(High, Hard difficulty with a decent, but not extraordinary mongol invasion)

Spending about two real life years of answering mongol invasions with "sensitive", balanced armies and careful strategic choises, I would have none of it. They showed up just after I had mopped up the last Egyptians and Turks in the area around Anatolia, so I had quite a few valoured-up kataphractoi, and a thirst for mongol blood. Time for an experiment.

The plan was simple: bring one stack of kataphractoi and pronoi allegion led by my best general (7 or 8 stars) with good armour upgrades. At the start of the battle, I'd charge them. No more, no less.

In the first battle, the charge devastated them. They had lots of mongol warriors that were easily butchered, and the the MHC didn't have much to say about it either, their bows failing to penetrate the armour of the cataphractoi, and my allegion simply ran them down and scewered them. The usual train of reinforcements arrived, and all of them fled immediately, ending the battle with some 80 - 700 casualties.

The second battle was a bit different, as the reinforcements actually didn't flee in terror as they arrived after the slaughter of their comrades, but it didn't help, since it really only meant that I was able to kill more mongols. Some 1000+ mongols didn't leave the field of battle.

The third battle was more or less a repetition of the second one.

The results: The stack, with a single reinforcement from Constantinople, was untouched, but with a ridiculous amount of valour. So yes, sometimes cataphracts > tactics. I really thought that I would survive one battle at most, but it turned out that my complete disregard for all the classic anti-mongol tools (river crossings, arbalests, good spear troops) paid off.

And yes, I stopped believing that kataphractoi is "not that good, and a bit too slow". Tell that to the Horde... ;)