1: Well if that's how argument works, then you tell me all the battles in the period 900-1100 where cavalry won first.
2: Your argument works both ways.
3: Those battles are perfectly relevant because there was no principal change in how heavy cavalry fought.
4: I said frontal charges against determined and disciplined infantry were usually ineffective.
5: No, Norman cavalry at Hastings did not use couched lance. Holding lance in the underhand grip is not the same as couched lance.
6: Which part of "until Normans fooled English to disband their formation by faking retreat or until English king received arrow in to the head, depending on which source you believe" you did not understand? Norman cavalry did not win the battle of Hastings by charging English infantry, Norman cavalry FLED from English infantry to win.
7: In reality 20,000 Crusader infantry backed by couple of knights mounted on oxes and pack animals have charged Turkish cavalry and light infantry (mostly archers).
https://www.historynet.com/the-crucible-of-antioch-the-pivotal-clash-of-the-first-crusade.htm You have misinterpreted the whole battle as 700 Crusader cavalry charge defeating 10,000 Turkish infantry.
8: The first guy who for some irrational reason run up front was bowled over by the knee of the rider. Those spears were not real spears.
9: And heavy cavalry used very long lances. In 1500s, heavy cavalry was at the pike of it's power. As is common with you, you don't know what you're talking about. A
rmoured cavalry, in the form of the gendarme, was at its highest as a proportion of the total number of combatants in many Renaissance armies, especially in France. Other Western European states also used heavy cavalry very often, such as Spain and the Holy Roman Empire in the Italian Wars. North-Central and Eastern Europe saw the emergence of winged hussars that proved a decisive factor in the territorial gains of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and in its wars with Sweden, Muscovy and the Ottoman Turks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_cavalry#Renaissance_to_20th_century France entered the sixteenth century with its gendarme companies being the largest and most respected force of heavy cavalry in Europe, feared for their powerful armament, reckless courage and esprit de corps.[10] As the fifteenth century waned, so did the tactical practices of the Hundred Years War, and the gendarmes of the sixteenth century returned to fighting exclusively on horseback, generally in a very thin line (en haye), usually two or even just one rank deep, so as to maximize the number of lances being set upon the enemy target at once.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendarme_(historical)#Gendarmes_in_battle_in_the_early_sixteenth_century
10: You still failed to explain how impaling itself on a long pike and short pike makes any difference to the horse.
11: No, I know for a fact that it does not take highest-tier Vlandian cavalry multiple attempts to kill the ****tiest, weakest looters in the game. Vlandian banner knight will one shoot any looter, given he have space and terrain to gain decent speed and does not miss.
1:
Because you're the one claiming everyone else is wrong and cavalry was terrible, it's up to you to prove your claim, not me.
You have not given even one example of heavy cavalry losing to infantry in the time period Bannerlord is set in.
But I'll gladly answer your request anyway. Here is more proof of heavy cavalry domination on top of what I've already provided.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Riade Heavy cavalry decisive charge secures victory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lenzen#Battle Decisive heavy cavalry charge secures victory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lechfeld Decisive victory of an all-heavy cavalry force against a mixed infantry/horse archer army.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stilo Although this battle was lost, the heavy cavalry are noted for successfully breaking the enemy's strongest center point where the king's guard were, and they only lost in the end to other cavalry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Olivento Decisive heavy cavalry charge secures victory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Montemaggiore "Victory was attributed to the addition of the Norman heavy cavalry."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ménfő (Battle of Menfo if that link doesn't work). "The army quickly fell apart in the face of the German cavalry."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Civitate Heavy cavalry manage to defeat a force of elite heavy infantry twice their size.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cerami Heavy cavalry defeat a significantly numerically superior force. First charge fails, but second charge successfully decides the battle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Langensalza_(1075) Charge "almost instantly" destroys the center of the infantry force.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_on_the_Elster In this unusual case, the cavalry acted as the anvil to the hammer of the infantry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dyrrhachium_(1081)#Byzantine_collapse In this most famous example, later described by Anna Komnena, the Norman cavalry "smashed through the ranks of the Byzantines, and they were irresistible. A Frankish charge could smash through the walls of Byzantium."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Alnwick_(1093) Knight charge catches enemy by surprise, finishing them off quickly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dorylaeum_(1097) Heavy cavalry arrives to rescue the helpless infantry with a successful charge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bairén Frontal charge breaks center line.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Larissa Historian Robert Holmes states: "The new knightly tactic of charging with the lance couched – tucked firmly under the arm to unite the impact of man and horse – proved a battle-winner."
This is almost every single battle from the 1000s I can find where a cavalry force is mentioned as fighting infantry.
2: Fair enough. In that case, I'll point out that it was originally your argument, since you were the one to bring up intentions in the first place. Moving on.
3: The
infantry changed how they fought the heavy cavalry, with much deeper formations and much longer polearms braced on the ground. That's why 1300s and 1500s examples are irrelevant to this discussion, as tactics and equipment were different in the 1000s. The long list of heavy cavalry victories in the 1000s above demonstrates this difference.
4: What you
actually said was "Devastating charges happened in the real life much less often then in the Hollywood movies." As you can see from the above list, that is incorrect.
5: You're making the mistake of thinking that because
some knights on the Tapestry aren't couching their lances, that means all of them must not be. Actually go back and read my source this time, it talks about how knights are visible on the Tapestry couching their lances.
6: The part where: "Although the feigned flights did not break the lines, they
probably thinned out the housecarls in the English shield wall. The housecarls were replaced with members of the fyrd, and
the shield wall held."
7: READ YOUR OWN ARTICLE PROPERLY! You are getting the LAKE battle and the SIEGE battles of Antioch confused. The battle of the LAKE of Antioch involved, as correctly reading your own link will tell you, "700 mounted knights", who "charged out with couched lances to strike the Turkish vanguard in the flank, throwing them back in disorder into the main force". The number of 20,000 infantry is from the SIEGE Battle of Antioch, and they were not present for the LAKE Battle of Antioch. Feel free to apologize for telling me I "misinterpreted" something which you actually massively misinterpreted yourself.
8: For the purposes of talking about heavy cavalry, man and rider are considered to be one. A horse can't tell the difference between a prop spear and a real one. It's a pointy stick pointed at them, yet it didn't scare them off riding through that line of infantry.
9: Nowhere in that needlessly long quote is the length of the lances used mentioned. Did you even read that before copypasting it? It's ironic that you tell me I don't know what I'm talking about while you apparently don't even know how to read the things you're talking about!
10: A long pike can be braced on the ground. A short spear can't. If you're not bracing it on the ground, that means you're literally just holding it with your human arms. The enormous impact of a horse running at you full tilt is going to knock the spear away out of your grip, maybe the horse gets hurt in the process but there's no way you are going to hold the spear firmly in place while the horse "impales" itself on it. That's why bracing long pikes on the ground exists, because the ground takes the force of the horse charge.
11: "And does not miss" is one of the biggest problems here. That's why it DOES take them multiple attempts to kill one of the weakest enemies in the game: Accuracy. Even though in real life knights would train from a very young age to be able to hit a target on the ground with a lance.
As I have shown, in real life in the 1000s period Bannerlord is based on, heavy cavalry charges decisively won almost every battle in which they were involved. That on its own justifies buffing Bannerlord's melee cavalry (let alone the fact that melee cavalry being such a poor option is bad for gameplay). Pretty much everything else is irrelevant.