I love the concept of knights...towering, irresistible armor-clads of steel and flesh and faith, taking all before them on the battlefield…

However, I must agree with the general consensus of the forum here: they are on a less-desirable side of the tech tree. One should only bank on knights if your opponent has no elephants (of course) and are trying to attempt a win before gunpowder units become significant on the battlefield. I do believe that in the good situations in which they are available, knights can make any game a victorious one.

The only exception that I have to the “knights come too late on the tech tree” comes from a personal experience playing a standard sized map on monarch with Justinian and his cataphracts. I’ve had them sweep over the field quite easily with little support from anything beside trebuchets when capturing cities, even on monarch surprisingly. The AI was researching faster, and just before the last civ, ol’ stubborn Saladin (ironic, eh?) was conquered (or ever warred), he cranked-out several handfuls of riflemen. Cataphracts are able to take on all medieval units, and when promoted, can even take on green elephants. I believe that one of the only reasons that it was a successful game was that I had several of them promoted all the way up to Combat IV, with a GG leading the stack and a few pinch promotions for good luck. I admit, the situations were pretty ideal for my archaic UU knights to charge-down practically industrial age riflemen, but it just added to the unique overall flavor of the win.

Despite the general consensus, this thread is for the ideas of strategizing possible uses for knights and cats in vanilla CIV, Warlords, and BTS. Also, if you have any eipc stories about how you’ve used knights to beat-put more advanced units or any tips on how toeffectively use them, feel free to post them here!

*******NOTE!!!!! I’m not trying to hijack the article on here about the validity of knights on the tech tree; rather this is more about the GOOD case for knights and to share personal experiences about their use. Enjoy! :king:

C'mon, somebody's gotta give knights some love! :)

Knights can be great if you're able to cut enemy's iron sources fast to prevent pikemen spamming. In higher levels you can't expect the enemy has no Engineering or won't get it soon. AI values Engineering high and there is no (easy) way to have knights out really early. If only you are able to prevent pikes, there may be quite big time window for "knights and city revolt"-spies tactic.

Knights are growing on me. Last couple of games I've got the Horse Whispering quest, if you finish your last stable just after getting Guilds you get free Knights.

Usually there is just one or two pikemen in a city, if you give the first Knight the Fist, it will damage the Pikeman so it doesn't defend again. The the rest of the Knights get Combat 2 or 3 and they have pretty good odds against Longbowmen as long as there is no Castle, no seige required - if there is a Castle, just roll up some seige for a couple of turns. Only a couple of cities typically have a Castle, so once you've punched through those, you can usually sweep an AI.

Plus if you have lots of Knights they are very cheap to upgrade to Curaissers and then Cavalry. For that matter, HA are cheap to upgrade to Knights, so if you get a head start on building them you can have a lot immediately after Guilds.

Hey Kevin,

One of my favorite strategies is what I call the Cyrus Horseman strategy. Play as Cyrus on Marathon. Build the Great Wall. When you get your GG's put them in your best production city where you plan to build He and the majority of your units. By the time you get to Guilds and Theocracy you'll have some really tough knights. I like doing it on a Great Plains map where my girst city has 3 or 4 cows in the fat cross and research AF first.

It might be interesting to do in BTS (unrestricted leaders) with Cyrus of the Byzantines.

Hey Kevin,

One of my favorite strategies is what I call the Cyrus Horseman strategy. Play as Cyrus on Marathon. Build the Great Wall. When you get your GG's put them in your best production city where you plan to build He and the majority of your units. By the time you get to Guilds and Theocracy you'll have some really tough knights. I like doing it on a Great Plains map where my girst city has 3 or 4 cows in the fat cross and research AF first.

It might be interesting to do in BTS (unrestricted leaders) with Cyrus of the Byzantines.

Good point! Glad that someone else is thinking of all the different used for these units. I am partial to cats when trying to win a game with knights, because tey can steamroll over gunpowder units that are early (such as musketmen), especially with pinch!

Knights are growing on me. Last couple of games I've got the Horse Whispering quest, if you finish your last stable just after getting Guilds you get free Knights.

Usually there is just one or two pikemen in a city, if you give the first Knight the Fist, it will damage the Pikeman so it doesn't defend again. The the rest of the Knights get Combat 2 or 3 and they have pretty good odds against Longbowmen as long as there is no Castle, no seige required - if there is a Castle, just roll up some seige for a couple of turns. Only a couple of cities typically have a Castle, so once you've punched through those, you can usually sweep an AI.

Plus if you have lots of Knights they are very cheap to upgrade to Curaissers and then Cavalry. For that matter, HA are cheap to upgrade to Knights, so if you get a head start on building them you can have a lot immediately after Guilds.

GOOD! Let them grow more:goodjob:
I think that one of the reasons why knights are undervalued is cuz they require a very specialized mode of play to win effectively with; a mode of play that means you win by the end of the medieval era, or you don't win at all.

I find knights to be more useful outside city combat. They're hard to counter on open plains and can beat their counter, the pikeman, with proper upgrades. The problem is that civ4 warfare is all about citytaking and to tackle down cities at this stage of the game you need siege. Siege is slow and as such you might just want to bring along macemen who you can give the city raider promotions - which make them very good at taking cities. So yeah, knights just seem to fall out of the boat a bit in civ4.

Luckily there's the Cataphract unique unit which IS worth getting ;) with combat and or flanking upgrades that's one sick unit.

I find knights to be more useful outside city combat. They're hard to counter on open plains and can beat their counter, the pikeman, with proper upgrades. The problem is that civ4 warfare is all about citytaking and to tackle down cities at this stage of the game you need siege. Siege is slow and as such you might just want to bring along macemen who you can give the city raider promotions - which make them very good at taking cities. So yeah, knights just seem to fall out of the boat a bit in civ4.

Luckily there's the Cataphract unique unit which IS worth getting ;) with combat and or flanking upgrades that's one sick unit.

Yeah, I gotta admit that Cataphracts pull a large amount of the responsibility when it comes to backing the credentials of knights.

Wasn't there just another thread on knights? Anyways i strongly disagree that civ is mostly about taking cities. CR is soo overrated. Only the AI is stupid enough to sit in it's cities in the face of an attack..

Strength 12 units that can easily get 3 promotions out of the gate, no one can pass up on that one :) and Oyzar, most people seem to play civ4 in single player mode. In MP I'd surely build more knights as they're great at destroying stacks out in the field.

Knights are very good when ultra promoted. Stables helps a lot with this. Their base strength upgrade over macemen makes them competent city attackers, only real issue is their pikemen counter. I like to promote a couple knights to full flanking and send them against the first couple pikes, then send the rest in to maul the longbows. Works pretty well and your army is a lot more mobile than maces and better in the open field with flanking and combat promos vs cr.

Strength 12 units that can easily get 3 promotions out of the gate, no one can pass up on that one :) and Oyzar, most people seem to play civ4 in single player mode. In MP I'd surely build more knights as they're great at destroying stacks out in the field.

I have to agree with you. I've never played on multiplayer; I think that it's a whole new world of play, if not a whole new game completely!

But in single player, I end up relying on uber-strong cataphracts to both reach cities, and then capture them. I know that civ is mostly a rock-paper-scissors scenario kind of game, but I do believe that one of the best ways to get and advantage (if not outright win) is to eliminate your dependance of making units and counter-units and counter-counter-units, while finding that one UU that will do the job of two or more. I believe that cataphracts fill that role nicely.

C'mon, somebody's gotta give knights some love! :)

My pikemen always do!

Wasn't there just another thread on knights?

Yeah, this would've been better there, I think.

Since it's still in the first page and all...

Knights are very good when ultra promoted. Stables helps a lot with this. Their base strength upgrade over macemen makes them competent city attackers, only real issue is their pikemen counter. I like to promote a couple knights to full flanking and send them against the first couple pikes, then send the rest in to maul the longbows. Works pretty well and your army is a lot more mobile than maces and better in the open field with flanking and combat promos vs cr.

Very true. Again, knights (especailly cataphracts) excell at eliminating that rock-paper-scissors reliance. Just make sure you have all of those fancy recources to build them!:lol:

Yeah, this would've been better there, I think.

Since it's still in the first page and all...

