Charge orders get resolved first, so there is no way that you can prevent 2 of them from charging. The artillery, even if it survives will not gurantee to rout one, never mind both of them. There will be nothing stopping one of them from charging again even if the artillery survives.
No, Fire orders get resolved first. I feel like that's a vital thing to understand here.
Let's take a hypothetical scenario where the enemy Elf Cav 1 attacks our artillery this turn. They aren't going to both attack the artillery this turn because Elf Cav 2 can't both reach the artillery and retreat out of effective range of the 310th's muskets. If anything, they'll start cutting into the 310th, but blocking cavalry pathing is what they're there for, hence my orders having them Brace. Anyway, Elf Cav 1 vs. 5th Hobgolin Horse Art. Let's assume that on the fringes of a major battle happening in the next county over, we're not facing crack hardened royal
gendarmes and the enemy cavalry is a scouting force with the same stats as our own - not green, but not piled on with bonuses either.
Round 1:
Elf Cav 1 initiates a melee attack on 5th Hob. H. Art, and rolls 1d100 for hits, rolling twice for advantage, and then subtracting 40 for being cavalry melee-attacking into a fortification (-20, doubled). The expected value on 2d100 take highest is
51 67, the highest is obviously 100. Any roll lower than 40 will result on no casualties, only Cohesion loss, which in worst case will be 2 out of the 5th's 8 (and in a no casualties roll, only 1). Absolute worst case scenario (barring a crit, which we don't know what they do yet other than possibly injure us I guess) is 60 hits, with an average case of 27. Expected value of casualties is 70% of the hits, all else being equal, so the 5th Hobgoblin Art will take an average of 19 casualties and a maximum of 42 assuming average wounding rolls (absolute theoretical cursed-by-God amount being 60). The former is more than survivable, the 42 is about a 2% chance, the 60 far less than that. Unless we're actively cursed, the Artillery will survive with more than half its number, and simply based on the probability curves involved, I see no reason to plan around more than about 20 casualties to the artillery.
Round 2:
Next round, the artillery gets its revenge against an Elf Cav 1 before it gets to move (Elf Cav 2 is almost certainly going to end up in the crossfire of a bunch of infantry it doesn't see). Assuming
purely average rolls of artillery attacking cavalry in an open field (which describes everything to the west of the manor), and assuming we use Ready Fire to wait for them to close to our point-blank, we will get
80 hits (average roll 50+ our experience level bonus of 30, 90% of which will become casualties thanks to artillery's +2 Wounding, resulting in an
average of 72 casualties. That's absolutely catastrophic for anyone foolish enough to try to have cavalry charge prepared cannons over an open field - even just bombarding them without using Ready Fire and losing 20 free hits will kill 54 of them on average before they get a chance for a second charge. Now, this is slightly mitigated by them being elves, but it doesn't mean the K/D ratio for this scenario won't be
massively in our favor, nor that the enemy knows this. Even the best case reasonably scenario for them sees one of their two apparent regular units on the field severely degraded in combat ability and liable to be picked off on subsequent turns, at the cost of killing maybe, if we're incredibly unlucky, almost half of our artillerymen.
Terrain, experience, and range are all huge factors in our favor here, We should exploit them rather than get bogged down trying to chase cavalry with infantry.
EDITed because my Advantage math was wrong, it's still looking pretty bad for the horse boys.
