Quote Originally Posted by cegorach
His tactic were more than enough to deal with conservative Tilly, but not enough at Lutzen where he died.
Well, he died mainly out of sheer bad luck (ie. stumbling into a squadron of Imperial cuirassieurs in the dust and smoke with just his small personal entourage) and the fact Kings and senior officers were still expected to hang around the frontline where they were naturally exposed to a fair amount of risk.

As for his tactical reforms, there was a wee bit of a problem with them - they basically consisted of using existing, tried-and-true forces in an innovative and more efficient fashion. An advantage of technique in other words, and since the Imperials used the selfsame types of troops it didn not take them long to simply copy-paste the ideas and restore baseline tactical parity. Breitenfeld was still a battle between "old" and "new" tactical techniques; by Lützen it was two "new" style armies duking it out.

Overall he won the war because Poland found it hard to recruit enough infantry to break the deadlock because of problems with taxation at that time.
What, you mean the state of Poland was at some point actually able to fix those problems given the ability of the feudal landholders to flatly torpedo any and all laws they didn't like - and their intense dislike of any and all measures that even looked like they'd strenghten the King in relation to themselves nevermind now at their expense...?

I recall learning that in Sweden it is said Poles were 'massacred' at Warsaw in 1656 which is not true at all
If you mean the famous three-day battle, well, it was pretty much a total rout wasn't it ? And the fact they had to flee over bridges meant the Swedes were somewhat unusually able to actually catch a fair few of the Poles, which would certainly have made it a rather bloodier defeat than the usual dispersals of Polish armies in the field...

'Course, I've also heard people who really should know better to honestly think the main tactic of Polish cavalry in WW2 against German panzers was a lance charge (), so you may be on to something here.