Are cavalry units just better than infantry in every way?

[uppi]

Infantry can be buffed with militaristic city states, cavalry cannot. So if you have a lot of those and also have more resources that buff infantry, you can end up in situations, where infantry has more combat strength than cavalry.

 

[The Civs 6]

In Civ VII, after playing through it for a few months, I finally realized that the 'rock-paper-scissors' aspect in this game AND the 'siplificatipn' compared to Civ VI in unit types are both products of the wild variety of ways you can modify unit factors.

Between Resource, Memento, Unique, Commander, Policy, IP Bonus and other variations, almost no infantry, ranged or cavalry/mobile unit fights with the same factor it supposedly has. I would also suspect (because I haven't taken the time to go back to earlier games and count up all possible modifiers) that the variations by unit are much larger than in previous games.
Just for an example, the basic 20-strength Warrior, in a Civ with several Iron deposits, bonuses from 1 - 2 IPs, a Tradition or two, under special conditions (defense, attack, versus Districts, etc) can easily have an actual combat strength of 30 - a 50% increase. Add in a few Bastion or Assault promotions from an Army Commander, and even a Tier 2 Spearman holds no terror for that Warrior.

The individual variations, not even counting additional variations from Unique units, means that the war-hungry player can customize and/or dramatically increase the power of his units in numerous ways - many of them not obvious to his opponents until they engage in combat. It also means that providing permanent changes to the attributes or strengths of units is much less important: if you want Anti-Cavalry infantry, infantry with an overall +10 combat increase does the same trick without requiring an entire specialized unit line.

The system, therefore, provides far more variation and customization overall than previous games did - it's just not laid out neatly for us in "this unit fights better against cavalry in Tundra" the way previous games made it explicit. - basically, you build your anti-cavalry, pro-tundra units using the game combat system of bonuses.

Which is not to say it couldn't be made a bit more explicit: familiar old tropes like Anti-Cavalry Infantry could be made a specific bonus from Traditions or Social Policies or some other source, to be adopted specifically when your nearest neighbors are Charlemagne, Genghis and the Mauryans.

One of later era Civ's great faults: lots of complexity and meaningless choices; little strategy.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Infantry can be buffed with militaristic city states, cavalry cannot. So if you have a lot of those and also have more resources that buff infantry, you can end up in situations, where infantry has more combat strength than cavalry.

Infantry and ranged both: I do some serious searching for militaristic IPs as a result - especially if I'm playing Frederick . . .

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

One of later era Civ's great faults: lots of complexity and meaningless choices; little strategy.

It's the difference between explicit and implicit modeling of some desired Real World set of effects that it has been decided to put in the game.

Military tactics, operations and strategy can be modeled by having each different type of unit separately included in the game so that you have to personally do all the tactical actions - making the gamer put on a Colonel's hat to run the units, then go back to being Immortal Grand Gnagus of the Civ when the fighting is over.

Or you can try to model the effects of the tactical interaction between infantry, ranged units and cavalry as a product of simply having one of each in your 'army stack', figure the results invisibly and present them to the gamer.

Or, as Civ always has, you come to some intermediate point between those two extremes and try to satisfy as many gamers as possible (or, more often, Dissatisfy as few as possible).

Always remembering that the entire combat system in Civ is one vast Fantasy, because the average 'battle' should take place in about .0015 of an Antiquity turn (1 day) and take place in about 1/100 of a tile. And your Army Leaders should last from 1 (Antiquity) turn to 20 - 30 Modern Turns, which would make any promotions for them rather worthless until the mid-late Exploration Age or later.

So we and the game muddle along with a system that allows some gamer interaction and we ignore the massive disconnect between Battle and Game in space and time and gamer decisions. Put the same kind of detail into the rest of the game, and we'd have to build each tile of railroad individually after raising the Gold required to build it by manipulating the Stock Market . . .

 

[The Civs 6]

It's the difference between explicit and implicit modeling of some desired Real World set of effects that it has been decided to put in the game.

Military tactics, operations and strategy can be modeled by having each different type of unit separately included in the game so that you have to personally do all the tactical actions - making the gamer put on a Colonel's hat to run the units, then go back to being Immortal Grand Gnagus of the Civ when the fighting is over.