Yeah, I just caught that other thread about it right after I made this one. I had no intention on hijacking, so I edited it a bit to try and make it a bit differentMore people should share personal experiences with them, or something. Sorry about the confusion :(

i too am a huge fan of knights so you're not alone, even though i usually beeline liberalism and so am not on that side of the tech tree, i try to get them up. The reason i love them is that knights and cavs are in my opinion, the most verstaile units of the game. They are great at active defense, running round your territory using roads to sneak attack pillagers or even flanking attack main stacks. I also like to give one knight the sentry promotion and use him as an intel gatherer in war, he can jump into enemy territory the first move, taking a peak at all the surrounding tiles, then retreat into safety the next. This is not to mention flank attacks, with flanking two one knight can potentially damage the best defender as well as all siege units in a stack. Finally, the most important thing about knights is that they have the highest base strength of any units in that era, even besting musketmen. This means that each promotion has a greater impact. For instance even against pikemen, a combat 3 knight has 1.3*10=13 strength whereas a combat 3 pike has 2.3*6=13.8 strength, meaning the higher promoted the units, the greater chance the knight has of winning due to his higher base strength! Knights ftw:goodjob:

i too am a huge fan of knights so you're not alone, even though i usually beeline liberalism and so am not on that side of the tech tree, i try to get them up. The reason i love them is that knights and cavs are in my opinion, the most verstaile units of the game. They are great at active defense, running round your territory using roads to sneak attack pillagers or even flanking attack main stacks. I also like to give one knight the sentry promotion and use him as an intel gatherer in war, he can jump into enemy territory the first move, taking a peak at all the surrounding tiles, then retreat into safety the next. This is not to mention flank attacks, with flanking two one knight can potentially damage the best defender as well as all siege units in a stack. Finally, the most important thing about knights is that they have the highest base strength of any units in that era, even besting musketmen. This means that each promotion has a greater impact. For instance even against pikemen, a combat 3 knight has 1.3*10=13 strength whereas a combat 3 pike has 2.3*6=13.8 strength, meaning the higher promoted the units, the greater chance the knight has of winning due to his higher base strength! Knights ftw:goodjob:

Nice. It's good to hear that the Crusader is not out there alone! Don't forget about cataphracts: a well-promoted cat can destroy a non-promoted (or minimally promoted, with some luck) riflemen. There's just something about archaic military forces beating down the modern, standardized armies that's very appealing to me. A group of life-trained, aristocratic knights lowering lances and charging-down those standardized riflemen just feel like a last huzzah for the good ol’ Middle Ages!:king:


(despite the life expectancy of late forties, poor healthcare, and lack of nationalism and subsequent coordinated armies….:mischief:)

That's one of my favourite things about civ combat, how a rifleman will wait until the swordsman runs up to him and stands there, poised to strike for one second, before finally deciding to shoot him in the face. Its also fun when a macemen smacks a longbow in the face, the longbowman, shrugs the pathetic blow off and proceeds to kill him with an uppercut from his twig:lol:

Haha, nice. I like it when the kinghts (surprise, right?) charge up and then, without the horses moving a single inch, the poke their lances forward and kill the longbowmen who somehow never fired a shot, but prefered to throw thier longbows at them!

That's one of my favourite things about civ combat, how a rifleman will wait until the swordsman runs up to him and stands there, poised to strike for one second, before finally deciding to shoot him in the face. Its also fun when a macemen smacks a longbow in the face, the longbowman, shrugs the pathetic blow off and proceeds to kill him with an uppercut from his twig:lol:

You have GOT to go here and watch this at about 3:25 into the vid if you like knights!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbYRs6b4DQI&feature=related

The only (but major) knock on knights is their location on the tech path. They are down a slower research line that the AI prioritizes. Essentially on high levels if you tech for guilds first, you can't trade anything away (and you're likely to get beat there be at parity), while if you go for education/liberalism, you CAN trade (even for guilds...) and will have better research. Not only that, cuirassers barely come later and are markedly superior to knights.

I'd go guilds on a rapid expansion conquest, lower levels. You can beat the AI to the medieval techs and without its production/tech bonuses smoke it at war. You'll probably need the gold multipliers to help pay the bills then anyway, so why not?

I like defensive stacks of war elephants when I can get them. Give them shock and flanking to survive the one "coverage" pikeman in the enemy stack (or sacrifice a few rookies if they stack more than one pike), and then murderlate the crossbows they stacked as an answer to pikemen, and the remaining knights. Best yet, Khmer ballista elephants.

Yeah the single biggest problem with using knights offensively (and given how the AI plays that why people like units 99 times out of 100) is that the elephant is better. The phant comes earlier, requires only a single resource, and doesn't require spy support. When you compare knight/pike/lb vs HA/spear/archer vs cav/rifle it doesn't do all that poorly; it is just that the phant too much overlaps it in useful era and unless you have a major espionage pile the two moves are rather useless on the offense as you need the slow boat siege for any assault.

I like knights. I've had a few games where they've proven invaluable. For a start, when amassing the stack, they storm through one's own borders, saving precious turns. I tend to give them combat I and II and then give one Combat I and Medic I (Heal after a move :D). They seem to have better survival rates. I had one game where a bunch of knights took a city and not one got other 50% odds yet they all won, and even when they don't they tend to withdraw. They also flank cats (I think) which is handy.

My tactic when knights come in is to build tons of them and add them to the existing stack of macemen from previous wars. I then take the cities, using a mix of macemen and knights (with siege support) and leave the macemen behind on defensive duties. The maces get their melee bonus and I leave them unpromoted so they can be upgraded to rifles with city garrison while the knights carry on to the next city. :)
I also tend to keep a pikeman or spearman with combat I and medic I in the stack anyway so even if the knight medic dies I still have an unlikely defender there.

TheMeInTeam:

The problem you're seeing is based on your difficulty-level. On levels above Emperor (and in some cases on Emperor), the AI techs so quickly that prosecuting a war anytime beyond BronzeWorking Axe Rushes and before Curies tends to be very costly in terms of hammers and tech.

Below those difficulty levels, you can have a tech lead heading into Guilds, and research Guilds primarily for the hammer bonus under Caste to facilitate production - and still have time left over for winning Lib. In fact, you can let some other AI win Lib and still benefit from the beaker discount, while focusing on taking over nearby Civs.

Conversely, the AI's proclivity for teching Guilds allows you to arrange a possible trade for it to acquire Knights in a timely fashion. It won't be a beeline, but it can net you a solid advantage in a medieval-era war anyway, especially if your enemy doesn't have HBR, Horses, or Guilds himself.

Aside from the obvious benefit of Knights, Guilds also opens the line to Gunpowder, Banking, and from Gunpowder, Chemistry and Steel.

Here's something to try out - DON'T win the lib race. As in, play for a week intentionally trying out other paths to dominance. You don't have to if you don't like it, but the point of this isn't to tech Knights, but to tech anything for advantage other than getting to Lib. You'll find that the Guilds line isn't that bad, and that you can trade it off for techs in the higher branches if you tech it first.

I know it's buried 1000's of posts ago for me, but I did just that ----> teched clean through the bottom path, spamming workshops and winning a tech-backward domination on emperor, probably somewhere like early June or so.

I lost lib and didn't even try for it in G major 40 that I submitted (weak but hell, i'll take an immortal/large win ATM).

My point is that I have a lot of experience trying odd tech paths, but it just doesn't seem to give the same returns as other paths unless you're expanding very quickly/successfully via war. I went the bottom path in madscientist's Sully RPC a bit more recently. You could say I didn't go for liberalism in that one - the game ended and nobody had it yet.........I leaned very heavily on market/grocer/bank in that one so that I could afford more war.

Just like you, I hold a special place in my heart for Knights. As most have already stated, Civ 4 tends to be more about city taking, so the majority of my army is cats, maces, and pikes (I play vanilla, so no trebs :( ). However, I still use knight, most of the time, if I'm fighting a major war (the most recent ocurance came when on my Roman Campaign when attacking Darius) The Knights proved very successful mowing down the dumpy little towns on the steppe as their mobility and hight strength allowed them to quickly move in and take down the low pop/low cultural defense cities up there, while my Praets did the hard fighting down in the fertile crescent. So while they weren't pivotal in my war, they did save me the trouble of having to defer an entire slow moving army to take a few dumpy cities, instead using a few highly trained knights to go run amuck up north :goodjob:.

