That's delusion French knights had at Crecy, Agincourt and Golden Spurs. Then the real "real" life kicked in.
Devastating charges happened in the real life much less often then in the Hollywood movies.
Making cavalry more realistic in Warband is one of the best changes done to the series. I don't want Warband's heavy cav spam that can roll over everything.
Crecy, Agincourt, and the Battle of the Golden Spurs get such great attention specifically
because they are exceptional-- they involved worst-case scenarios where cavalry forces lost battles
they would normally win.
This was due to some terrible decisions. At Crecy and Agincourt the ground was extremely muddy, and the battleground was greatly in favour of the English (who had erected defensive stakes), and the French cavalry were disorganized, not at full numbers (at Agincourt some of them left to go for a walk!), and made some incredibly poor tactical decisions (like waiting until after multiple arrow volleys to charge, and not charging when the English were vulnerable outside their stake walls). At the Battle of the Golden Spurs, the Flemish had crisscrossed the countryside with defensive ditches (which you can't do in Bannerlord) and the battle took place on marshy ground; the French cavalry charged against a force twice their size, and their reinforcements decided not to show up to help them. What lost those battles was not heavy cavalry somehow being weak, but disorganization that made the full strength not be brought to bear.
Also, importantly, Golden Spurs took place in the year 1302, when two centuries of heavy cavalry domination had made armies finally adapt tactics that would best work against heavy cavalry. In the 1000s the high-backed saddle and stirrups were relatively new innovations for Europe, and thus so was the heavy cavalry charge.
I will say that yes, an
individual charge was not always immediately devastating; however, over the course of a battle, heavy cavalry forces making repeated charges over infantry generally were successful, and massive failures like Agincourt were rare. Bringing up the few battles where it resulted in death, compared to the thousands of battles where it succeeded, is disingenuous.
As a handful of counter-examples (that are actually from Bannerlord's 1000-1100s time period, and not the high middle ages!), you can have the Battle of Hastings where the Norman knights defeated a numerically superior infantry force through repeat charges, the Battle of the Lake of Antioch (where 700 mounted knights quickly routed
10,000 infantry in a handful of charges), the Battle of Dyrrhachium (army of 15,000 defeats an army of 25,000 thanks to a decisive cavalry charge), the Battle of Ramla where a force of 260 knights and 900 infantry defeated a force of 3000, and the third (lol) Battle of Ramla where 500 knights and 2000 infantry used a decisive charge to defeat a mix of around 5000-15000 infantry, horse archers, and light Arab cavalry (who did not charge, and waited to be charged).
I don't know about you. But in real life a horse would not charge into a line of men. It's a living animal with instincts after all.
Dude, sorry, but please stop talking about something you know nothing about. People are very happy to say "in real life" while providing no examples of real life. Here, have a horse charging into a line of men in real life.
They were literally trained to do it. A human is a "living animal with instincts" and you can train it to charge into a line of men!