Or you can try to model the effects of the tactical interaction between infantry, ranged units and cavalry as a product of simply having one of each in your 'army stack', figure the results invisibly and present them to the gamer.

Or, as Civ always has, you come to some intermediate point between those two extremes and try to satisfy as many gamers as possible (or, more often, Dissatisfy as few as possible).

Always remembering that the entire combat system in Civ is one vast Fantasy, because the average 'battle' should take place in about .0015 of an Antiquity turn (1 day) and take place in about 1/100 of a tile. And your Army Leaders should last from 1 (Antiquity) turn to 20 - 30 Modern Turns, which would make any promotions for them rather worthless until the mid-late Exploration Age or later.

So we and the game muddle along with a system that allows some gamer interaction and we ignore the massive disconnect between Battle and Game in space and time and gamer decisions. Put the same kind of detail into the rest of the game, and we'd have to build each tile of railroad individually after raising the Gold required to build it by manipulating the Stock Market . . .

To be fair I think civ combat was always intended as an abstraction.

 

[McSpank01]

In Civ VII, after playing through it for a few months, I finally realized that the 'rock-paper-scissors' aspect in this game AND the 'siplificatipn' compared to Civ VI in unit types are both products of the wild variety of ways you can modify unit factors.

Between Resource, Memento, Unique, Commander, Policy, IP Bonus and other variations, almost no infantry, ranged or cavalry/mobile unit fights with the same factor it supposedly has. I would also suspect (because I haven't taken the time to go back to earlier games and count up all possible modifiers) that the variations by unit are much larger than in previous games.
Just for an example, the basic 20-strength Warrior, in a Civ with several Iron deposits, bonuses from 1 - 2 IPs, a Tradition or two, under special conditions (defense, attack, versus Districts, etc) can easily have an actual combat strength of 30 - a 50% increase. Add in a few Bastion or Assault promotions from an Army Commander, and even a Tier 2 Spearman holds no terror for that Warrior.

The individual variations, not even counting additional variations from Unique units, means that the war-hungry player can customize and/or dramatically increase the power of his units in numerous ways - many of them not obvious to his opponents until they engage in combat. It also means that providing permanent changes to the attributes or strengths of units is much less important: if you want Anti-Cavalry infantry, infantry with an overall +10 combat increase does the same trick without requiring an entire specialized unit line.

The system, therefore, provides far more variation and customization overall than previous games did - it's just not laid out neatly for us in "this unit fights better against cavalry in Tundra" the way previous games made it explicit. - basically, you build your anti-cavalry, pro-tundra units using the game combat system of bonuses.

Which is not to say it couldn't be made a bit more explicit: familiar old tropes like Anti-Cavalry Infantry could be made a specific bonus from Traditions or Social Policies or some other source, to be adopted specifically when your nearest neighbors are Charlemagne, Genghis and the Mauryans.

Yes this is true, I also don’t think it’s all that good a system either. I often find myself going into combat and not really being able to make decisions at a glance because there are far too many factors going into whether a unit will win combat or not, many of which I cannot control or do anything about. As you say, it's very hard to know how combat will go until you actually engage, because of all the many modifers going around.

I personally would prefer there to be some level of tactical, rather than strategic management of units, and the current system makes it feel far more that the strategic level is the important one, and the tactical level is almost kind of meaningless.

Ideally I would be playing rock paper scissors with my units to determine placement, I would be using the landscape to work out where to attack and where to defend. I guess the AI just can't compete on that level, but you'd think it should be able to as it's not that complex.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Yes this is true, I also don’t think it’s all that good a system either. I often find myself going into combat and not really being able to make decisions at a glance because there are far too many factors going into whether a unit will win combat or not, many of which I cannot control or do anything about. As you say, it's very hard to know how combat will go until you actually engage, because of all the many modifers going around.

I don't think Civilization is designed to be able to calculate combats beforehand. There's a significant random anyway, so knowing exact modifiers shouldn't help much.

 

[McSpank01]

I don't think Civilization is designed to be able to calculate combats beforehand. There's a significant random anyway, so knowing exact modifiers shouldn't help much.