TheMeInTeam:

Well, if it wins you the game, then you could say that it gave you enough, didn't it? ;)

Playing the lib race in many cases allows you to keep up with faster teching AI, but if you don't really need to keep up in tech, it's not all that necessary. You don't have to tech clean through the bottom path to make it work. Sometimes, you can tech through Engineering and Education, and have a nice GP coming up. At that point, the lib race is in the bag, with Guild coming up. I suppose you could do some extreme tech leap at that point to go for Cuirassers, but you could also tech Guilds - Gunpowder (you'll need Gunpowder anyway) to increase hammer output, gold output, go for Chem and take Steel with Lib - it works.

knights are on a desirable part of the tech tree if you are running a pure SE, which can involve gunning for banking for mercantilism. also, if you have the pyramids for representation, your tech pace should be very good, allowing you to tech some of the pricier medieval techs faster than you might otherwise.

knights are on a desirable part of the tech tree if you are running a pure SE, which can involve gunning for banking for mercantilism. also, if you have the pyramids for representation, your tech pace should be very good, allowing you to tech some of the pricier medieval techs faster than you might otherwise.

It really doesn't matter how good your economy is, running to knights will nerf your tech verses the AI in most cases. Tech trading is an insanely effective :science: multiplier; let's just say you can trade each tech three times (with no tech brokering to boot). The first trade is for ~2/3rds of the :science: the tech cost you, the second for ~1/2, and the third for ~1/3. All told then you effectively multiply your :science: output by 150%. This ignores getting faster access to buildings, improvements, and civics which can actually be greater.

If you are beelining to guilds you cannot trade much of anything away; pretty much everything pushes the AI closer to engineering which you simply cannot afford. Beyond that you have the problem that if you intend to bulb there (the fastest way and the only way to have a shot at archers/spears vs knights) you have to get GE which limits the ability to leverage specs.

Now I'm willing to try the Oracle, GE bulb, GE bulb slingshot and run wild with Catas, and I've even been known to leverage Lincoln into a knight monster (shock/flankers get a good return rate vs non-formation pike); but it is just too unreliable (not to mention that in the latter shot I'm using my acquisition of vassals as massive fodder/distraction so I can get more vassals and utterly dominate the quantity over quality debate).

With either of those, though, you are still going to get pretty heavily abused if the AI has war elephants.

It's true that you won't have as many tech trade options, but when I go this route I am not as concerned about tech trading, instead preferring to fight at tech parity during the medieval age. This may be less desirable at the highest skill levels.

Knights are high in my top favorite units too! Especially for raiding.
I've had had great fun with my so called samurai knights when I played the earth18civs scenario as japan and raided europe :-))

...but I do believe that one of the best ways to get and advantage (if not outright win) is to eliminate your dependance of making units and counter-units and counter-counter-units, while finding that one UU that will do the job of two or more.
Agreed. The only time I tend to build counter units is when a rambling bunch of hephalumps are coming my way, or I intend to attack a heavy elephant enemy. Otherwise, I (usually) stock up heavy on horse archers and macemen with a good compliment of seige units.
As soon as the time Knights are available, I spend all my rainy-day money and upgrade the horse archers and with all the combat they have already seen, 20 odd of nicely promoted shiny beasts are ready to plunder any enemy and hold off almost indefinately a large scale multi-opponant war (including the macemen of course ;).
I generally aim at 2 unit types in any stack excepting seige: Physical attackers (axemen, macemen) and fast heavy mounted units. This also helps me avoid confusion as to where I need to send what, where and when. There's always exceptions but I have found it an amazingly effective strategy (learned on here somewhere way back).
Also, having small packs of fast knights rampaging the enemy resources and terrifying the enemy units to keep them from re-inforcing your target city(ies) helps to smooth the expansion. Several differing promotions can turn a knight stack into a fair hellstorm leaving either rubble or precious holdings (your choice - season to taste :p)

Agreed. The only time I tend to build counter units is when a rambling bunch of hephalumps are coming my way, or I intend to attack a heavy elephant enemy. Otherwise, I (usually) stock up heavy on horse archers and macemen with a good compliment of seige units.
As soon as the time Knights are available, I spend all my rainy-day money and upgrade the horse archers and with all the combat they have already seen, 20 odd of nicely promoted shiny beasts are ready to plunder any enemy and hold off almost indefinately a large scale multi-opponant war (including the macemen of course ;).
I generally aim at 2 unit types in any stack excepting seige: Physical attackers (axemen, macemen) and fast heavy mounted units. This also helps me avoid confusion as to where I need to send what, where and when. There's always exceptions but I have found it an amazingly effective strategy (learned on here somewhere way back).
Also, having small packs of fast knights rampaging the enemy resources and terrifying the enemy units to keep them from re-inforcing your target city(ies) helps to smooth the expansion. Several differing promotions can turn a knight stack into a fair hellstorm leaving either rubble or precious holdings (your choice - season to taste :p)


Outstanding examples! It's good to hear about how knights can be used defensively. As for the elimination of multiple unit and having one do many jobs, I believe that the Cataphract handles that nicely.


My previously tested (twice sucsessful, at least on monarch) theory is: well-promoted cataphracts can fight many a battle for you and have a good chance to carry the game in the medieval era. Even if you fall behind on the tech tree, cataphracts are strong enough to run-down musketmen, and combat IV cats (or even better, cats with pinch) can hold up against riflemen for a little while. However, at that point if the enemy gets that far, then there should be only one CIV left to face you...and you should swoop in while you can. An arcaiac medieval army of valiant, promoted knights cannot stand against TOO MANY industial era gunpowder units for long.....

:goodjob:Knights are high in my top favorite units too! Especially for raiding.
I've had had great fun with my so called samurai knights when I played the earth18civs scenario as japan and raided europe :-))

HAHA, I've GOT to try that (albeit historically innacurate for Japan to focus on horseback riders) :goodjob:

I've had cities garrisoned by 2 CR2 infantries get pizzorned out by a stack of 10 knights which I foolishly underestimated. Sure they lose about 6 but the final 4 keep comin' atcha.

I have a standing challenge to Sid Meier though, which he so far has refused to accept: I will stand in a field armed with an AK-47 and plenty of ammo, and he and 99 of his most skilled horse-riding buddies may suit up as knights and charge at me in an open field. No money or anything at stake, just honor and bragging rights, and of course, our life. :)

I've had cities garrisoned by 2 CR2 infantries get pizzorned out by a stack of 10 knights which I foolishly underestimated. Sure they lose about 6 but the final 4 keep comin' atcha.

I have a standing challenge to Sid Meier though, which he so far has refused to accept: I will stand in a field armed with an AK-47 and plenty of ammo, and he and 99 of his most skilled horse-riding buddies may suit up as knights and charge at me in an open field. No money or anything at stake, just honor and bragging rights, and of course, our life. :)

Haha, smooth. Even if they were wearing kevlar, you could just shoot the horses out from underneath. Simple. Knights were ony really efective aginst early gunpowder units with short-ranges and long reload times.

I've had cities garrisoned by 2 CR2 infantries get pizzorned out by a stack of 10 knights which I foolishly underestimated. Sure they lose about 6 but the final 4 keep comin' atcha.

I have a standing challenge to Sid Meier though, which he so far has refused to accept: I will stand in a field armed with an AK-47 and plenty of ammo, and he and 99 of his most skilled horse-riding buddies may suit up as knights and charge at me in an open field. No money or anything at stake, just honor and bragging rights, and of course, our life. :)

And you'd die. The AK-47 can take a 75 round drum mag at best (and that sucker sucks to change). In order to hit each horseman once, you have to hit 2 out 3 times (which at those fire rates is virtually impossible) and throw a slow drum change; all in the time it takes a galloping horse to cover ~750 m (assuming you not only are phenomenally accurate but also have excellent range conditions). Oh and you need to hope your quickly heating barrel neither jams nor causes trouble with the gas action. Given the ability of human wave tactics, from the Zulus to the Chinese, to overcome fully automatic (belt fed), crew served guns; you are toast.

Even against well trained forces, human waves can be effective; against troops not well drilled or specially trained (i.e. the Iran-Iraq war; Ethiopia -Eritrea) 100:1 numbers overwhelming favours the masses.

And you'd die. The AK-47 can take a 75 round drum mag at best (and that sucker sucks to change). In order to hit each horseman once, you have to hit 2 out 3 times (which at those fire rates is virtually impossible) and throw a slow drum change; all in the time it takes a galloping horse to cover ~750 m (assuming you not only are phenomenally accurate but also have excellent range conditions). Oh and you need to hope your quickly heating barrel neither jams nor causes trouble with the gas action. Given the ability of human wave tactics, from the Zulus to the Chinese, to overcome fully automatic (belt fed), crew served guns; you are toast.

Even against well trained forces, human waves can be effective; against troops not well drilled or specially trained (i.e. the Iran-Iraq war; Ethiopia -Eritrea) 100:1 numbers overwhelming favours the masses.



