Cavalry... What do you think? (all discussion of cav here)

[Ibn Munqidh]

The main impact of a cavalry charge is always psychological

Funny to say, that the only historian that says this is Dr.Nicole Smith. No other historian or specialist agrees with him, and it is one of the most critical catch phrases against him.

Imagine a car, speeding towards you, at 40 km/ph, sure it will unnerve you, but if you have the guts to stand still, it will crush you. Same with a knightly charge.

[Satyr]

If it takes an entire battle for a Royal Guard company to take out a company of archers, how many cav are you really going to bring to the table? Seems like the cav should just sweep thru killing many on the charge but instead they get tied up in melee forever.

[Spino]

Funny to say, that the only historian that says this is Dr.Nicole Smith. No other historian or specialist agrees with him, and it is one of the most critical catch phrases against him.

Imagine a car, speeding towards you, at 40 km/ph, sure it will unnerve you, but if you have the guts to stand still, it will crush you. Same with a knightly charge.

You make a good point but you also overlook the fact that horses are harder to dissuade from flinching than people. The psychological factors involved in a heavy cavalry charge were often instrumental to its success.

To prove a point when Sergei Bondarchuk was filming his Napoleonic epic 'Waterloo' he had at his disposal several thousand Russian soldiers which he used as extras during the battle scenes. These men were instructed in the basic drill and formations of the Napoleonic era. When it came time to film the scenes featuring Marshal Ney's infamous massed cavalry charge Bondarchuk had a helluva time getting it just right. The problem wasn't that the horsemen were breaking formation too early but the fact that many of the extras in those square formations would break ranks and run when the horsemen got too close! As you can imagine this probably led to the occassional chain rout where a few skittish extras set off an entire group. This is in spite of the fact that all of the extras were told the oncoming horsemen would veer away and ride around their square formations! The sight, sound and rumbling of hundreds of horses bearing riders wielding swords galloping towards your position is enough to make your primitive inner brain scream "Big mean loud fast things! Run!"

So while it is extremely difficult to train a horse to overcome its instincts which tell it to stop or veer away from an obstacle in its path it is also quite difficult to train human beings to hold their ground in the face of a massed cavalry charge and instill in them the belief that such a seemingly simple and feeble posture will prevent said cavalry from trampling them underfoot. This was probably quite difficult to do during the pre-gunpowder era when your average infantryman was armed with nothing more than a pointy stick and a wooden shield and the oncoming rider and mount could be covered from head to toe in armor and/or barding. The fact that said rider also wielded a mean looking lance of considerable length and had a nasty assortment of arm severing and head bashing weapons at his side didn't help matters either. Last but not least it is no easy thing to stand your ground against a man who is considered by society as a whole to be 'your better' in every capacity; rigid class structure being an unfortunate fact of life back then.

[Orda Khan]

I've not played the demo but what upgrades were in place? I agree with your point, cav should trample over archers

.....Orda

[the_mango55]

If it takes an entire battle for a Royal Guard company to take out a company of archers, how many cav are you really going to bring to the table? Seems like the cav should just sweep thru killing many on the charge but instead they get tied up in melee forever.

If you are talking about the Scot's Guard, they are one of the most elite archers in the game, and should be great at both archery and melee. And my cav still didn't have much trouble with them.

Care to tell us exactly where you are talking about?

[Watchman]

When close-combat infantry could stand up to a cavalry charge on open ground it was invariably through enough discipline, drill and espirit de corps - in short confidence - that they held their ground in the rank and file in the face of the very imposing sight of masses of large animals carrying armed men bearing down on them. If they did not, their formation rapidly lost cohesion and solidity and therefore its ability to intimidate the horses and just plain take the physical impact if necessary (a horse has no trouble knocking down one man, but scores of them braced for impact and supporting the ones before them ought to get a lot more difficult - heck, the first man doesn't even have the room to fall down; then again, if the horse is by that point skewered on a properly braced spear the point gets rather moot), and tended to get gutted.

This is why the knights were the kings of the battlefield in much of Europe for a while; most of the infantry around (which had markedly declined in quality since Carolingian times) just didn't measure up to the task. Where sufficiently solid infantry traditions were preserved however - such as in the urbanized northern Italy and the Low Countries - the cavalry was far less a dominant arm, and the "reinvention" of the necessary measures (more or less already culminating in the highly drilled Swiss communal pikemen, who were already able to go on the offense against any cavalry) pretty much yanked the carpet from under the more narcissistic delusions of the chivalry. Not that good shock cavalry had not remained an important battlefield asset even when dealing with solid heavy infantry, they just usually couldn't do all that much to the stubborn footsloggers frontally unless some particularly telling disparity in equipement was also involved.

As a side note assorted books give the very strong impression suitable "infantry backbone" was typically preserved in urban areas (where the local communal militiamen knew each other "off duty" too, shared a common local identity and regularly trained together) and regions where for one reason or another the old shieldwall infantry levy had remained valuable. Elsewhere for example the warlike Daylami mountain people, noted mercenaries in the Middle East since at least Late Antiquity, had their own characteristic and aggressive style of fighting as massed infantry which by descriptions reminds one of the tactics used by the various "barbarian" peoples of ancient times.

