Originally Posted by
X~Calibur
Yes, theoretically, it ought to be possible to clear the cav and archers in the same wave against Sword-Cav-Ram. When you get results that you don't expect, something you should always check is the number of rounds of the battle. Get yourself a pen and paper, and using movement rates, try to figure out what happened. Depending upon how many rounds it takes your archers to cut through the Cav, the pike, or the enemy archers, you can get vastly different results in your battle.
The ideal situation on sword-cav-ram is that the cav is already cleared, so that when your unlayered archer wave hits, all units move correctly so that you take out the enemy archers. In all my battles where anything greater than 20k sword remained, the archers failed to take out the enemy archers.
Now, theoretically speaking, the fellow above is correct that you can clear cav/arch in the same battle, but it takes clearing the cav in 3 and exactly 3 rounds (rds 2-4). You'd need a pike and sword layer. Cav kill the pike layer on rd 3, and the sword layer on round 4. Defending archers are simply left without a target. So what happens in round 5 at this point is that defending sword move to 2750, just outside of range of our archers, defending arch move to 2500 since they see no target within their range of 4400. They can hit 4900, which pretty much covers all remaining units. Our own arch see no targets in range and advance to 4200 where enemy arch are in range. The trouble with all this is that we're all running heroes with different stats, and until you get some experience hitting level 12s, you can't be quite sure what your heroes/units will kill.