As a player I should be able to make decisions like ‘oh there are 3 spearmen units sitting on hills, I may struggle to win a battle vs them with my 3 horsemen unit, I should find another tactic’. Instead the game lays modifier on top of modifier at a strategic level so outcomes of battle may rely more on me worrying about whether a lowly swordsman unit is buffed up due to city state and iron bonuses and others rather than what type of unit it is and where it is placed.

Personally I don’t find that fun.

 

[stealth_nsk]

As a player I should be able to make decisions like ‘oh there are 3 spearmen units sitting on hills, I may struggle to win a battle vs them with my 3 horsemen unit, I should find another tactic’. Instead the game lays modifier on top of modifier at a strategic level so outcomes of battle may rely more on me worrying about whether a lowly swordsman unit is buffed up due to city state and iron bonuses and others rather than what type of unit it is and where it is placed.

Personally I don’t find that fun.

In reality there are always units coming to battle, other conditions changing and the like. I think it's hard to make decisions that way - normally if you want to win for sure, you need to throw much more than the force you see.

 

[McSpank01]

In reality there are always units coming to battle, other conditions changing and the like. I think it's hard to make decisions that way - normally if you want to win for sure, you need to throw much more than the force you see.

Yes of course, not denying that. It’s a question of balance.

The game has to balance how relevant global bonuses are vs local tactical decisions, and right now I think that global bonuses have far too much bearing on the outcome of battles. The direct effect of this is that you rarely need to make any real tactical ground level choices when getting into battles. You can generally win or lose regardless.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Yes of course, not denying that. It’s a question of balance.

The game has to balance how relevant global bonuses are vs local tactical decisions, and right now I think that global bonuses have far too much bearing on the outcome of battles. The direct effect of this is that you rarely need to make any real tactical ground level choices when getting into battles. You can generally win or lose regardless.

I can see both sides of the debate because it's a debate that's been going on in historical miniatures games for Decades.

Basically, it's whether the gamer should have more information than his IRL counterparts ever had, or should be as befuddled as too many historical generals were.

Or, as one very, very good game designer and military historian once said to me:

"There are no combat factors or movement factors on a battlefield."

Another way of saying every single game design that includes Combat simplifies your decision making enormously by giving you various 'hard' numbers to play with instead of the extremely fuzzy real life factors of morale, training, discipline, and Random Chance that govern actual battles. To throw out another quote, this time from the German Army's Truppenfuhrung (Troop Leadership) manual of the 1930s:

"War is the province of Uncertainty."

But, we cannot play games that way. We need hard and fast rules and at least some degree of knowledge of hard factors - even if they are made up by the game designer.

Civ has one major advantage over miniatures games, which are almost all on the tactical, individual battle level: Civ can 'average' the strength of all the units in the entire enemy/friendly force so you know, at least, that if that one spearman has a +3 bonus from Iron resources, all the spearmen in that army have the same bonus. No worries about the fact that Spearman Unit A has a commander who is a drunk while Spearman Unit B has been told if they take your city they will get three days to pillage it to their heart's content. They are, at least, all the same.

The game could, of course, make the bonuses more situational and ephemeral. You could decide to give your army the chance to pillage a settlement if they take it, which would give all units participating in the attack on the settlement an attack combat bonus, but also could reduce the captured settlement to a fraction of its former size with no building intact. And this would enormously complicate the game and probably make the actual per-turn combat factors even harder to calculate.

All of which is a typically Borisean way of saying that the current Civ-wide bonuses to your units (or Leader-wide) is probably as good as we can do without devolving the combat system into a tactical nightmare that, frankly, would be out of place in a game at Civ's Grand Strategy scale. Let's leave that level to the miniatures games that are designed for that level of gaming.

