"All ballista crews, listen up! Load the ballistas, and once the centaurs enter range, hit them with everything you've got. Don't you dare conserve ammunition!" Yu Lin Bloodhawk ordered.
The explosive bolts fired by ballistas had a far greater range than the Rangers' arrows. They could easily give the centaurs a punishing welcome before they entered bow range. Unfortunately, Yu Lin Bloodhawk had only five ballistas. Even if the crews fired like mad, they would not achieve much. Five machines were simply too few.
Perhaps the first few explosive bolts would achieve decent results through surprise, but what happened afterward was harder to say. The centaurs might have primitive equipment, but they were not fools! They would soon discover that the bolts exploded and adjust their tactics accordingly, perhaps by spreading out farther.
A centaur army could loosely be considered cavalry, but it differed from true human cavalry. Since their human and horse halves formed a single body, their individual coordination and reaction speed were far better than those of separate human riders and mounts. Thus, whether attacking, marching, or performing other collective maneuvers, they maintained only half the spacing of human cavalry. Still, because of their speed and the time needed to react to emergencies, their spacing was considerably wider than that of human foot soldiers.
One could say that centaur troops fell somewhere between human cavalry and human infantry, though they leaned more toward cavalry. They possessed the speed and impact of human cavalry as well as the quick, agile reactions of human foot soldiers, combining something of the advantages of both.
If the centaurs had an excellent commander, they could potentially respond to unexpected developments as quickly as human foot soldiers, dispersing or gathering at will. Unlike human cavalry, they would not need to control their mounts