army of Cavalry able to break through hordes of infantry similar to Braveheart or the Riders of Rohan charge in Return of the King doesnt seem too far off the map in my opinion.

2. Cavalry charges where feared by everyone, even disciplined infantry, so having a them cause fear on the charge makes since, as it would be very intimidating to see a large number of heavy cavalry charging straight at you, even with a Pike or Spear in hand.

3. Vulcans idea of Cavalry being able to disrupt an enemy formation makes a lot of since, and might be crazy enough to work to help Cavalry in general fix and address the current Steadfast rule. A rule like that would be a god way to fix Cavalry in this edition, and it could be something like: "After the charge is declared and if successful by a Cavalry Unit (of certain size), the opposing player rolls a D3 dice and losses a rank depending on the number rolled". So say if a unit of 12 KOTR charges a block of 50x Slaves in a 10x5 formation, and the Skaven player rolls a 4x, he will only have 2x ranks that he could count towards the steadfast rule, however he still can use all ranks for rank bonus during CC resolution. Might seem a bit over the top but it would go a long way to fixing the rule to make Cavalry relevant again.

 tmarichards wrote:
Cavalry is perfectly good in the game as it stands, there's no need to try and give it a big boost across the board.

Some cavalry are badly costed, but that's more of a problem with internal army book balance than a problem with external balance between unit types.

Cavalry in the 8th edition rules, IMHO anyway, are pretty dang useless.... the steadfast and step up rules mean that you are very rarely going to win a combat resolution unless you have an enourmous unit of cav. And even if you win, with the steadfast, pretty much any unit is going to pass its test and not break. Personally, I think that if you get hit in flank or rear, steadfast should go away (whether hit with cav or infantry) due to the chaos that would cause in a realy army formation

If they could just run up and break larger units of infantry, why would you ever buy non-cavalry? They are already usually somewhat better in stats. Have WAY better armor. And have way better movement. If they could just lol-crush infantry blocks, then infantry blocks are pointless. They'd just be slow and sucky and easily killable cavalry.

A problem is high armor and high movement alone don't really matter that much. That's not a combo that justifies the much larger purchase price. Kind of like if you give a unit 10 init and 10 movement and it has all other 3 stats, it's avg might be high, but you're not going to pay 30pts a pop for it.

The super MC units took high armor, high movement, high wounds and high dmg for vastly higher cost. And just about everyone agrees they are worth it.

Current rules for cavalry are pretty good. They are a shock unit, nd charging head on into the front of an infantry formation should be suicide cavalry. After all, 5 knights no matter how chaosy shouldn't be able to break 50 halbreds.

However, I do feel like it wouldnt't be amis to grant cavalry an additional perk on the charge, perhaps doubliing their ranks for the purpose of determining steadfast ON THE CHARGE ONLY. After all, 5 horsemen running down 10 infantry men, should be scary, where as 10 infantry in a prolonged fight with cavalry would be less scary and put more pressure on the knits being outnumbered two to one....

 Castitas wrote:

However, I do feel like it wouldnt't be amis to grant cavalry an additional perk on the charge, perhaps doubliing their ranks for the purpose of determining steadfast ON THE CHARGE ONLY. After all, 5 horsemen running down 10 infantry men, should be scary, where as 10 infantry in a prolonged fight with cavalry would be less scary and put more pressure on the knits being outnumbered two to one....

That's the point. Why would someone ever want to face infantry heads on with cavalry? What's the point of your higher mobility? A few people in here are just wishlisting cavalry to be broken like hell aka break on front charge which is pretty stupid. If you cannot flank your enemy with cavalry, you're doing something wrong. Rather stock up on infantry then. Cavalry is meant to flank units, not just go "HERP DERP MY HORSE IS AMAZING LOLOL" run straight into the enemy expecting him to break.

Guess why Bretonnians are still doing well in comp? Because they are played by good players. I could happily faceroll any new player with almost any army if he's playing Bretonnia. The thing is that Bretonnia needs skill and experience to work, they aren't Lizardmen or Skaven where you just throw some dice around and win. That's sth. people need to get straight before ranting on how bad cavalry is.

/rant.

Not directed at you, Castitats. In regards to your example, keep in mind that cavalry already gets a bonus of +1 over infantry for attacking with the current rules. If they did not attack first, you're a bad general.