 

[tsuneomai]

So I was reading in the Civ wiki about the differences between cavalry and infantry units. It sounds like apart from the increased cost there is zero reason to build infantry (assuming you have the same tier level of units unlocked)? Am I right? Its pity if true they should differentiate more and give you a reason to build some infantry units (perhaps make it so cavalry units cant take cities).

i think the main mistake they made is they took the balancing straight from civ 6. yet in civ 6 archers have double attack so you need 3 archers with double attack to kill cavallary in one turn. but since we do not have double attack sometimes even with a 5 star commander that has all the + range combat bonus you need 5 to 6 units. with rivers and such sometimes there is no space to do 6 attacks in a turn. meanwhile cavallary often one shots your archers at least on diety. infantery on the other hand dies easy to archers. but things like elephants are a menace and sometimes barely get dmg from range. so thats why cvallery is far superior i think. also since melee can't really hurt fortifications. if they do attack those they get dmg and if there is an archer or 2 inside... yeah well it does not really work. the only one doing damage to stationed unit are trebuchets so the meta greatly shifts towards them as best units. i just think they should make cavallery a bit weaker defence/attack wise ...so you at least survive one attack. and infantery needs some defence buff. the egypt units are kinda cool with the we can walk on rivers ability.

 

[The Civs 6]

yes, always have been, both in Civ and IRL

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

yes, always have been, both in Civ and IRL

In Civ, yes.
IRL, almost never.

The number of times cavalry or other mounted forces have been cut or shot to pieces by steady infantry far outnumbers the times mounted troops have been decisive in battle in Europe or anywhere else.

What warps our understanding is two factors:

1. The man on the horse was frequently an aristocrat, since it cost major gold to afford to keep a horse, and those people made sure they were written up as the heroes of the day, even when the peasant archers, spearmen or axemen did all the work.

2. When effective weapons (post-Roman) were made of metal, like mail armor, pattern-welded swords and long axes, etc. they also could only be afforded by the men also rich enough to afford horses. That meant the horseman had a virtual monopoly on weapons and horses and the time to train and get proficient with them. Over much of Europe and parts of Asia, then, from about 500 to 1300 CE the horseman was the only really effective military force available in the field.

Then European cities and 'marginal' places like Scotland, Switzerland and England made a virtue of their relative poverty and horselessness (the cities) and started raising good infantry: Welsh-derived English longbowmen, Swiss halberds and then pikes, Scots half-pikes, Flemish city militia pikemen, and the horsemen were suddenly getting shafted (pun intended) right and left:

1302 CE: Battle of Courtrai between the Royal Army of France and the militia of the County of Flanders - knightly charges utterly failed to break the pike blocks of the Flemish militia. Also known as the "Battle of the Golden Sours" because 500 - 700 pairs of spurs were hung up in the local cathedral as trophies, taken from knights massacred on fhe field.

1314 CE: Battle of Bannockburn: English knights tried charging through a swamp, ended up literally as Sitting Ducks while Scots lowlanders with half-pikes (12 - 14 foot long spears) butchered them.

1315 CE: Battle of Morgarten. First (of many) Swiss victories over mounted troops, when the Swiss trapped 2000 mounted knights in a narrow pass and hacked them to pieces with halberds

1346 CE: Battle of Crecy. English longbows mow down French knights. English historians frequently call this battle "the beginning of the decline of the mounted knight" but as you can see, it was almost a half-century after the writing was On The Wall for any knight who could read it:
Don't charge pikemen
Don't charge half-pikemen
Don't charge Halberds

Basically, don't charge any steady, disciplined infantry armed with polearms, a maxim that became doubly true when the polearm was a bayonet on the end of the musket that could drill a hole through any armor you could wear and move in from 50 - 100 meters away. When the musket became a rifle with more accuracy and longer range that writing on the wall was in ALL CAPS. Note that Bredow's famous cavalry charge in the Franco-Prussian War (1870) during the 'rifle period' was known at the time as "Bredow's Death Ride" - his brigade suffered 50% casualties in less than 50 minutes, which may be a record in percentage casualties except for some American native massacres (Custer's and Fetterman's mostly-mounted commands both suffered 100% casualties in about the same amount of time at about the same period of history: 1869 - 1876).

In game terms, Civ VII's cavalry/mounted forces should have a different relationship with inantry opponents in each Age:

Antiquity: High factors for Flanking, mediocre basic combat factors: when most of your opponents on foot have spears and big shields, a man on a horse is basically a Big Target.

Exploration: Higher combat factors, because this is the high point of mounted, armored men on big horses with lots of training and the best weapons. This has been Civ's Default setting, but it's really only correct for about 7 - 800 years.

