Quote Originally Posted by Furious Mental
"I doubt the majority of people who play the game think dismounted knights fight better than mounted knights. "

It might not be obvious to people in field battles but nonetheless it should be intuitive to anyone that in, for example, a siege situation, dismounted knights may be more useful because horses cannot ride up to the battlements. In any case it is not that CA has chosen not to include small units of heavily armoured foot soldiers and such. Rather it has simply chosen not to bother including under the rubric of an ability to dismount cavalry before a battle. That is not a result of a decision to promote a particular type of gameplay to conform to popular concepts. That is a result of a decision not to bother doing something properly.
Meh, it's easy for you to dissect their ideas from the outside and arrive at the conclusion that they're stupid.
Give them some credit. They're not a bunch of lazy retards who are trying to screw over history so that X-Box gamers will pick up the game.
They're clearly just trying to make the game as fun as possible (to sell more) and make some money.

It's not that they just "didn't bother" like they thought, hey, you know what, we could check the little box that says "let knights dismount" or, you know, we could eat some crisps.
Letting knights demount would have been a lot more work (to code, to make the models and skins, animations and the like) for them for very little benefit (they reckon), and I think that's fair enough.

On these boards, it's easy to get carried away and think that everyone, or everyone that matters, is a bit of a history buff. In real life, the vast majority of players aren't. It makes good sense for CA to make the game for their biggest demographic. Get over it. CA were never different.

Finally, I think people are just generally being too down on MTW II before it's even out. You won't like it if you pick it up, pop it in and say, "omsg wtf the install screens were better on MTW." Give it its chance.