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horses crashing into soldiers like tanks
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Ok, I did read the Churchill writing but only from the point where the charge started because it was long. Then I wrote from memory and maybe I made mistakes like I said the flagbearer but when I looked again it said several flags. I've been reading other informations in this thread and I enjoy learning about this theme too.Michael Bolton said: said:
Let's say it was an ambush and they were placing most of their guns at the top of the slope with the intention to charge to melee if they were attacked. And they had no time to react due to the quick action. Then yes, the charge was successful even by accident because they were overwhelmed and most of the lancers came out unscathed. Still it would had been better to dismount and proceed with caution. As for the 1 or 2 seconds or more, the colonel probably decided they were too close to the enemy guns by that moment and decided not to abort. The charge was costly in injured horses which is what we have been saying.
It's possible as well the dervishes didn't have time to prepare the ambush because they were resting. Their intention was to defend the path to Omudurman no doubt, and the place was well suited for an ambush, but from the first shots the dervishes officers had to asses what was happening, and information had to be transmited to them. When it was clear the lancers were coming at them they ordered to attack as well. But clearly they were not ready because 12 ranks deep could be useful in medieval times, not in modern times when they should have been seeking cover in the reverse slope and spreading toward the sides. I don't think their plan was to lure the lancers into a charge, which neither the english nor the dervishes were expecting.
This is my view, and I make mistakes too. I said your arguments are a pain refering to things like the wedge, the water in the khor, the horse with the mass of ten horses... I may be wrong about the ambush but I don't want to look every sentence and every word again. You did your research ok, and there are many quotes and comments from present and past historians or politicians that may say one thing and still be wrong. That's why I like to read about these themes like you.
In any case, I'm sorry it's true my last comment was personal and bad tempered. And about clones and similar, I have my suspitions too, sometimes, but I don't think someone who takes the time to write with sense is a clone or a troll.
Hoping to move forward, yesterday I was watching an interesting video about the battle at Banockburn.
They are buses. What the hell do you think happens when an animal over 800 pounds, with the additional weight of any armor it might be wearing, and the 160-240 additional pounds of armored rider do to infantry? Horses should absolutely smash infantry that gets in their way like a bus for virtue of it being a massive animal that can crush steel. The caveat is that the number of players who can play as cavalry classes should be limited in a fashion similar to Battlefront 2 (the EA one) or the Rising Storm games, with the allowance of cavalry classes varying between the factions and the nature of the class selected.
Actually what should be a mechanic isn't bracing. Bracing as it was in warband is idiotic as it's not really how pikes work - if you kill a horse charging head on at you with a pike, you're dead too from the massive animal still carrying its forward momentum and snapping the pike. Or you just get poked in the face by a lance, as lances should generally be able to outrange pikes and definitely outrange all spears when bracing. Rather what should be a mechanic is the ability to knock riders off their mounts with sufficient blunt trauma. Such as using the riding skill as a skill check against a dice roll where each time you take damage over a certain threshold if you're knocked off your mount. The higher the riding skill of the respective unit (light cavalry vs elite cavalry), the more likely you are to keep a hold on the horse.
Although what bannerlord really needs is
1) horses still deal (blunt) damage when killed and rolling into the thing that killed them
2) falling off your horse should also deal blunt damage.
3) a horse being shot out from under you should also deal blunt damage from the impact of the fall
You might be cautious to not fall into the pit of eurocentrism. The very purpose of the Cataphract is to -riding a heavily barded horse, often down to the horse's shins or ankles- slam into the enemy at a fast trotting pace before getting stuck in with melee until either the enemy broke or the fight was lost. To quote the Praecepta Militaria on the tactics of the deployment of Kataphraktoi ~Well people who falsely believe Hollywood myth of horse as a battering ram have a problem, because while you can somehow imagine horse colliding with the unarmed men, horse colliding in to spears and pikes, is complete idiocy. Such horse would be impaling itself. In Hollywood films and computer games, this isn't an issue, because it's not a reality of course and films and games solve such issue simply by pretending that it does not exist. In the film, horse can pass spear or pike as easily as sword can cut through plate armor.
Now people who believe this myth of course have to somehow explain how can you collide horse on to a pike planted in to the ground and not impale it, and they usually do so by saying that horse is "heavily armored".
Reality is of course that 99% of the horses that did charge infantry did not had any armor protection. You can look Bayeux tapestry for example if in doubt.