So that settles it then. All modern-day armies need to do is recruit massive ammounts of volunteers to be knighted and used as massed heavy cavalry in order to be effective in today's warfare. Not to mention re-master the art of breeding military warhorses, their care, and transportation. Not to mention re-discover new options for cavalry in different errain types (which in several, they are completely useless). It's all so simple!Knights can STILL win!:goodjob:

Where do I sign?

....and no, I'm not joking. :king:

And you'd die. The AK-47 can take a 75 round drum mag at best (and that sucker sucks to change). In order to hit each horseman once, you have to hit 2 out 3 times (which at those fire rates is virtually impossible) and throw a slow drum change; all in the time it takes a galloping horse to cover ~750 m (assuming you not only are phenomenally accurate but also have excellent range conditions). Oh and you need to hope your quickly heating barrel neither jams nor causes trouble with the gas action. Given the ability of human wave tactics, from the Zulus to the Chinese, to overcome fully automatic (belt fed), crew served guns; you are toast.

Even against well trained forces, human waves can be effective; against troops not well drilled or specially trained (i.e. the Iran-Iraq war; Ethiopia -Eritrea) 100:1 numbers overwhelming favours the masses.


750 m? Let's say 400, just because we are talking about horses.
And it's still generous.

Still, the point stands. Any lone AR in an open field vs 99 horses is going to die. You may kill 20, 30 if you are lucky. Maybe with an MG, if you manage to fire 99 rounds (assuming you have a 100% hit ratio) without jamming it.


I agree anyway. Totally unrealistic battles happen way too often on Civ IV. It was just a bad example to prove it.

750 m? Let's say 400, just because we are talking about horses.
And it's still generous.

Still, the point stands. Any lone AR in an open field vs 99 horses is going to die. You may kill 20, 30 if you are lucky. Maybe with an MG, if you manage to fire 99 rounds (assuming you have a 100% hit ratio) without jamming it.


I agree anyway. Totally unrealistic battles happen way too often on Civ IV. It was just a bad example to prove it.

I have a love-hate relationship with CIV IV battles....while I hate it when unrealistic battles happen and I loose, I still feel like that it's part of the entertainment.

And you'd die. The AK-47 can take a 75 round drum mag at best (and that sucker sucks to change). In order to hit each horseman once, you have to hit 2 out 3 times (which at those fire rates is virtually impossible) and throw a slow drum change; all in the time it takes a galloping horse to cover ~750 m (assuming you not only are phenomenally accurate but also have excellent range conditions). Oh and you need to hope your quickly heating barrel neither jams nor causes trouble with the gas action. Given the ability of human wave tactics, from the Zulus to the Chinese, to overcome fully automatic (belt fed), crew served guns; you are toast.

Even against well trained forces, human waves can be effective; against troops not well drilled or specially trained (i.e. the Iran-Iraq war; Ethiopia -Eritrea) 100:1 numbers overwhelming favours the masses.

You missed the "plenty of ammo" part, and the history of Rourke's Drift.

And at Agincourt the English did it with longbows.

Part of the logistics of all this is that the bodies of their own dead slow down the advance of the "mass". With that slow-down, the mow-down becomes yet even more effective.

In other campaigns where the Zulus were effective in mass against the English, they put the mass to good tactical use cutting off artillery, for example, and using terrain to reduce the deadliness of rifle volleys.

In Korea where the Chinese succeeded with human waves, the U.S. Marines simply ran out of ammunition.

Back to our field charge challenge: I have 100 mounted opponents, and no need of 75 round drums. 6 pairs of 30-round magazines duct-taped together for flip-reloads, with the spares in cargo pockets or in an LBE belt, would allow me to spray 360 rounds at said 100 large and relatively slow-moving targets. As the first row of knights tumble, the next row slows down to jump over or avoid collision with their fallen comrades. This perturbation in the flow of their mounted charge isn't effectively coordinated at the middle and rear of their ranks, so they have further collision as the faster-moving knights to the rear collide with their companions to the front. In the mean time more streams of rounds are mowing down yet more knights, adding more obstacles to their mobility. By the time about half of these knights are dead, if the remaining are suicidal enough to continue the charge, they will be picking their way over obstacles barely surmountable by a horse, or taking detour routes around the carnage, thus breaking up the mass of their charge to a trickle-flow. I can then switch from full-automatic to semi-automatic and take more careful aim at the onesy-twosy knights foolish enough to continue to approach me.

Would you like to take up this challenge, on Sid's behalf? You choose the field, and the 99 others with a death wish, if you like.

This would assume a direct charge. If it was an encircling approach it would take the horses roughly 20-25 seconds depending on terrain to close 400-600 meters. That given you will have to fire in all directions and kill 4 riders per second. You would have to be very good to pull that off.

I have not shot an AK but with the M-16 using semi-auto would be pretty hard to accurately hit 4 targets at range per second. I would be pretty comfortable taking 20-25 targets down as that is only one per second. Though there is a decent chance of hitting a jam in 90 rounds from my experience with a M-16 or M-4.

Rate of fire of an AK-47 is 10 rounds per second. I suggest you redo your calculus unless you want to learn the hard way why Poland's cavalry charges didn't do much against Hitler's machine guns.

The problem is ROF. The problem is hitting 4 targets per second that are moving and are not in a line. Plus this isn't calculus. This is arithmetic.

Speaking of history you might want to check your history books. They seem to be a bit biased. The Poles were able to hold of the Germans and Russians for a month and killed 60k Germans and 11.5k Russians. This was not on horses though because they used the horses mostly for communication and this was not against machine guns but tanks as well. Frankly this was better than the French did (I know, I know).

I would challenge you to hit 100 targets @ 4 targets per second in a spiral starting with the out most target in one try. This would be far easier than hitting moving targets.

The problem is ROF. The problem is hitting 4 targets per second that are moving and are not in a line. Plus this isn't calculus. This is arithmetic.

Speaking of history you might want to check your history books. They seem to be a bit biased. The Poles were able to hold of the Germans and Russians for a month and killed 60k Germans and 11.5k Russians. This was not on horses though because they used the horses mostly for communication and this was not against machine guns but tanks as well. Frankly this was better than the French did (I know, I know).

I would challenge you to hit 100 targets @ 4 targets per second in a spiral starting with the out most target in one try. This would be far easier than hitting moving targets.


Ummm not that this isn't an interesting topic or tangent, but I think that it's getting a little off-topic...:crazyeye:

Theoretical rate of fire is 600 rpm for pretty much every modern AR.

Real rate of fire, without jamming the thing and with the goal to keep hitting anything beyond the 2nd round is a completely different issue.

I don't want to sound like an ass, but I happen to have real experience with rifles. I've never shot with an AK, but I did shot many times with a beretta AR 70-90 (Italian stock AR), a few times with a Minimi LMG and a single time with a M4 and a G3. No, I'm not a weapon maniac. I'm in the italian army.

600 rpm is nice and all, but it's pure theory. First, you are not firing in auto mode. Ever. You want single shot or maybe 3-shots burst in an urban contest. In your hypothetical scenario you want single shots. You may use full auto mode, but still controlling it in single shots. Unless your goal is to make a lot of noise, that is.

About distance, I consider myself slightly above average. I can fire an indefinite number of rounds in a nice 15 cm circle at 100 m. At 200 m, those rounds can reliably go in the upper torso of an hypotetical human target. Over 200 m, said human target starts looking awfully small. Here I'm talking about a 5.56 rifle, single mode, firing from a prone position.
You are talking about a 7.62 rifle (more recoil, wich is pretty much irrelevant, but a bigger deviation is going to be a big problem), full auto, from a standing position.
Ok, horses are big targets. Let's say you start hitting consistently from 400 m. Your 99 horses are covering those 400 m in less than 40 seconds (assuming an average speed of 40 kmph). You need to kill 2.5 horses per second, assuming you don't jam your ak (not likely) and your arms are still steady after the first 20-30 7.62 rounds from a standing position (not likely). Not even considering reload time here.


Now, to sound even more like an ass, I work with horses on a daily basis (I'm not making up stuff, you may check the RL thread for confirmation). Oppositely to popular belief, horses are very predictable creatures, but they tend to go completely black-out at the slightest hint of pain. I've seen horses completely destroy their ankles after something as simple as a microfracture, for a very simple reason. They don't stop at the first signal of pain, they simply go faster and faster, until the damage is too heavy to keep galloping.

So you'd better use well those 40 seconds and hope to hit them in the head or to break a leg. I don't think a horse in full charge is going to stop for a round in the shoulder. But, luckily, this is theory.


About the game, again, I agree. Absolutely no way for a cavalry regiment to destroy an infantry regiment with auto or semi-auto rifles.
But your example is out of question. You are going to die.