Modern Age: The remaining mounted troops (1st Tier, basically) should again, have high Flanking bonuses, but their actual combat factor is, comparatively, even worse than in Antiquity: now they are a Big Target for rifles and artillery from 500 - 1000 meters away.

 

[The Civs 6]

In Civ, yes.
IRL, almost never.

The number of times cavalry or other mounted forces have been cut or shot to pieces by steady infantry far outnumbers the times mounted troops have been decisive in battle in Europe or anywhere else.

What warps our understanding is two factors:

1. The man on the horse was frequently an aristocrat, since it cost major gold to afford to keep a horse, and those people made sure they were written up as the heroes of the day, even when the peasant archers, spearmen or axemen did all the work.

2. When effective weapons (post-Roman) were made of metal, like mail armor, pattern-welded swords and long axes, etc. they also could only be afforded by the men also rich enough to afford horses. That meant the horseman had a virtual monopoly on weapons and horses and the time to train and get proficient with them. Over much of Europe and parts of Asia, then, from about 500 to 1300 CE the horseman was the only really effective military force available in the field.

Then European cities and 'marginal' places like Scotland, Switzerland and England made a virtue of their relative poverty and horselessness (the cities) and started raising good infantry: Welsh-derived English longbowmen, Swiss halberds and then pikes, Scots half-pikes, Flemish city militia pikemen, and the horsemen were suddenly getting shafted (pun intended) right and left:

1302 CE: Battle of Courtrai between the Royal Army of France and the militia of the County of Flanders - knightly charges utterly failed to break the pike blocks of the Flemish militia. Also known as the "Battle of the Golden Sours" because 500 - 700 pairs of spurs were hung up in the local cathedral as trophies, taken from knights massacred on fhe field.

1314 CE: Battle of Bannockburn: English knights tried charging through a swamp, ended up literally as Sitting Ducks while Scots lowlanders with half-pikes (12 - 14 foot long spears) butchered them.

1315 CE: Battle of Morgarten. First (of many) Swiss victories over mounted troops, when the Swiss trapped 2000 mounted knights in a narrow pass and hacked them to pieces with halberds

1346 CE: Battle of Crecy. English longbows mow down French knights. English historians frequently call this battle "the beginning of the decline of the mounted knight" but as you can see, it was almost a half-century after the writing was On The Wall for any knight who could read it:
Don't charge pikemen
Don't charge half-pikemen
Don't charge Halberds

Basically, don't charge any steady, disciplined infantry armed with polearms, a maxim that became doubly true when the polearm was a bayonet on the end of the musket that could drill a hole through any armor you could wear and move in from 50 - 100 meters away. When the musket became a rifle with more accuracy and longer range that writing on the wall was in ALL CAPS. Note that Bredow's famous cavalry charge in the Franco-Prussian War (1870) during the 'rifle period' was known at the time as "Bredow's Death Ride" - his brigade suffered 50% casualties in less than 50 minutes, which may be a record in percentage casualties except for some American native massacres (Custer's and Fetterman's mostly-mounted commands both suffered 100% casualties in about the same amount of time at about the same period of history: 1869 - 1876).

In game terms, Civ VII's cavalry/mounted forces should have a different relationship with inantry opponents in each Age:

Antiquity: High factors for Flanking, mediocre basic combat factors: when most of your opponents on foot have spears and big shields, a man on a horse is basically a Big Target.

Exploration: Higher combat factors, because this is the high point of mounted, armored men on big horses with lots of training and the best weapons. This has been Civ's Default setting, but it's really only correct for about 7 - 800 years.

Modern Age: The remaining mounted troops (1st Tier, basically) should again, have high Flanking bonuses, but their actual combat factor is, comparatively, even worse than in Antiquity: now they are a Big Target for rifles and artillery from 500 - 1000 meters away.

It's just physics. A horse is capable of 10x work a man is. A man on a horse has far more kinetic force than a running man, even excluding even cleverer use of horses. Pre gunpowder the steppe archers never lost a battle. Not one. Other than Dorylaeum. And that was against the second most powerful pre gun powder warrior, the knight.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

It's just physics. A horse is capable of 10x work a man is. A man on a horse has far more kinetic force than a running man, even excluding even cleverer use of horses. Pre gunpowder the steppe archers never lost a battle. Not one. Other than Dorylaeum. And that was against the second most powerful pre gun powder warrior, the knight.