But that's only part of the reason whole horse as a battering ram myth falls apart. Other part is that while you can put armor on a horse, it's very difficult to protect horse legs. They are for most part unprotected:
Of course legs are the most fragile and vulnerable part of the horse body and at the same time they are the most exposed to the collision with the infantry and it's weapons.
So yes, your point is of curse perfectly valid. Horse crashing full speed in to the dense formation of infantry several ranks deep would very likely trip over and throw it's rider down. I have already posted video of the head on collision between race horse and woman -horse tripped over and had to be put down later due to the injuries it received during the fall. And it's also clear from Churchill's account that at last part of the horses in 21th Lancers threw their riders down during head on collision. 21th lancers lost full 1/3 of their horses in the collision and short fighting afterwards.
Colliding horses makes no sense on many levels, form level of the economy of force to horse biology and mentality to pure physics. But Hollywood is hard to beat with logic. Anything is possible on the screen and people who newer read any books will blindly believe what they saw on the screen, because that's the art of the film making ...making viewer believe that what is happening on the screen is real. Or at last believable.
And computer games unfortunately add to the mess. Way too many people here base their believes on what they learned playing the Total War games. Hence inability to realize that "charge" in real world literature does not mean head on collision and real soldiers, horses and weapons does not have "shock attack value" and "hit points". Horse with broken leg is written off and it's HP is not 90%.
"Then the front of the triangular formation must move in proper formation at a trotting pace and smash into the position of the enemy commander while the outflankers on the outside encircle the enemy as far as possible and the other two units proceed on both flanks with perfect precision and enveness with the rear ranks of the kataphraktoi without getting too far ahead or breaking rank in any way. With the aid of God and through the intercession of His immaculate Mother the enemy will be overcome and give way to flight." pg 47 of Sowing the Dragons Teeth by Eric McGeer, folio IV.121-IV.154
While they would not crash into the enemy at full charge (although that may have changed in the high middle ages when the Roman army became heavily latinized with mercenaries and began to adopt some of latin tactics), they were meant to crash, physically, into the enemy at moderate speed and bulldoze them with a mixture of the impact of the mounts, throwing maces, lances, and general hacking of the enemy with swords or cavalry maces. The Jin Dynasty meanwhile would conduct full crashing charges into the heart of enemy infantry, then retreat immediately or even dismount to act as heavy infantry.
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In other words, you only read half of it, and are basing your replies on an incomplete understanding of the situation. The muskets were deployed on level ground in a weak skirmish line, with the nearly invisible line of depression behind them, and with most of the troops hidden in that depression until the cavalry began their charge. It appeared to be a perfect opportunity for a cavalry charge, if that was what you wanted to do, although trading fire, with far superior British firearms, would still have been the safer and better approach. It was DEFINITELY an ambush, from ALL of the descriptions given.
Despite the ambush, the charge STILL pressed through the mass of men to the other side. You don't do that by walking the horses casually up to the enemy and gradually shoving them aside while you fight your way through with sabers and spears, or there would have been a lot closer to equal casualties on each side, if not a complete disaster for the British. It mentions that they were SLOWED to a walk as they fought through to the other side, not that they contacted the enemy at a walk.
I am seriously confused by your insistence on picking details out of context and using those to support your argument, when most of the body of the texts run completely contrary to your argument.
Is anyone else reading this thread while eating popcorn? Because I am reading this thread while eating popcorn.
I agree on most of what you say but, look at the video about the battle of Banockburn, knights and horses were killed attacking pikes. It's not the same a wedge formation than several formations arranged in a triangular shape. There is no advantage in attacking with a single troop at the tip because if there is any solid resistance it will be easily stopped and the following troops will form a line to support it, so why would you do that?
I don't doubt heavily armored cavalry attacked infantry formations head on. I think it was still dangerous for horses and those units were few in numbers. Cavalry was rare, armored horses were even rarer.
Yes, and I read the whole text recently. I don't want to make a long post because I already said what I still think. I know most people just read the last comment and why not, who wants to read whole pages in a forum thread but there they are.
What I and others have been saying is that there is a myth created by movies and games about cavalry destroying infantry lines with ease, when at the very least those cavalry charges should be costly because horses are expensive and difficult to replace.
What details out of context? Maybe it's you who didn't read what I said.