Theoretical rate of fire is 600 rpm for pretty much every modern AR.

Real rate of fire, without jamming the thing and with the goal to keep hitting anything beyond the 2nd round is a completely different issue.

I don't want to sound like an ass, but I happen to have real experience with rifles. I've never shot with an AK, but I did shot many times with a beretta AR 70-90 (Italian stock AR), a few times with a Minimi LMG and a single time with a M4 and a G3. No, I'm not a weapon maniac. I'm in the italian army.

600 rpm is nice and all, but it's pure theory. First, you are not firing in auto mode. Ever. You want single shot or maybe 3-shots burst in an urban contest. In your hypothetical scenario you want single shots. You may use full auto mode, but still controlling it in single shots. Unless your goal is to make a lot of noise, that is.

About distance, I consider myself slightly above average. I can fire an indefinite number of rounds in a nice 15 cm circle at 100 m. At 200 m, those rounds can reliably go in the upper torso of an hypotetical human target. Over 200 m, said human target starts looking awfully small. Here I'm talking about a 5.56 rifle, single mode, firing from a prone position.
You are talking about a 7.62 rifle (more recoil, wich is pretty much irrelevant, but a bigger deviation is going to be a big problem), full auto, from a standing position.
Ok, horses are big targets. Let's say you start hitting consistently from 400 m. Your 99 horses are covering those 400 m in less than 40 seconds (assuming an average speed of 40 kmph). You need to kill 2.5 horses per second, assuming you don't jam your ak (not likely) and your arms are still steady after the first 20-30 7.62 rounds from a standing position (not likely). Not even considering reload time here.


Now, to sound even more like an ass, I work with horses on a daily basis (I'm not making up stuff, you may check the RL thread for confirmation). Oppositely to popular belief, horses are very predictable creatures, but they tend to go completely black-out at the slightest hint of pain. I've seen horses completely destroy their ankles after something as simple as a microfracture, for a very simple reason. They don't stop at the first signal of pain, they simply go faster and faster, until the damage is too heavy to keep galloping.

So you'd better use well those 40 seconds and hope to hit them in the head or to break a leg. I don't think a horse in full charge is going to stop for a round in the shoulder. But, luckily, this is theory.


About the game, again, I agree. Absolutely no way for a cavalry regiment to destroy an infantry regiment with auto or semi-auto rifles.
But your example is out of question. You are going to die.

Like I've said, where do I sign up for this new knight regiment? haha:mischief:

I would challenge you to hit 100 targets @ 4 targets per second in a spiral starting with the out most target in one try. This would be far easier than hitting moving targets.

Worst case is I'd need to pack more ammo for the sprays.

But your example is out of question. You are going to die.

Bring it. :)

You missed the "plenty of ammo" part, and the history of Rourke's Drift.

And at Agincourt the English did it with longbows.

Part of the logistics of all this is that the bodies of their own dead slow down the advance of the "mass". With that slow-down, the mow-down becomes yet even more effective.

In other campaigns where the Zulus were effective in mass against the English, they put the mass to good tactical use cutting off artillery, for example, and using terrain to reduce the deadliness of rifle volleys.

In Korea where the Chinese succeeded with human waves, the U.S. Marines simply ran out of ammunition.

Back to our field charge challenge: I have 100 mounted opponents, and no need of 75 round drums. 6 pairs of 30-round magazines duct-taped together for flip-reloads, with the spares in cargo pockets or in an LBE belt, would allow me to spray 360 rounds at said 100 large and relatively slow-moving targets. As the first row of knights tumble, the next row slows down to jump over or avoid collision with their fallen comrades. This perturbation in the flow of their mounted charge isn't effectively coordinated at the middle and rear of their ranks, so they have further collision as the faster-moving knights to the rear collide with their companions to the front. In the mean time more streams of rounds are mowing down yet more knights, adding more obstacles to their mobility. By the time about half of these knights are dead, if the remaining are suicidal enough to continue the charge, they will be picking their way over obstacles barely surmountable by a horse, or taking detour routes around the carnage, thus breaking up the mass of their charge to a trickle-flow. I can then switch from full-automatic to semi-automatic and take more careful aim at the onesy-twosy knights foolish enough to continue to approach me.

Would you like to take up this challenge, on Sid's behalf? You choose the field, and the 99 others with a death wish, if you like.

Bwhahahahahaha, you so do not want to try this.

Firstly I did not miss the "plenty of ammo" comment. You have two basic things you have to do here, put lots of rounds downrange fast and be highly accurate doing so. You could have 10k rounds preloaded into mags and you'd still die.

Firstly with regards Agincourt and Rourke's drift. They are irrelevant you specified an "open field" not densely wooded terrain preventing flanking with spears fixed in front of you to break up a frontal charge. In the open field either of those two examples go down, and down quickly. Further in both cases the kill ratio was far lower than then 100:1 ratio you require (Rourke's drift managed "only" 21:1; further with a far higher rate of fire than you'd have and a more target rich environment they killed "only" ~35 Zulus / hour; Agincourt is worse on all counts for you).

Next up, you have at most a minute of firing. You want to do *12* mag changes in this time. Let's be generous I'll say you spend 2 seconds with a flip change and 4 on the others (actually I'd bet on multiplicative longer with an old school stamped piece like an AK-47 but hey I feel generous). Going through all 12 mags is frankly not possible.

But even ignoring that you still run into one simple problem. Firing at 10 rounds/s is going to overheat and cause mechanical failure. The AK-47 is an old stamped metal piece meaning its heat dissipation is crap. It fires a 7.62 round which creates heat like nothing else. The thermal expansion of its components is rather shoddy (compared to say that of the AK-74). Firing a 10 rounds/second will first cause the barrel to expand, this will throw off the rifling a variable amount (meaning you drop to barn accuracy) and will start to distort the mechanical performance of the gas action (invariably leading to jams, misfires, or other nasty crap). Given that you seem to think having a flipped magazine is good idea I should note that the barrel temperature will climb rapidly and stand a good chance of cooking off your second mag (and for more fun the bullets are pointed right at your head when that happens) :rolleyes:

Beyond all this while you are firing a 7.62 which you are going to overpenetrate and likely only cause the horses or men to bleed to death. Even if you sever a major artery you are still looking at timeframes of minutes before they bleed out and stop attacking (Given the frontal armor on the horses, you are not going to be able to rely on hydrostatic shock). So given all the above concerns you also need to be considering that you need head shots (perhaps heart shots or going after the coratid artery).


The long and the short of it is that you are talking about a stamped metal piece (has bad accuracy to begin with), are firing from a terrible position, are thermal stressing the rifle to hell and have to do an huge number of mag changes ... all within 60 seconds and shooting with accuracy vastly exceeding that exceeding your average DMR grunt (and honestly are not that far from sniper territory). As much as you like to talk about mow down to disrupt the cavalry charge, there is still no way you can send the round density downrange that failed to stop cavalry charges in Crimea. While it was against rules, *hypothetically* one could buy a cheap AK-74 in Kabul (which is superior in pretty all respects to the earlier 47) and get some first hand experience with that to go with M16A4, M16A2, DMR (M14), and M4 :D Such experience would then lead an individual to conclude that taking down 100 targets in a minute with an AK-47 is circus trick shooting, and likely not possible even then.


In reality machine guns are limited to how long they can sustain full auto fire; at Imjin the Brits were overheating their HMGs so badly that they pulled riflemen off the line to urinate into buckets to cool them. Throughout Korea HMGs were taken out of service repeatedly because they were fired too long and overheated like hell. If it weren't for artillery, air strikes and the true bane of human wave attacks - napalm, the entire UN line would have collapsed. Machine guns have extremely limited utility against human waves (as Iraq found out the hard way); they can only rack up a few hundred kills before something breaks. At best you need to pause the firing, swap barrels (in a pinch piss on them and hope for the best), and perhaps do some quick cleaning if you want the highest possible effective rate of sustainable fire. This is why the US military believes in mortars, arty, mines, and airstrikes. As already noted the number one counter to human waves is napalm.

The real way the modern rifleman is going to respond to hordes of knights charging is not with a blazing automatic; but with grenades or preferably claymores and flamethrowers. However without air or arty support even these have their force multiplication limits. It is not unreasonable for WWI era infantry to be overrun by much more numerous cavalry. In game terms 5 or so cavalry should take down a non-drill infantry; perhaps 10 curis should be able to do the same, and in the neighborhood 25-50 knights depending on which type of infantry/knight we are talking about.