According to the American Kriegspiel of 1880, a horse is also 10x the target that a man on foot is, and neither the horse nor the man sitting on it do much work when they have a pointed shaft sticking through them.

"Pre gunpowder the steppe archers never lost a battle." - is simply inaccurate.
Examples:

1. Alexander's father, Phillip II, defeated the Scythian king Atheas (steppe horse-archers) in 340 BCE

2. When Alexander the Great wanted to cross the Jaxartes River against horse archer (Saka - eastern Scyths) opposition in 329 BCE he crossed under cover of catapults and siege weapons (the first known time they were used as 'fire support' in an open field battle), set out a mounted force as bait, and when the horse archers closed in trapped them between his infantry pikemen and archers and his cavalry and slaughtered them.

3. 133 BCE to 188 CE the Xiong-nu and Han China fought a series of wars - classic steppe horse-archers against Han infantry and only later Han cavalry. Especially after the campaign of 119 BCE the Xiong-nu were pushed north and in 89 and 91 CE the Xiong-nu's main armies were smashed by Han forces in two major battles. By 151 CE a Han force of infantry militia were able to defeat the remnants of the Xiong-nu, possibly because the Han were already using disciplined volley-firing by massed infantry crossbows (this is Chinese speculation: we have almost no details of the battles except that there were steppe horse-archers on one side in every one of them)

4. From 10 to 12 August 955 CE a Hungarian/Magyar army of horse archers with infantry and siege engines moved into southern Germany and beseiged Augsburg. The Battle of Lechfeld fought on those dates resulted in the majority of the Magyar force being wiped out by repeated charges of heavily-armed German cavalry (proto-knights) which, after heavy rains turned the ground soaked and muddy, were able to catch the lighter horse-archers and massacre them.

5. 8 September 1380 CE, forces of the Golden Horde, a direct decendant of the Mongol horde that conquered most of Russia, were defeated by the forces of Muscovy (Principality/Duchy/Gtrand Duchy of Muscovy, the Moscow city-state) led by Dmitry Donskoi at Kulikovo Field. The actual battle was not a decisive tactical defeat for the Mongols, but it was a decisive strategic and grand-strategic defeat: Muscovy from that time on ceased to pay any tribute to the Horde and started on the long path to becoming the center and basis of the modern Russian State. Kulikovo is considered one of the "The Great Field Battles" of the Russian military, but in fact, in 1378 CE, before Kulikovo, the Mongols were also decisively defeated by Dmitrii at the Battle of Vozha River.

Point being that while horse-archers could be very, very effective under the right conditions, they were not Super Troops and in fact modern 'authorities' tend to over-estimate the effect of their relatively light arrows. There is a record of a Crusader knight coming back from a battle with 15 horse-archer arrows sticking out of his link-mail armor and padding and that of his horse with neither seriously injured. How often this happened we don't know, of course, but if that knight is charging you 15 ineffective arrows is quite likely to give him time to reach you with his heavy horse, heavy armor, and heavy lance with distressing results: - see Lechfeld, above.

Against unarmored, untrained, poorly led and disciplined troops horse-archers could win extremely one-sided victories, but so could any well-led, well-trained force. That is as close to a universal military truth as anything, and far more so than picking out any single weapon-system as Always Victorious.

But note: Civ has never explicitly modeled differences in training, tactical leadership, discipline or morale in any rendition of the game, which leaves the gamer with an entirely false picture of what is important on the battlefield.

 

[The Civs 6]

According to the American Kriegspiel of 1880, a horse is also 10x the target that a man on foot is, and neither the horse nor the man sitting on it do much work when they have a pointed shaft sticking through them.

"Pre gunpowder the steppe archers never lost a battle." - is simply inaccurate.
Examples:

1. Alexander's father, Phillip II, defeated the Scythian king Atheas (steppe horse-archers) in 340 BCE

2. When Alexander the Great wanted to cross the Jaxartes River against horse archer (Saka - eastern Scyths) opposition in 329 BCE he crossed under cover of catapults and siege weapons (the first known time they were used as 'fire support' in an open field battle), set out a mounted force as bait, and when the horse archers closed in trapped them between his infantry pikemen and archers and his cavalry and slaughtered them.

