MP faction

[L'Impresario]

With HRE, Italy or whoever, all you needed to do was deploy in close formation with crossbowmen close to the spear line and let the Horde do their damnedest. Arrows killed far less in MTW and any european army could easily sit and soak up every Horde arrow and still have enough men left to win the day.
Sure, if your opponent could be drawn into mistakes you could achieve wonders, if he refused to budge and kept his missile units safe while they covered the HA, the Horde could do very little about it. I faced the Horde with european armies (and I never used anything heavier than Feudal Knight cav) and believe me, it was easy to stop them. I complained about their weakness when MTW was first released and hope that MTW II will address this issue. I will not hold my breath since the Huns were no real threat in BI.

Well, I think that despite the lack of the -ultimately- overpowering Parthian shot and shot-on-move in earlier TW games, a Cavalry based faction with fast HA and light cav did have many advantages in certain game types.
For example in VI, when playing in a florin level that allows all cav armies that include effective countercharging light cav and a small force of relatively powerful heavy cavalry, and in a large map that doesn't have too many forests or very steep hills, then a GH user could: a) surround his opponent in a 1v1 and make him spread his missile units, thus making him vulnerable to expendable light cav charges, while tiring his mobile forces (in case of overpowering missile adversaries, an all cav rush under circumstances can be a cheap way to win heh); b) in team games, although probably a random team wouldn't perform very well, all cav forces offer a chance to overpower a specific point of the enemy formation due to mobility. Ofcourse this can be regarded as not very honourable play, because most of the time it requires a quick attack, even before missile exchanges are played out.
But money/ morale levels are very critical in all such cases.

In RTW the mobility advantage was further enhanced by other qualities specific to cavalry. A combined arms approach was even less fruitful than 10-15k VI, simply because a detailed interaction between the various army pieces couldn't be put down and rationalized, the battle system being too "instance-intensive", if I may use that weird term heh.
In the end, we must recongise that it is extremely hard for CA to balance the game when they implement so many radical features that are not as "predictable" as in the previous engine.

Orda Khan, that is because the AI sucks (and AI will always suck) and never used the Horde's advantages. Plus the Mongolians are very weak in the game.
Use the Mongolians right, you can defeat any army, not matter who is commanding it.

IMHO, keep the valour, troop experience and weap/armor upgrades (add more upgrades as well, such as horses). I like that extra dimension to the game. No way in hell can 10 units of green Hobilars stand up to 10 units of green CKs or Cataphracts in a head-to-head charge...

He 's referring to MP, but Mongols can be an effective faction, it's just that it relies on breaking some traditional approaches to the game, and extra effort by teams, maybe not worth it though in the end.
BTW v4 Hobilars can win v0 Ck (and more easily Kataphraktoi), and for that matteralmost any other cav can do that with the right upgrades. The charge score advantage the CK have can be negated in various instances.
I really do think that upgrades are allowing for a most counter-intuitive game (the greater the florin amount you use, the more intensive this is).