Firstly with regards Agincourt and Rourke's drift. They are irrelevant you specified an "open field" not densely wooded terrain preventing flanking with spears fixed in front of you to break up a frontal charge.


There was plenty of flanking at Rourke's Drift, but rate of fire still won the day.

At Agincourt rate of fire wasn't the only deciding factor (the key was indeed the hemmed-in terrain funneling the French into a kill zone), but it was a large enhancement.

For AK and open field, flanking slows down the approach, allowing the sprays to be more effective without requiring perfect accuracy.


Rourke's drift managed "only" 21:1;


With "only" bolt-action rifles. There's some math you still have yet to do here.


Next up, you have at most a minute of firing. You want to do *12* mag changes in this time. Let's be generous I'll say you spend 2 seconds with a flip change and 4 on the others (actually I'd bet on multiplicative longer with an old school stamped piece like an AK-47 but hey I feel generous). Going through all 12 mags is frankly not possible.


My turn to be generous and estimate a 56 second charge across the field to my position.

Rate of fire and reload assigned to Seconds:

1-3, 30 rounds
4-5, flip switch
6-8, 30 rounds
9-12 pair switch
13-15, 30 rounds
16-17, flip switch
18-20, 30 rounds
21-24, pair switch
25-27, 30 rounds
28-29, flip switch
30-32, 30 rounds
33-36, pair switch
37-39, 30 rounds
40-41, flip switch
42-44, 30 rounds
45-48, pair switch
49-51, 30 rounds
52-53, flip switch
54-56, 30 rounds
[claimed arrival of first knight's lance tip at my position]

So I'm staking my life that 1 round out of 3 will at least unhorse or otherwise slow down the charge of the knight. That's all I really need. It doesn't have to be a perfect shot between the eyes or through the heart or make the head explode. 7.62mm of hot lead tearing into a horse, making it rear in pain, throwing the knight off the saddle, is "good enough for now". I can finish them off with my other 60 rounds later.

So this is the essential gambit. In a spray can I prevent a charge from approaching me with deadly knight-joust force, at a rate of three rounds per each target the size of a Japanese car? Hmmmm.


But even ignoring that you still run into one simple problem. Firing at 10 rounds/s is going to overheat and cause mechanical failure. The AK-47 is an old stamped metal piece meaning its heat dissipation is crap. It fires a 7.62 round which creates heat like nothing else. The thermal expansion of its components is rather shoddy (compared to say that of the AK-74). Firing a 10 rounds/second will first cause the barrel to expand, this will throw off the rifling a variable amount (meaning you drop to barn accuracy) and will start to distort the mechanical performance of the gas action (invariably leading to jams, misfires, or other nasty crap). Given that you seem to think having a flipped magazine is good idea I should note that the barrel temperature will climb rapidly and stand a good chance of cooking off your second mag (and for more fun the bullets are pointed right at your head when that happens) :rolleyes:


You may have googled somewhere that the AK overheats when fired "for an extended period". So the question my life would be riding on is, did the Russian army consider 1 minute to be "an extented period" for combat? The life of your knights depends on hoping against hope that 1 minute is considered too long for a near-modern combat assault rifle to be operable. I think I would be more worried in their metal shoes, than my leather ones.


Beyond all this while you are firing a 7.62 which you are going to overpenetrate and likely only cause the horses or men to bleed to death. Even if you sever a major artery you are still looking at timeframes of minutes before they bleed out and stop attacking (Given the frontal armor on the horses, you are not going to be able to rely on hydrostatic shock). So given all the above concerns you also need to be considering that you need head shots (perhaps heart shots or going after the coratid artery).


I've read the other post by a soi-disant "expert" claiming that horses feel no pain and continue charging when shot. I, however, have read detailed descriptions of battle events in the Civil War and the plains wars against the First Nation tribes. At Custer's Last Stand they quickly got OFF of their horses when the firing began because they were familiar with the tendancy horses have to rear up and throw their rider when wounded. To Custer the horses were more reliable as cover than as vehicles of mobility.

Happy hunting, fair Knights!


As much as you like to talk about mow down to disrupt the cavalry charge, there is still no way you can send the round density downrange that failed to stop cavalry charges in Crimea.


Crimea cavalry charges (armed with carbine rifles) against the wild volleys of 19th century-era Russian guns (operated by drunk Russian peasants) and you compare that to knights charging an AK-47 operated by me. We need to do multi-player some time.


In reality machine guns are limited to how long they can sustain full auto fire; at Imjin the Brits were overheating their HMGs so badly that they pulled riflemen off the line to urinate into buckets to cool them.


Prior to one minute? I suggest you rethink.


In game terms 5 or so cavalry should take down a non-drill infantry

I have no problem with the game doing that with *cavalry*. My problem is with the same (or fewer) number of Knights doing it. You've got nice sharp poles, but viable modern weapons, they are not.

lots of bs

Nice way to turn an interesting (but pointless) discussion into trolling flame bait.

Obviously you play too much fps videogames. Your supposed rate of fire is utter bullcrap. You are NOT going to keep a 10 rps rate of fire. You are going to jam and overheat your mighty ak.
In for some miracle you manage to keep firing at that rate for more than 10 seconds, you are going to fire at the sky after the first 10 rounds. You obviously don't know what deviation is, you have no idea about heating issues and gas system of a rifle, you have no idea about the feeling of a full-auto rifle on your arms and eyes. But probably you think you can fire from the hips like in some Rambo movie.
This is coming from people with real experience with rifles, and you keep pulling off your skewed theoricraft.

Same thing about horses. I didn't say they feel NO pain. Quite the opposite. They are hyper-sensitive about physical pain, but react in a totally unpredictable behaviour. Again, first-hand experience, not pretty books (or wikipedia, more likely).

Now I'm off this thread. As said above, it was pointless but entertaining. Now it's flame bait. I still don't get what you are trying to prove anyway.

As I said, bring it. I'll risk my life on this if you'll risk yours. I'll walk the talk.

As for "flames", mine are directed against cartoon b.s. fantasy game mechanics Firaxis put into pseudo-combat, which we have to deal with as gamers, but would have been better had they actually considered a little more verisimilitude to actual battle. If I hurt your poor widdo feeeeeeewings criticizing game mechanics that you think are super-duper, well, so solly G.I.

Knights are good stack protectors and raiders. I typically use them to cut down improvements that I know I won't have a use for (Munich would be a great production city once I capture it...guess those Cottages have to go!), and to round up wandering Workers. Their movement is extremely useful, as they can pillage twice in one round. Stack 2 Knights together, and they can cut a Village with a Road into a plain tile in one turn!

As I said, bring it. I'll risk my life on this if you'll risk yours. I'll walk the talk.

As for "flames", mine are directed against cartoon b.s. fantasy game mechanics Firaxis put into pseudo-combat, which we have to deal with as gamers, but would have been better had they actually considered a little more verisimilitude to actual battle. If I hurt your poor widdo feeeeeeewings criticizing game mechanics that you think are super-duper, well, so solly G.I.

I said in my very first reply that some battle outcomes are completely unrealistic in this game. So I agree with you about game mechanics.

What I don't get is the "I know it all" attitude about a totally pointless fantasy scenario, based on no real facts whatsoever and total ignorance about the topic (not in a rude way, but it's pretty obvious that you know absolutely nothing about what we are talking about).

This, and the kinda arrogant manners you have with people kind enough to share their real experience about the topic. Talking about myself and mirthandir, who seems to have good knowledge about rifles in general.

The "bring it" childish answers aren't helping either. I don't think you have an AK ready to prove your point anyway. So yeah, bring it.
Less Wikipedia, I'd say.

There was plenty of flanking at Rourke's Drift, but rate of fire still won the day.

At Agincourt rate of fire wasn't the only deciding factor (the key was indeed the hemmed-in terrain funneling the French into a kill zone), but it was a large enhancement.

For AK and open field, flanking slows down the approach, allowing the sprays to be more effective without requiring perfect accuracy.

Rourke's drift was behind stone walls and had far more severe bottlenecks, you specified open field and your ass will get handed to you in an open field. You may take a few dozen with you (though I doubt it), you are still just as dead. When you have multiple lines of barricades, you can't begin to call this open terrain.

With "only" bolt-action rifles. There's some math you still have yet to do here.
Yeah. The fact that it was over 5,000 bolt action rifles with aimed fire (and superior accuracy to a stamped metal AK-47) and they still couldn't disrupt horse charges. At just two shots per rifle they are only outshooting your wet dream 10:1.





My turn to be generous and estimate a 56 second charge across the field to my position.

