Actually, all of the so-called great steppe cavalries that came into the West (and by the West I mean anything that is on the Rome Total War map, that is to include large tracts of the middle east) were defeated by even stronger and better tribes in the East. So pretty much the extent of "Western" experience with steppe cavalries were from the "losers", the steppe people that fought and LOST to even deadlier steppe armies to the East. I may be wrong, but I believe the first "victorious" steppe people to come into contact with the West were the Mongols.

And considering how badly the westerners lost to these inferior steppe armies, it gives me a new appreciation for the military prowess of Imperial China. They had fought with and successfully defended the littoral against the steppe tribes for well over three thousand years before the time of Ghengis Khan. The Chinese armies was more of an army based on maneuver and formations; in fact the tactics the Mongols used against the West was nothing new in the East; such tactics have been used there for centuries if not millenia. Chinese armies were moving infantry as well as cavalry in complex and intricate formations and tactics at least from the Spring and Autumn Period, the time of Sun Tzu.

And think about this: it took the Mongols DECADES of hard fighting (and this fighting took place right on their doorstep of their homeland, so logistics must have been far better) to take all of China (I believe it was around 40-50 years of war before north and south China was subdued). During this time period Ghangis Khan and his successors destroyed the Middle Eastern empires, humiliated among the best of Western chivalry (they wiped out the Polish, Hungarians, and German armies sent to face them, and with the Hungarian plains as a base, could have taken the whole of Europe with a little over 100,000 men), and the Mongols were outnumbered EVERY TIME against the heavily armored armies of the West.

That just goes to show you that if you were to pick between heavy chivalric armored shock cavalry or swift, unarmored horse archer cavalry, you would always pick light missile cavalry before heavy shock cavalry. One on one, knights have no chance against horse archers (they wouldn't even have been able to engage them, much less defeat them).

True, the Mongol generals were great, but they were not original in their tactics. Their tactics have been set for them centuries before; they are just proficient at using these tactics, which is their job.

I truly would have liked to see the armies of China face off with the best of the armies of the West. The Han Dynasty versus the Roman Empire would have been interesting indeed.

Oh, and Mongols WERE the best cav ever. No cavalry, not even gun-armed cavalry, would have been able to defeat them, all other things being equal. I think their arrows shot even farther than the effective range of muskets. Unless faced with gunpowder artillery, the Mongols would have won any engagment with any cavalry in history, in my opinion.

I could be wrong though