As I said before: deny rank bonus => no Steadfast + ASF if charging. If you're getting flanked, you need to be punished. You made a tactical mistake and thus you must be strictly punished. Period. It's the same with cavalry charging an infantry unit's front: you made a mistake, you need to get punished. Period.

 Micky wrote:
I think there needs to be more distinction between Heavy Cav and Fast Cav. Heavy Cav getting impact hits, and Fast Cav getting some sort of 'hit and run' rule would differentiate them best and clearly illustrate their intent and purpose.

Heavy Cav is all about the charge and breaking the target - both in-game and traditionally.

Fast Cav is basicly mounted skirmishers, designed to harass the target rather than kill it.

I like this.

 Lexx wrote:

 Micky wrote:
I think there needs to be more distinction between Heavy Cav and Fast Cav. Heavy Cav getting impact hits, and Fast Cav getting some sort of 'hit and run' rule would differentiate them best and clearly illustrate their intent and purpose.

Heavy Cav is all about the charge and breaking the target - both in-game and traditionally.

Fast Cav is basicly mounted skirmishers, designed to harass the target rather than kill it.

I like this.

I agree, this would be a great way to make Cavalry not only unique in there roles, but also give them something they need to make them more effective.

 Sigvatr wrote:

 Castitas wrote:

However, I do feel like it wouldnt't be amis to grant cavalry an additional perk on the charge, perhaps doubliing their ranks for the purpose of determining steadfast ON THE CHARGE ONLY. After all, 5 horsemen running down 10 infantry men, should be scary, where as 10 infantry in a prolonged fight with cavalry would be less scary and put more pressure on the knits being outnumbered two to one....

That's the point. Why would someone ever want to face infantry heads on with cavalry? What's the point of your higher mobility? A few people in here are just wishlisting cavalry to be broken like hell aka break on front charge which is pretty stupid. If you cannot flank your enemy with cavalry, you're doing something wrong. Rather stock up on infantry then. Cavalry is meant to flank units, not just go "HERP DERP MY HORSE IS AMAZING LOLOL" run straight into the enemy expecting him to break.

Guess why Bretonnians are still doing well in comp? Because they are played by good players. I could happily faceroll any new player with almost any army if he's playing Bretonnia. The thing is that Bretonnia needs skill and experience to work, they aren't Lizardmen or Skaven where you just throw some dice around and win. That's sth. people need to get straight before ranting on how bad cavalry is.

/rant.

Not directed at you, Castitats. In regards to your example, keep in mind that cavalry already gets a bonus of +1 over infantry for attacking with the current rules. If they did not attack first, you're a bad general.

As I said before: deny rank bonus => no Steadfast + ASF if charging. If you're getting flanked, you need to be punished. You made a tactical mistake and thus you must be strictly punished. Period. It's the same with cavalry charging an infantry unit's front: you made a mistake, you need to get punished. Period.

exalt worthy!

It seems not everyone here is like "Cav sucks".
I love my boarboyz and I use them nearly every game and so far they haven´t disappointed me. And in my area cavalry is pretty common so I don´t get why "everyone" is crying. Maybe the same type of player that is crying about the fact that marauder deathstars aint worth it anymore.

As a bretonnian player,I would not mind my heavy cav getting an impact hit,something similar to the hammer of wrath rule my IG rough riders get but even without it you can still ride down alot using two units per charge,,,

One thing I do not understand and would like to see changed not just for me but all cav/beasts what have you is,,,they are riding horses,are fast,they should be able to wheel or reform quicker/more easily as its a huge pain to have 12+knights all lined up in a block having to maneuver back towards another unit once they've riden down something or killed something.

Gomericus wrote:

One thing I do not understand and would like to see changed not just for me but all cav/beasts what have you is,,,they are riding horses,are fast,they should be able to wheel or reform quicker/more easily as its a huge pain to have 12+knights all lined up in a block having to maneuver back towards another unit once they've riden down something or killed something.

I disagree. Sure, if going straight, cavalry is faster, but keep in mind that regular cavalry units are a unit in a certain formation and thus it's more complicated and reform to keep the formation at the same time. Light Cavalry does not have that problem and therefore gets easier reforms (aka free reforms).