The bottom line is, cavalry can pretty much demolish unprepared, poorly motivated and/or scared infantry with often frightening ease. But when trying to frontally assault confident, stubborn and/or suitably braced heavy infantry they tend to at the very least be looking for a serious and drawn-out fight (sword-toting Late Roman soldiers were apparently usually able to put up a serious fight against the heaviest cataphracts the Sassanids could throw at them, unless first seriously weakened by archery) and not rarely flounder entirely, with potentially disastrous results. That latter one seemed to happen fairly often when Medieval European chivalry used to easily dispersed low-quality infantry suddenly met the rather higher-caliber sort cities in particular tended to spawn...

[andrewt]

I haven't played the demo yet but this sounds encouraging to me. The cavalry in RTW are way overpowered. MTW era cavalry should be stronger in comparison to RTW era cavalry but shouldn't be as strong as how RTW cavalry were depicted in game.

[hoetje]

Whats with the cavalry models? In pavia,I killed all the charging french cavalry,so you would expect them to lie dead on the field...Well,their horses did,but I saw the riders hanging in the air! It looked like they were still riding their horses!Anyone had this terrible experience too?

[Azog 150]

lol, yes, but mostly they are upside down, looks like they impaled on the wrong end of there own lance.

[AlJabberwock]

Seen it too, but it appears only temporarily if I move the camera away and then back, the image disappears.

In relation to the Cavalry question, I find no difficulty running over the Scots and no trouble versus the crossbowmen either unless they are charging towards my cavalry themselves ... Cavalry appears ok to me, although I agree about the "weight" appearing to be missing from the charge... Even if an attacking wave of cavalry might be decimated, the defending line should be pressed, even buckled under the pressure wave.

Al Jabberwock

[Kenchi_Sulla]

I haven't seen any strange things with cavalry so far. In prolonged melee vs a good infantry unit they should and will bite the dust (being outnumbered, and not able to hold formation - basicly fighting 2 or more soldiers at once). On the charge they are pretty powerfull so if you are able to use them as a battering ram you got the advantage. They have no trouble clearing archers since they can cut right through there formation. You can't expect them to win a fight against pikes or spears.

Armour was good in those days but the sheer force of a knight on horseback riding himself into a speer wall should impale him. The armour was designed more to protect them from low velocity thrusts and slashing attacks.

[Loki]

***NOTICE*** I understand that what we are now playing is a *demo* and based on older code, yadda yadda yadda. I get it. I also understand that the two historical battles we have to play are allegedly somewhat scripted. BUT.

I know theres been some talk about cavalry beeing taken down a notch or two, but does anyone else earnestly hope that the final product will be greatly different than the playable demo?

The first time I played thru Agincourt and the French heavy chivalry charged the center of the line, I saw them slam to a halt on the english line. I assumed that that part of the line had stakes as well. It was only later that I realized that there were no stakes at the center of the line of battle.

There is no way on Gods green earth that a heavy cavalry charge hitting *any* infantry unit (except perhaps deep ranks of armored pike) would stop like it hit a brick wall.

I fear if cavalry stays like this, the resultant battles/combat (although graphically beautiful to watch) will bear no resemblance to the reality of combat in the middle ages.

[Jediknight73]

well English units were almost maxed out in armour/weapon upgrade's, while the french hardly had any. that may be why?

[Leftenant Moley]

Is it just me or when cav charge through stakes from the back to front ie stakes pointing away for the cav they still end up dying? When i was attacked from behind on the battle of avincourt i ran my archers in front of the stakes(why?) but it seem all the cav died anyway.

[Bob the Insane]

Following are a series of images of Knights charging head first into archers on open ground (from the Agincourt battle of course). The whole series is over no more than 10 seconds and remember the longbowmen have 2 gold chevrons (probably explains way they do not rout)..

Warning, images...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The knights approach...



The charge...



The impact...



Spilt second after impact...



Same moment, different angle...



A second later...



Again the same moment and a different angle...



Archers' death animations completing (it appears a unit is not counted a dead until the this point)...



It's all over, no more than 10 seconds at the most...

The point of this exercise to to demonstrate that the cavalry is not useless...

[Soulflame]

The killspeed and movement speed was reduced a small bit, and I think that plays against cavalry (you have more time to react). Also, just 'trampling' an enemy is harder when they are in full plate then in say the Roman age (although less armor means you can try to jump away).
Anyway, I think there is some change from Rome -> Med 2, but personally, from the limited experience I had with and against cavalry in the demo, I think it's actually very well balanced.

[Barkhorn1x]

I believe Bob's post summed up the situation pretty well:

1. Cavalry going up against a braced unit of armored foot knights or billmen are in for a rough ride.

2. Cavalry going up against lightly armored units goes through them "like butter".

Barkhorn.

[Kommodus]

Interesting... when I played the battle of Pavia, the French knights broke through the wall of pikes (after suffering significant casualties initially, of course) and began hacking their way through my Landschnekts. One of my pike units suffered enormous losses before finally beating off the knights. I've noticed some of you had the same experience.

So no, I don't think cavalry are underpowered. Just like in previous TW games, they have to be used correctly - and in the demo, they're scripted to do just the opposite!

[Leftenant Moley]

But what about when cav charge through wooden stakes in the ground that are Pointing away from them but still end up dying? Is that a bug has this happened to anyone else?

[Haxorsist]

The horses are obviously allergic to wooden stakes.