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Yes war horses were bred and trained to charge, kick, and bite and they were the most feared force on the battlefield from the mid 10th century to Napoleonic times. But horses will not charge into a wall of shields and spears. Think about the battle of Hastings if the Norman heavy horse at the time was capable of running through the Anglo Saxon shield wall then why didn't they do it from the start. Instead they tried to soften the shield wall with arrows and wave after wave of lighter skirmishing troops including light horse with javelins. Only after the heavy infantry engagement when the Normans turned and ran (or it was a tactic to run - history seams unclear) did the Norman Cav charge and win the day. This was proven many more times with viking/french battles in mainland France. When the Vikings took Paris they first had to defeat the French Knights in open battle. There are many examples of this. Cav Charges were used strategically not as a be all end all. Another example is Avincourt (Spelling ?) some over confident french commander though charging elite long bowman and a shield wall on muddy terrain was a good idea. Back on topic cav charges should be the most devastating force in the game but only under certain circumstances. In my opinion they should not be able to charge head long into a wall of spears or take 8 arrows and keep on chugging along but in the open if you get run over it should dam near or kill you. It would be like getting hit by Harley going 35 miles an hour.
If the goal was to physically "slam into the enemy", gallop would be better, wouldn't it?
You are inventing things that are not even in your cited text. "Smashing in to position" and "crash, physically, into the enemy" are two different things. Position is an abstract thing. You can't "physically" crash in to it. You can crash in to it only metaphorically.
Moreover you did not even read what Praecepta Militaria writes about Kataphraktoi, because it tells specifically how to do "smashing in to position":
It is necessary for the comander of the army to have the triangular formation of kataphraktoi at the ready and the other two units which accompany it,and, on whichever front enemy is facing, have them move out through those internals very calmly in proper formation. Even if enemy formation is made up of infantry, that is to say heavy infantry, the kataphraktoi should not be apprehensive but should proceed to attack very calmly (even if enemy formation is made up of infantry, as mentioned), and aim triangular formation of the kataphraktoi right at the spot where commander of the enemy army is standing. And then the spears of the enemy infantry in the front lines will be smashed by the kataphraktoi, while arrows will be ineffective, as will javelins of their javeliners. Then with the help of God, they will turn to flight.
And with God lending us aid through the intercession of His immaculate Mother, the enemy will be routed by this triangular formation of the kataphraktoi. For the enemy spear and pikes will be shattered by the kataphraktoi and their arrows will be ineffective, whereupon, the kataphraktoi, gaining in courage and boldness, will smash in the heads and bodies of the enemy and their horses with their iron maces and sabers, they will break in to and dismember their formations and from there break through and so completely destroy them.
When the enemy troops do turn to flight, it is not the kataphraktoi who should undertake the pursuit but their two accompanying units trailing behind them.
There is no mention of colliding horses anywhere. Attack is meant to break enemy in to rout, specifically directed at enemy leadership to increase effect. And it's meant to be done by smashing enemy heads and heads of their horses with maces and sabers NOT with horses. Heavy armor of the horses is not meant to turn it in to a heavy battering ram, it's meant to allow kataphract to close in with the enemy and engage him with those maces and sabers by protecting horse from enemy arrows, javelins and spears.
Note also that treatise talk about attacks in general and attacking heavy infantry formation is emphasized in the treatise as something that is normally to be apprehensive about.
All in all treatise confirms what I was saying all along here: that horse is not a weapon, that cavalry charge is meant to disturb enemy formation by routing him and that it's done by actually engaging him in the melee fight with real weapons, not by any Hollywood rugby techniques. In other words cavalry charges worked the very same way infantry charges did, horse simply gives cavalry charge mobility, speed and larger intimidation effect. Armor is there to give protection from weapons, not to add weight.
And the last thing, now compare kataphract that was dressed head to toe in armor and had armored horse and compare it to the Norman knight from Bayeux tapestry with his open faced helmet and mail shirt plus completely naked horse and tell me how Norman charge at the battle of Hastings looked like, because there was nothing to shatter enemy spears, lances, arrows and javelins. So how did they charge?
Churchill clearly says that number of riders and their horses were overthrown on the impact, that "terrified" horses were "wedged in the crowd", that impact was so debilitating that for ten seconds nobody even heeded his enemy and several riders even had time to remount their horses, that "officers forced their way through", rest "followed", that their pace was reduced to walk and it was not "as they fought", because killing started only when riders reached the other side of the khor.
So no, what you suggest is nowhere in the text to be found, nor anything in the text could be interpreted the way you do. But you can explain why according to your theory only "officer" horses had enough weight to "shoot through" the dervishes and why horses of ordinary troopers did not, if their horses were just projectiles carried across by sheer momentum.
