WhiskeyPete asks some good questions over at the Rise of Nations Heaven Forum.

Ok, so lately I've been seeing some variants of early classical raiding. Normally I expect a couple CA'(Cavalry Archer)s to come tearing through and causing some havoc. Lately, I've been seeing a few more HC's doing the raiding or one Cavalry archer with one Heavy Cavalry for support. Or the 1HC, 1LC, 1HA raid. So I have a couple questions:

1. Is it better to raid with one or two CA's if you decide to raid with CA's?
2. What are the Pros/Cons of using HC vs CA for early classical raiding?

ceohammer responds with:

Whiskey, there is only one counter to the early Horse Archer raid - and that is to get to classical just as fast as you can. Without classical and your opponent is already there you are doomed. The ranged cav can just sit outside your cities firing radius and bring your economy to a complete halt.

I generally agree. If your economy is compact, archers are an excellent stationary counter to horse archers. Which is one reason why heavy cav is usually the next unit to show up. You could make some pikes to guard against HC, but then you've gotta have both archers AND pikes there JUST IN CASE they show up. That means you've gotta have 2-3 units for every one of theirs, because you can't be everywhere at once and you don't know which type of unit he'll hit you with.

So even though you can make counters from the barracks, speed kills, so stable units are much better for responding to raids. Light cav is the best option, but then that is the main reason heavy cav is the next unit to show up. Heavy cav beats light cav 1on1.

As G0dSpiral added:

LC is definitely what you want against HAs. The point of bringing along HCs isn't for additional raiding, but to deal with the LCs that pop up against your HAs. 3 LCs will beat 2 HCs, so if you can't match opponent HCs right away, some supporting LCs can help. HCs don't do any real damage so if there are no HAs left you can tuck your LCs away for healing.

posted by Tim at 11:08 AM