Where would the real disadvantage be...

[Cartaphilus]

That's it.

Read about the "disastrous" parthic campaign of the Divus Julianus, aka the Apostate. Until he arrived to the enemy capital, the romans performed quite good.

But in the end some bad decisions and the death of Julianus made that the campaign failed. But the new agreement between the new emperor and the parthic king was no calimitous to the romans, as it would have been.

[The Persian Cataphract]

*laughs at many of the ludicrous entries in this thread*

Some of you have a very simplistic, rock-paper-scissor approach to assessing military weaknesses, and others have a loose grasp of understanding the capacity of a proper quiver and a gorytos (Between Scythian and Parthian types). The rivalry between foot-archery and mounted archery is complex enough to bring completeness to at least a handful of reports, and none of them were inherently better than another. There is a likewise rivalry between heavy cavalry and light cavalry, where a number of times the light cavalry emerged victorious (Enough to profoundly influence playing rules in DBA and DBM).

Out of common courtesy, I won't mention any names, but I warmly advise you to read up on your scholastics. Real-life warfare is anything but a Vanilla RTW fare.

[AqD]

*laughs at many of the ludicrous entries in this thread*

Some of you have a very simplistic, rock-paper-scissor approach to assessing military weaknesses, and others have a loose grasp of understanding the capacity of a proper quiver and a gorytos (Between Scythian and Parthian types). The rivalry between foot-archery and mounted archery is complex enough to bring completeness to at least a handful of reports, and none of them were inherently better than another. There is a likewise rivalry between heavy cavalry and light cavalry, where a number of times the light cavalry emerged victorious (Enough to profoundly influence playing rules in DBA and DBM).

Out of common courtesy, I won't mention any names, but I warmly advise you to read up on your scholastics. Real-life warfare is anything but a Vanilla RTW fare.

Hmm. If you know something we don't, why not just tell us here??

[The Persian Cataphract]

It's a matter of insight and understanding, not the amount of knowledge. Most people not only find history to be a most boring topic, but they pathologically think they are going to find the "quick fix" magical answer to one of the most complex matters ever to be conceived by us human beings. For an example, let us take these aforementioned horse-archers and try to chart their weaknesses. Let us get the scope of their continued use within general militaria, from the age of the Cimmerians and early Scythians, to the age of the late Tatars.

Their function in the battle-field was more or less the same throughout the ages, yet they must have continuously surpassed their own short-comings throughtout the generations through different tactical adaptations and different strategical paradigms. It easily gets esoteric, which is a far cry from "heavy cavalry beats light horse and spears beats horse and blades beats spears". These are all over-simplifications, and if one cannot understand the basics of the real life tactical flexibility of a military element, there is no point for me to ramble on about it either.

[Watchman]

...although, at least as far as the light nomadic-pattern HAs go, arguably the main reason for their continued use throughout the millenia was simply that whatever their real and numerous enough limitations, in certain parts of Eurasia where cavalry was the king anyway they were just plain readily and cheaply available. The common nomadic tribesman could be employed as a quite effective light cavalryman, scout, raider and skirmisher "off the shelf" without further ado.

Given the vital importance of light horse for what might be termed "campaign duties" (ie. scouting, foraging etc.) for any army, whatever their battlefield potential, this was obviously a detail any warlord could well appreciate.

(PS: What, no Almighty Moustache(tm) ? You're slipping, TPC. )

[Lysimachos]

If i remember correctly there even fought some cossacks with bows at the battle of Leipzig in 1813

[Watchman]

1813, Hell. You had Mongol irregulars with composite bows in the damn Boxer Rebellion and whatnot.

Not exactly fearsome battlefield presence obviously, but then nobody expected that either anyway.

[Lysimachos]

You had Mongol irregulars with composite bows in the damn Boxer Rebellion and whatnot.

Wow, i didn't knew that. But now, when you are talking about that, i come to the feeling that it would be probable to find evidence of horse archers in second world war or maybe some later african civil war or something...

[Strategos Alexandros]

When Hitler invaded them the Polish tried a cavalry charge at his tanks.

[Lysimachos]

When Hitler invaded them the Polish tried a cavalry charge at his tanks.

That is a popular myth: The Polish indeed used cavalry (as did germany, russia, romania and others, too!), but they were used for scouting etc. In fact there are no reports on an occurence where cavalry was engaging tanks, though it is still a popular story.

[Strategos Alexandros]

Really? I didn't know that.

[Ludens]

According to Wikipedia it is actually a Nazi and later Russian propaganda myth. However, the article goes on to claim that Polish cavalry did on one occasion charge elements of a German Panzer division, and drove them back. Off course, for all we know these "elements" might be scouts or supporting elements, not tanks. It also worth bearing in mind that most German tanks at this stage were of the Pz I or Pz II type, which were little more than armoured cars.

[Strategos Alexandros]

That might have been what I was thinking of.
(Although I could just have been being stupid)

[russia almighty]

Ludens I could have sworn the story was, that the Polish cavalry had cut down a decent sized unit of Germans and got ambushed by those said panzers.

[Watchman]

Like all of their kind, the Polish cavalry of the day was basically mounted infantry - being able to range far and wide independently of roads and the logistical "tail" of fuel supply, such mobile troops had an obvious usefulness in the wide open lands of Eastern and Central Europe (the Finnish army had a cavalry corps too, incidentally; presumably chiefly because while horses aren't all that hot in forests, they're still way better than motor vehicles there and in any case were much more readily available). AFAIK they did however mount the occasional succesful "cold arms" charge on suitably exposed German troops - infantry caught on the move in the open being the most obviously vulnerable one, but it's not like the open-topped halftracks and whatnots weren't potential victims too. Soviet cavalry is known to have occasionally mounted charges in the grand old form as well, with varying degrees of success (generally contingent on how well they were "shot in"), and German medics every now and then had to treat sabre wounds inflicted by cavalrymen harassing stragglers and retreating troops.

Random trivia: whatever their reputation for mechanised warfare, a good 90+% of WW2 German troops nevertheless either had to leg it or relied on horses for transport. The first ones to field genuinely mechanised armies were the British (a lot of the Germans' horses were actually surplus British stock that had been replaced by motor transport, bought before the outbreak of hostilities) and Americans - and even they used vast numbers of draft animals on the logistical side.

[Aper]

According to
Warfare
a site usually very reliable, the polish cavalry attacked german infantrymen in 16 occasions, and in almost all the polish won. Too bad the site is only in italian...