Using mounted bowmen

[Wauthan]

New patch solves your problem. Archers fire twice when on "hold and attack" then go into melee.

[Saxon]

Which patch is that which allows two rounds of fire before attacking? 2.08? I have not played with these recently.

I also have a rough time doing anything with these units. SOmetimes in a newly captured province, the cash/resource situation sees me building these as fodder to convince the AI not to attack. Not the best use of this unit...

[Chazar]

As stated before in an older (unsatisfying) thread, hold and attack does not solve the problem for horsebowmen: They are not using the speed of their horses sufficiently!

One would want that they move closer to the enemy, fire at the enemy while keeping some distance, and then retreat orderly (or engage in meele for a few rounds).

Hold and attack means that they will fire from their far away starting position, their cool horses grazing, and then charge stupidly...

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Aside, I'm quite new to the game, and I do believe that the game is kinda balanced, so there must be another good reason why this expensive unit is worth building?! Why is no one here giving this precious secret of cleverly using horsebowmen away?

I'd love to build an empire on horses...

[PDF]

Well, IMHO the main problem is that those horse archers/lancers are very inefficient as archers due to their cost (you can buy 3 foot archers for the price of 1 horseman), and not that good as lancers dur to relatively weak protection (and they are also costly as "lancers" due to their -useless- bow ...). They don't even have great morale ...

[Raz 24]

I have had great use of the tien chi barbarian horsemen . I just let them hold and attack and they first pepper and lower morale then charge and destroy the enemy front. Works great in hordes

[NTJedi]

Originally posted by PDF:
Well, IMHO the main problem is that those horse archers/lancers are very inefficient as archers due to their cost (you can buy 3 foot archers for the price of 1 horseman), and not that good as lancers dur to relatively weak protection (and they are also costly as "lancers" due to their -useless- bow ...). They don't even have great morale ...

Horsemen archers are one of the WORST deals in the game. First their accuracy is very bad, second they are more expensive, third they seem to die just as easily as regular archers.
From my experiences it's always been better to either buy regular archers or regular heavy cavalry.

The heavy horsebowmen of TC and BK do work, about 10x better than they used to. They may or may not be as efficent as they should be or could be, but it is a step in the right direction. You need 20+ in order to really see the effects. They don't work alone but if you have them on a flank, they do very well in causing alot of damage (because of the bow and lance) before they lose many forces.