3. 133 BCE to 188 CE the Xiong-nu and Han China fought a series of wars - classic steppe horse-archers against Han infantry and only later Han cavalry. Especially after the campaign of 119 BCE the Xiong-nu were pushed north and in 89 and 91 CE the Xiong-nu's main armies were smashed by Han forces in two major battles. By 151 CE a Han force of infantry militia were able to defeat the remnants of the Xiong-nu, possibly because the Han were already using disciplined volley-firing by massed infantry crossbows (this is Chinese speculation: we have almost no details of the battles except that there were steppe horse-archers on one side in every one of them)

4. From 10 to 12 August 955 CE a Hungarian/Magyar army of horse archers with infantry and siege engines moved into southern Germany and beseiged Augsburg. The Battle of Lechfeld fought on those dates resulted in the majority of the Magyar force being wiped out by repeated charges of heavily-armed German cavalry (proto-knights) which, after heavy rains turned the ground soaked and muddy, were able to catch the lighter horse-archers and massacre them.

5. 8 September 1380 CE, forces of the Golden Horde, a direct decendant of the Mongol horde that conquered most of Russia, were defeated by the forces of Muscovy (Principality/Duchy/Gtrand Duchy of Muscovy, the Moscow city-state) led by Dmitry Donskoi at Kulikovo Field. The actual battle was not a decisive tactical defeat for the Mongols, but it was a decisive strategic and grand-strategic defeat: Muscovy from that time on ceased to pay any tribute to the Horde and started on the long path to becoming the center and basis of the modern Russian State. Kulikovo is considered one of the "The Great Field Battles" of the Russian military, but in fact, in 1378 CE, before Kulikovo, the Mongols were also decisively defeated by Dmitrii at the Battle of Vozha River.

Point being that while horse-archers could be very, very effective under the right conditions, they were not Super Troops and in fact modern 'authorities' tend to over-estimate the effect of their relatively light arrows. There is a record of a Crusader knight coming back from a battle with 15 horse-archer arrows sticking out of his link-mail armor and padding and that of his horse with neither seriously injured. How often this happened we don't know, of course, but if that knight is charging you 15 ineffective arrows is quite likely to give him time to reach you with his heavy horse, heavy armor, and heavy lance with distressing results: - see Lechfeld, above.

Against unarmored, untrained, poorly led and disciplined troops horse-archers could win extremely one-sided victories, but so could any well-led, well-trained force. That is as close to a universal military truth as anything, and far more so than picking out any single weapon-system as Always Victorious.

But note: Civ has never explicitly modeled differences in training, tactical leadership, discipline or morale in any rendition of the game, which leaves the gamer with an entirely false picture of what is important on the battlefield.

You are quoting battles that are literally legendary because the non steppe people got one on them. They are against a backdrop where steppe archers always won. Horsemen are a larger (albeit faster) target which was only relevant when the musket and specifically the rifle were invented.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

You are quoting battles that are literally legendary because the non steppe people got one on them. They are against a backdrop where steppe archers always won. Horsemen are a larger (albeit faster) target which was only relevant when the musket and specifically the rifle were invented.

I am quoting battles that directly contradict your statement that "horse archers always won" - by historical example, they did not.

The difference between 'always won' and 'mostly won' is a difference that the German Wehrmacht and Napoleon knew all too well: they always won until they didn't, and in the end they and their states were destroyed despite 'mostly winning'.

In other words, not a trivial difference.

I'm not arguing that horse-archers were not effective, just that they were not invincible any more than any other weapon or troop-type or force ever were. Given the enormous difference in the size of the populations, the steppe pastoral horse-archers had tremendous influence on their settled neighbors: the Xiong-nu were only the first of the "northern barbarians' that troubled China, and they provided several 'foreign' Dynasties, most famously the Mongol Yuan Dynasty: no small feat given the enormous difference between the Chinese population and the pastoral steppe peoples.

 

[Kmart_Elvis]

@Boris Gudenuf

Just want to say, I really enjoy your contributions to this forum with your in-depth explanations of history. I'm always learning something relatively obscure that one might not learn in high school or tv/movie media, but it's still fascinating to discover.