Empire And Revolution: Caracoles and Dragoons
With the development of the pistol there arose a new kind of cavalry. One that could use speed to fire point-blank into enemy infantry, upon which it can withdraw to a safe distance away to reload. The German peoples would call them Reiters or “Black Riders”. They represented a new form of light cavalry, using their firearms to break up large infantry formations before ultimately using their swords in direct combat. Sometimes this could involve simply firing before a direct charge, other-times it could involve multiple harassing passes against the enemy infantry. Similar to the Reiters would be the harquebusiers, which served a similar purpose but are simply differentiated by their use of “harquebusier” early carbines.
These cavalry were trained to ride up directly to the enemy, fire their weapons, and then immediately wheel around and withdraw to a safe distance to reload. This type of coordinated formation movement was referred to as a “Caracole”.
Its easy to imagine how the mongol archers did the exact behavior in the medieval period. In both cases, composite bows and small fintlock pistols/carbines had their highest effect at a short range.
It’s one my big gripes with games treating cavalry archers as simply archers firing at a long range while moving. Its why in Total War horse archers were often limited in multiplayer rules due to them being overpowered. They had too much effectiveness at far ranges which made kiting an easy tactic.
In reality the main benefit of mounted archery was the ability to ride up directly to the target and firing at the closest distance possible. Shot and arrow both lose their energy over time due to wind resistance, and the theoretical max distance of a bow means nothing if it has no effective penetration. Games typically just treat ranged cavalry with “kiting” behavior, and perhaps this is somewhat appropriate, but there’s plenty of historical evidence where mounted ranged units approached the enemy and were counter-charged to deleterious effect. Trying to get this behavior in-game can be complicated…
I thought turning this tactic into game mechanics would be very difficult, especially in a grid system. However I think I've settled on a straight-forward system in which the units will approach enemy units to be 2–3 grids away before firing and then falling back from the enemy.
Harassing a moving infantry formation can be a lot trickier. We want the cavalry to avoid getting unnecessarily caught by the advancing infantry due to bad unit behavior. There’s never a real-world scenario where a person should be able to catch a moving horseman. However in the chaos of battle we still situations where this may still happen. Withdrawing against the enemy is complicated since we want the groups of cavalry to stay together in a cohesive group, but its easy to see how they can split off when avoiding advancing enemy.
Dragoons:
Once infantry firepower advanced enough in the 17th-century it became all but impossible for the caracole tactic to work. Advancing that close to the enemy would lead to immediate destruction of the cavalry unit as it would receive a full counter-volley of infantry fire.
It was still desirable though to use ranged cavalry. But in order to have firepower parity with infantry, the cavalry would have to use longer firearms. This made firing while on horseback impracticable. However battlefield operations had expanded in scale as well, so it was useful to ride to strategic locations and then dismount to actually fight. In a sense they were simply mounted infantry without the intensive skills/training that was required of heavy armor cavalry, but more mobile than your basic infantryman. They could arrive to the battlefield before anyone else. Perhaps the most famous were John Buford’s dismounted cavalry on day 1 of Gettysburg.
Implementing dismounted cavalry was a bit of an uncertainty for me. The actual dismounting is straight-forward enough, the horses after all can just be stationary after the dismounting effect. The player can simply convert their mounted dragoons into unmounted dragoons, at which point they’ll have the higher accuracy / firepower buffs that come with dismounting.
However there are major concerns regarding re-mounting dismounted dragoons.
- Can stationary horses take damage from say a random cannonball landing on them? And if so, does that mean some of the dragoons won’t have a mount. How should a unit of dragoons behave if only half of the dragoons have a horse to mount on?
- If a company of 80 dragoons is 3 independent grid agents, what happens if one of the agents mounts before the other 2 agents mount back up? Will half the dragoons be walking and the other riding horses?
Ultimately what I decided was the following rules for dismounting
- A company of dragoons can only dismount/mount if all agents are at their location and free to perform the action at the same time
- If the dismounted horses take any fire damage or enemy agents are proximate to the horses, they will become “panicked mounts” at which point they will flee the field of battle. The dismounted dragoons will never to be able to re-mount for the duration of the battle. (Like in real-life horses should be dismounted and left in a safe location)
If you’ve made this this far. Thanks for reading. I’ve had people ask me when a release can be expected and let’s just say I still have a long way to go… at some point I will need to get a Patreon account going so that I can get help when it comes to making the actual art assets and audio. For now everything is still programmer placeholders. I expect another 1–2 years of just programming since AI and multiplayer syncing require a lot of experimentation still.