Rate of fire and reload assigned to Seconds:

1-3, 30 rounds
4-5, flip switch
6-8, 30 rounds
9-12 pair switch
13-15, 30 rounds
16-17, flip switch
18-20, 30 rounds
21-24, pair switch
25-27, 30 rounds
28-29, flip switch
30-32, 30 rounds
33-36, pair switch
37-39, 30 rounds
40-41, flip switch
42-44, 30 rounds
45-48, pair switch
49-51, 30 rounds
52-53, flip switch
54-56, 30 rounds
[claimed arrival of first knight's lance tip at my position]

So I'm staking my life that 1 round out of 3 will at least unhorse or otherwise slow down the charge of the knight. That's all I really need. It doesn't have to be a perfect shot between the eyes or through the heart or make the head explode. 7.62mm of hot lead tearing into a horse, making it rear in pain, throwing the knight off the saddle, is "good enough for now". I can finish them off with my other 60 rounds later.

So this is the essential gambit.

In a spray can I prevent a charge from approaching me with deadly knight-joust force, at a rate of three rounds per each target the size of a Japanese car? Hmmmm.

No.

You are dead, thanks for playing FPS boy. An elite sniper using bolt action, having taken hours to get into firing position and most often minutes to line up his shot, using a rifle that costs a small fortune gets between 2 out of 3 and 5 out of 6 kills per shot. You think you can manage do half that good with a stamped piece known for having traded accuracy. For reference a Designated Marksman normally weighs in around 1 kill per 4 bullets in a hot firefight (this is why the Mozambique drill and the like encourage people to shoot their targets at least twice then see if they are actually incapacitated); one shot disabling is just not reliable in battle). Note the DMR is light years more accurate than an AK-47 and is specially machined in Quantico to get the number it does as a semi-automatic. It is beyond the mechanical capabilities of the AK to get that type of accuracy with sustained fire.

You may have googled somewhere that the AK overheats when fired "for an extended period". So the question my life would be riding on is, did the Russian army consider 1 minute to be "an extented period" for combat?

Yes, it does.

Mikhail Kalashnikov designed his rifle to fire at the rate you quote for <10 seconds; even after 10 seconds of firing at its fast RoF it experiences substantial degradation in accuracy. Firing off a whole magazine in a "spray" is almost tantamount to suicide. First the muzzle flash is a "please aim here" beacon. Second, the Red Army in the late ;40s was a conscript army which was expected to balloon in size and was poorly mechanized, the logistics of just carrying that ammo is . .. .. .. .. . and half (and speaking as someone who has to lug their own bullets and has had do a hundred klicks at obscene altitude, conscripts are going to dump half the bullets you are talking about), thats ignoring the very real danger that they will just sell them outright any officer who issued that many rounds and clips would be shot. Third in the real world, only first rate dumbasses or REALLY desperate riflemen empty the entire clip, let alone gun through six like candy you eject before you are empty so the enemy can't bum rush you while changing (most often in combat your clips are NEVER handy as you are making hugging the dirt). Fourth, the AK-47 was designed for back when Russian bullets and powder really sucked; if you went 30 rounds without a bullet crapping out you'd have amazed your entire platoon.

Soviet military doctrine called for masses of conscripts using two clips to either take aimed shots in three shot bursts. Or to walk the bullets toward the target in ~7-20 second rounds. Firing full auto, makes it impossible to hit piss. Kalashnikov specifically designed his rifle for short bursts of fire and knowingly sacrificed accuracy for ruggedness.

The life of your knights depends on hoping against hope that 1 minute is considered too long for a near-modern combat assault rifle to be operable. I think I would be more worried in their metal shoes, than my leather ones.
No "inoperable" is not the same "mechanically unable to hit the broad side of the barn". The AK-47 is made from stamped steel. This means that it has differing stress fatigue across the grains of the stamped piece. When you begin to heat the rifle the amount of thermal expansion is variable across individual components and is worse between components. This means your sight, calibrated when the entire weapon was cool, is no longer accurate and is not correctable (as the exaction deviation is random, dynamic, and progressive).

The AK-47 is a reliable weapon, it is NOT an accurate weapon. Sustained firing massively increases this problem. When an AK-74 (with much better thermal properties) fires at its highest rate of fire through an entire clip, its accuracy goes into the toilet and the heat of the barrel is approaching the point where rounds can cook off if they are too close to the barrel.


Crimea cavalry charges (armed with carbine rifles) against the wild volleys of 19th century-era Russian guns (operated by drunk Russian peasants) and you compare that to knights charging an AK-47 operated by me. We need to do multi-player some time.
It doesn't matter what the man on the horse is armed with, your whole fantasy, even we ignore the basic impossibility of getting the type of accuracy you want with the weapon you choose, is that somehow your "spray" of bullets will slow down a loose formation of horses before you are overrun. Entire Russian divisions with veteran troops (who incidentally had missed their vodka rations) couldn't put out enough lead to stop a cavalry charge before it overran them. You hope to do better?

Prior to one minute? I suggest you rethink.
Listen, the is an example to show the point. Modern weapons have limits as to how long and under what conditions they can operate. The Ak-47 is a piece of stamped cheap steel that is air cooled; the guns at Imjin were high quality steel (cast I think) that were water cooled. Water cooling is orders of magnitude more effective and yet you still had them literally pulling guys off the line to piss so they could try to keep the suckers from overheating. Human wave tactics can work. The ability of basic infantry (particularly WWI era) to stop them is limited. Rifles WILL jam, machine guns WILL over heat, and men will get sloppy.

I have no problem with the game doing that with *cavalry*. My problem is with the same (or fewer) number of Knights doing it. You've got nice sharp poles, but viable modern weapons, they are not.

Why not? Lancers managed to overwhelm Italian positions at Adowa (with exceedingly high losses). Now, yes game mechanics are broke in that knights are immune to first strikes and too few of them can take down drill infantry. But you should be able to through enough poorly armed units are superior troops to eventually wear them down and killed them. The whole masses of dated forces wearing down infantry positions is FAR more realistic than the popular, through enough suicide cannon at anything and and you can win tactic that many players love.

Knights in general come on a bad tech path, and the counter unit, Pikemen, is a quick side-trip away to the really useful tech of Engineering - something the AI tends to prioritize. That said, Knights are hardly worthless.

Cataphracts, with Flanking II, are excellent killers of almost anything, good quick-response troops, and very mobile. Knights are much weaker at all of these, but still OK. But to everyone who says they are good stack defenders, remember that only applies to open terrain. Most of the time, there will be at least a hill available to sit on. When a forest is available, Macemen or Pikmen become much better stack defenders.

Where Knights shine is in their ability to raid for an opponent's strategic resources, and to destroy the siege units in an invading enemy stack. An army without siege is a pretty worthless invasion force, ready to picked off at your leisure. Being able to destory siege without first killing off all those macemen, archers, pikemen, etc, is the real virtue of knights.


As to the AK-er vs 100 Knights joke:
The maximum effective range of an AK-47 is 400 meters. That's assuming a trained professional, aiming carefully and firing single shots.
A horse can run at between 15-20 meters/second, and keep it up for over a mile.
Your 56 seconds assumes the enemy is at LEAST 840 meters away. That's more than twice the range a soldier has a chance of hitting anything. If you started shooting at 400 meters, you'd have about 25 seconds to shoot all 100 knights, and get kills on each one. That's 4 kills per second, on an armored target about twice the size of a motorcycle. You'd have to shoot, switch to another target about 2 meters distant from the first, shoot again, and repeat twice more PER SECOND. You also can't reload, can't jam, can't miss, can't fail to kill, anything. I'll bet you can't even do that in a video game, much less real life.

You may have googled somewhere that the AK overheats when fired "for an extended period". So the question my life would be riding on is, did the Russian army consider 1 minute to be "an extented period" for combat?

Someone has obviously not used many firearms in their life much less automatic ones. I do not believe even an M249 can be expected to operate continuously for 60 seconds (or if it did it requires a barrel change) and certainly no AR can much less the AK47. That and there's NO WAY in hell you are hitting a target with every 3rd bullet Full Auto. I have fired a full auto AK47 (and I am a very strong guy ... strength has nothing to do with it) and even with 5-10 round bursts you're going to be hard pressed to hit anything more than 100m away with the majority of your rounds wasted in the earth or the sky. Sure horsed men are not the hardest to hit and indeed you will knock some over into others but not 100 ... not in 60 seconds or less ... not from 400 meters. No way.

