Quote Originally Posted by Nowake
Because in real history the dacian cavalry never remarked through anything. The dacians relied mainly on pedestrian units. Of course, we're not including here the getae who lived in Skythia Minor and in the lower Danube basin.
Well, actualy they did make themselves known to everybody living around them, those Dacian cavalrymen. For instance in August 48 BC a Dacian cavalry-only army sent to reinforce Pompey arrives too late to be of any help (Caesar had won the battle at Pharsalos). So the Dacians have fun plundering Greece (which was now in Caesar's hands) down to Athens, before returning to their home country. This means that whatever troops Caesar had left behind to secure the newly-acquired provinces were not good enough for the job.

Also one reason the Romans got so pissed off with Dacia and decided to finishit it off were the repeated cavalry raids over the frozen Danube, during winter time. In the winter of 105 - 106 AD the Dacian king Decebalus tried to force the Romans to withdraw from Dacia by means of a joint Dacian - Sarmatian massive cavalry attack against the Roman supply base, the province of Moesia (nowadays Bulgaria).

In 106 AD the Dacian capital Sarmizegetusa fell to the Romans and king Decebalus, failing to organize further resistance, committed suicide soon after that. Romans only occupied the Western part of Dacia, a region coresponding to nowadays western Romania and eastern Hungary. The rest, that is the eastern half of Romania, the Republic of Moldova and western Ukraine remained outside the Roman control. The so called "Free Dacians" (Dacians outside the Roman-occupied area) together with their allies, the Germanic tribe Bastarnae and the Roxolani and Alani (Sarmatian tribes) raided the Roman provinces south of Danube several times. Acording to contemporary sources the raiders were mainly cavalry troops (which makes sense, since their main intention was to hit, plunder and withdraw back home, not conquer and stay)

Lastly, in the 3rd century AD the Romans had to put up with the Carpi, a Free Dacian tribe which had allied to the Goths and was again devastating Moesia. Emperor Diocletian finaly defeated them in 297 AD and gain the title of "Carpicus Maximus". It is worth noticing that he was not "Goticus Maximus" which means that at that time the Dacians were still the dominant partner of the alliance. The Carpi army of 297 AD was dominated by cavalry.

RTW doesn't provide the Dacians with horse archers (which would have been historicaly acurate) but compensates by giving them easy access to the [expensive] Scythian mercenaries. People familiar with the monument erected by Trajan after defeating Dacia (Trajan's Column, still standing in Rome) might get the impression that Dacian armies were indeed infantry-based. However on the column there are scenes of Dacian and Roman & Moorish (Roman auxiliaries) cavalry clashes. There could be 2 reasons for the aparent infantry-mainly Dacian army carved on the Column: first the main battles there are sieges, mountain or forest battles, where cavarly is inapropriate. We can understand the second reason by looking at the armies of the medieval Romanian states of Moldova and Walachia. They were using a very peculiar tactic, diferent from what was typical for the peoples around them: their mainly light cavalry army was actually a sort of mounted infantry: marching on horseback and fighting mostly on foot. The reason for this behavior was the nature of the terrain where the Romanians chose to fight: difficult terrain, where the technical (heavily armoured Polish or Hungarian knights) or numerical superiority (Turks and Tartars) were negated. Now, back to their ancestors, the Dacians, this was exactly the same defensive tactic adopted by them against the Romans. I would therefore side with the players who want a better selection of Dacian cavalry (too bad in RTW we don't have the "dismount" option like in MTW).