These mounted nobles represent a lightly armoured medium cavalry, able to skirmish with their bows and equipped with lances also able to mount a desperate charge. They wield their bows with skill, and are able to handle their lances; However their chief virtue lies in their supportive nature, as horse-archers but also as flankers, a diversionary force as well as nobles who may lead but also inspire their troops. They will not perform very well in melee due to their light defences, so care must be taken to use these nobles wisely. This is offset by their great skill in archery, allowing them to out-range their adversaries and to out-power other archers thanks to their asymmetrical bows.
Historically, these nobles represent the upper end cavalry of the Yuezhi or Tocharians before they came into contact with the “Haoma-drinking Scythians” (Sakâ Haomâvargâ) who fielded heavily armed and armoured horsemen. As such they are a far cry from the later feared Kushan cataphracts. Nevertheless the rationale of the Yuezhi nobles may merely have been authoritative, and “aristocratic”, in the sense of that their exquisite garments ordained them a rallying point in battle, far rather than being proven for battle themselves. As the Yuezhi began to interact with the Saka, Tocharian influences reached the Graeco-Bactrians and the Hellenistic colonies along the Indus river, the Indians and subsequently the Parthians who became their western nemesis during the height of the Kushan hegemony. The Yuezhi cavalry must have been numerous, for Chinese sources though possibly exaggerated mention herds of horses numbering upwards hundreds of thousands of animals of riding quality. The asymmetrical bow was most likely proliferated by them; A representation of Eros from the 1st century CE Gandhara (Back then firmly in Tocharian/Yuezhi rule) shows the deity wielding an asymmetrical bow, now lost from the eyes of scholars.