You seem to misunderstand what ARs were designed to do. With a 30 round clip you only have 3 seconds of holding down the trigger ... and they were NOT designed to be used like that and fail very quickly when abused in such a fashion. There's a reason why all of the modern AR's don't even include full auto anymore and even when they did no one used it. Accuracy hit the toilet and the barrel went to . .. .. .. ..

Oh and no one is loading clips from an LBE in 4 seconds ... specially after the first 100 rounds or so when the entire unit heats up to flesh-melting levels. AK47s really are garbage. Honestly quit dreaming about mowing anything down with full auto ... while you'd still die you'll probably get more kills with aimed fire ... a marksman in that field could probably take down 25-30 of the knights with him. An idiot holding down the trigger might get 10 before his gun jams and he gets run over ... although odds are his gun is going to jam long before they get anywhere near effective range so he might not get any of them.

While I do understand your sentiment and indeed regiment vs regiment there's no question ... but still ... hyperbole can only be carried so far.

Just a couple notes from a guy that served in th U.S.M.C. infantry.
The M-60 machine gun team carries a spare barrel that can be switched out in seconds. It is also belt fed which mean the belts can be connected for a continuous feed. A platoon of infantry has a weapons squad which has m-60 as well as 60mm mortars.
A bipod or tripod mounted m-60 does not buck the way a hanheld automatic rifle does. So if the knights were in one long line they could be mowed down.
If they are in ranks then they are impeded by the dead/wounded horses.

And last but not least....concertina wire. A couple rolls deep and no iron clad destrier is going to jump over it.

On a somewhat different note, the Chinese didn't allegedly use human-wave tactics in Korea. Human-waving implaced automatic machine guns has been notoriously ineffective since WW1, and it seems like they used an entirely different approach.

Saying that the Chinese used human waves in Korea appears to be on a level equal to saying that the Mongolians took over the world with 5 million horsemen from Mongolia.

Just a couple notes from a guy that served in th U.S.M.C. infantry.
The M-60 machine gun team carries a spare barrel that can be switched out in seconds. It is also belt fed which mean the belts can be connected for a continuous feed. A platoon of infantry has a weapons squad which has m-60 as well as 60mm mortars.
A bipod or tripod mounted m-60 does not buck the way a hanheld automatic rifle does. So if the knights were in one long line they could be mowed down.
If they are in ranks then they are impeded by the dead/wounded horses.

And last but not least....concertina wire. A couple rolls deep and no iron clad destrier is going to jump over it.

Oh no doubt with setup and an LMG you could at least have a chance. I have no doubt that a squad or possibly even a fireteam, with any kind of preparation, will handle 99 knights coming from 400 meters. But that wasn't the setup described though. The ridiculous setup described was one guy in a field with an AK47 and 12 magazines, taped together in doubles in an LBE (how does one fit doubled up magazines in an LBE?) vs 99 knights.

That said you brought up something that made me wonder about the AK47 example. I actually doubt a human can fire 360 rounds out of an AK47 in 60 seconds. I mean I've let off a couple of long bursts out of one ... maybe 8-12 rounds ... and its not exactly something you can ignore kickwise. The kick is non-trivial and I imagine either your shoulder or your hands would give out to the point of being unable to manage the weapon anymore. Sure maybe you could hold on and keep the trigger down but I'm hard pressed to believe you will be able to aim in even the vaguest sense after a while. I could be wrong on that one though ... but it just seems like that much recoil in that little time would be pretty detrimental. Hell when I hit the range with my SKS after 50-60 rounds I know I fired a rifle and that's spaced out over half an hour or more.

Just a couple notes from a guy that served in th U.S.M.C. infantry.
The M-60 machine gun team carries a spare barrel that can be switched out in seconds. It is also belt fed which mean the belts can be connected for a continuous feed. A platoon of infantry has a weapons squad which has m-60 as well as 60mm mortars.
A bipod or tripod mounted m-60 does not buck the way a hanheld automatic rifle does. So if the knights were in one long line they could be mowed down.
If they are in ranks then they are impeded by the dead/wounded horses.

And last but not least....concertina wire. A couple rolls deep and no iron clad destrier is going to jump over it.

As the other poster said, this is vastly superior to one guy sitting there with an AK 47. Knights would own the heck out of that something ugly. He didn't even say anything about (or even think of ) wire!

Civ IV is always ambiguous about the # of people actually represented by a unit, too.

That said you brought up something that made me wonder about the AK47 example. I actually doubt a human can fire 360 rounds out of an AK47 in 60 seconds. I mean I've let off a couple of long bursts out of one ... maybe 8-12 rounds ... and its not exactly something you can ignore kickwise. The kick is non-trivial and I imagine either your shoulder or your hands would give out to the point of being unable to manage the weapon anymore. Sure maybe you could hold on and keep the trigger down but I'm hard pressed to believe you will be able to aim in even the vaguest sense after a while. I could be wrong on that one though ... but it just seems like that much recoil in that little time would be pretty detrimental.

Absolutely. Never fired with a 7.62 weapon, but I have some experience with a Minimi LMG (5.56 standard version), wich is known to be a very reliable weapon (for the USMC guys, a Minimi and a M249 SAW are basically the same thing).

Again, 5.56 rounds, from a prone position, using the bipod, target at 200 m. The smart way to fire a LMG is to aim at the legs with short bursts of 3-4 rounds, so the last rounds are almost guarantee to hit the falling target in the body. I've tried to fire longer bursts (20ish rounds) and, after the 5th/6th round, I was hitting nowhere close to the target, wich could have easily been at 50 m at that point, and still survive.

Kick-wise, it wasn't that bad, but 5.56 on a bipod and 7.62 from standing position are two entirely different stories. I don't think it's going to hurt your arm/shoulder, but surely it's enough to get completely out of control.


Heck, our Centauro APC has a coaxial 7.62 MG as secondary weapon and they never fire more than 20-25 rounds.

Heck, our Centauro APC has a coaxial 7.62 MG as secondary weapon and they never fire more than 20-25 rounds.

That is because the Italian army has Prats. I don't know why you even bother with APCs. Unless they are CR3 Prats you have upgraded to Mech Inf.

That is because the Italian army has Prats. I don't know why you even bother with APCs. Unless they are CR3 Prats you have upgraded to Mech Inf.

Good point...
about those knights?:king:
lol

Oh no doubt with setup and an LMG you could at least have a chance. I have no doubt that a squad or possibly even a fireteam, with any kind of preparation, will handle 99 knights coming from 400 meters. But that wasn't the setup described though. The ridiculous setup described was one guy in a field with an AK47 and 12 magazines, taped together in doubles in an LBE (how does one fit doubled up magazines in an LBE?) vs 99 knights.

That said you brought up something that made me wonder about the AK47 example. I actually doubt a human can fire 360 rounds out of an AK47 in 60 seconds. I mean I've let off a couple of long bursts out of one ... maybe 8-12 rounds ... and its not exactly something you can ignore kickwise. The kick is non-trivial and I imagine either your shoulder or your hands would give out to the point of being unable to manage the weapon anymore. Sure maybe you could hold on and keep the trigger down but I'm hard pressed to believe you will be able to aim in even the vaguest sense after a while. I could be wrong on that one though ... but it just seems like that much recoil in that little time would be pretty detrimental. Hell when I hit the range with my SKS after 50-60 rounds I know I fired a rifle and that's spaced out over half an hour or more.

You can do a few drums in quick bursts (at least with more modern assault rifles than the AK47), but aiming at much better than barn accuracy is not going to happen. Normally, when you are doing that type of firing it is purely for psychological effect, i.e. I've loaded out every other round with either bright or subdued tracers and the goal is to look like a squad or three. When the job is just to convince the enemy to keep his head down or run away burning through lots of terribly "aimed" bullets is quite effective. When the adrenaline is flowing I can manage long periods of fire with plenty of rounds, but then it gets easier the more rounds you have put downrange (also you want an EXTREMELY good fit between your shoulder and the rifle if you expect to have to do long bursts; having a support also helps tons).

I'm playing a game as Isabella, prince, small, marathon, great plains. What a blast. The conquistadors were excellent. They seemed to be a lot tougher than regular knights.

@Divaythsarmour

They definitely are. Conquistadors have a bonus to attacking melee (+50%) and they do get defensive bonuses for terrain (as opposed to all other mounted units other than the Immortal). Unfortunately they are a cuirassier replacement with the latest patches instead of a knight replacement.

It's different in Warlords. Conquistadors replace knights and they upgrade to cavalry. The next time I boot up warlords, I'll check their stats. I'm thinking they must be combat level 10. I would be suprised if they're level 12, that would be way too tough.