"The collision was prodigious. Nearly thirty Lancers, men and horses, and at least two hundred Arabs were overthrown. The shock was stunning to both sides, and for perhaps ten wonderful seconds no man heeded his enemy. Terrified horses wedged in the crowd; bruised and shaken men, sprawling in heaps, struggled, dazed and stupid, to their feet, panted, and looked about them. Several fallen Lancers had even time to remount.
Meanwhile the impetus of the cavalry carried them on. As a rider tears through a bullfinch, the officers forced their way through the press; and as an iron rake might be drawn through a heap of shingle, so the regiment followed. They shattered the Dervish array, and, their pace reduced to a walk, scrambled out of the khor on the further side, leaving a score of troopers behind them, and dragging on with the charge more than a thousand Arabs. Then, and not till then, the killing began; and thereafter each man saw the world along his lance, under his guard, or through the back-sight of his pistol; and each had his own strange tale to tell."
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I just wanted to take a moment to brag about how off the mark a lot of the fears about this ended up being, as well as how differently it all handles from what a certain "duo" were suggesting.
crucifier
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1. Do you really think a baseball which travels at 50+mph would impart the same force on you as a bus traveling at 50+mph? Momentum = M*V, the M is mass, V velocity. Please do not try to use physics as an argument here.
2. That is the entire point of cavalry. Their primary purpose is to destroy unit formations and get out before they take many casualties. Horses that are 1000+lb can wear ****loads more armor than a person and thus are extremely resilient and could easily trample a lot of people, especially they hit the flank and the infantry are not braced at all for the attack.
3. Cavalry is already weak compared to their real life counterparts since archers/crossbowmen/skirmishers in this game have inhuman accuracy while cavalry misses a considerable amount of their hits when smashing ranks and actually running dudes over with an 1000+ lb horse does almost no damage.
If you want to balance cavalry, they should just be more expensive to maintain but their effectiveness is actually much lower than it probably should be.
Kircholm is not an example, whatsoever. The PLC Cavalry routed the Swedish Cavalry, which retreated right through the middle of the Swedish "pike" blocks, which were advancing and assembling, and didn't actually have enough pikes to be reasonably called pike infantry, something Gustavus Adolfus rectified in his reforms on the heels of Kircholm. The Polish Hussars rode on the heels of the retreating Swedish cavalry, and as the swedish infantry opened their ranks to allow the fleeing swedish cavalry to ride off, the PLC cavalry rode right through those gaps. They didn't charge into the teeth of pike infantry. They rode through gaps made by enemy cavalry.
Any shock action undertaken throughout history by cavalry, has been the exception to the rule, not the rule itself. There are so many reasons why this is fact, but I'll just wade into a few reasons. First, cavalry, any sort of cavalry, that rides headlong into closer order infantry, with enough depth to absorb the initial crash, dies. All of it dies. Period. The first horses and men that go in, create a mass of dead and dying men and horses, that each subsequent rank of cavalry plows into, to meet the same fate, and create an even more impassible writhing mass of flesh.
Next, let's look at the social makeup of cavalry throughout antiquity and into the medieval period through to the 19th century. In the European tradition, it is almost entirely composed of upper class, nobility. Ramming the future leaders of your country/kingdom/state into a mass of peasants, isn't very smart. The value of cavalry, was in its existence just as much as its potential for carnage. It mirrors the fleet in being doctrine of late 19th early 20th century navies in a way. You needed cavalry to counter their cavalry, you couldn't risk it in a pointless suicidal frontal charge against peasants.
Let's address the economic aspect now. You can take 256 guys, give them 15 foot poles with a sharp end, spend a few weeks teaching them drill, and they are a fairly effective fighting force. It takes a lifetime to train a skilled cavalryman. The investment in resources to train a pikeman, or a crossbowman, compared to a cavalryman isn't a comparison. Cavalry is too valuable to throw into a meat grinder.
Why is it valuable? It's valuable for its presence, and the implications of its presence. As a rule, cavalry did not lower lances, and plow into close order infantry with sufficient depth to absorb the charge. It just didn't. There are exceptions of course, but as a rule, it just didn't happen. What it did, was charge, as in, the verb, to charge. This is an action, not an outcome. Cavalry charged, over and over again. It was playing a meta game of chicken with the infantry it was facing. If the infantry wavered, broke, loss order, the cavalry could, and would exploit. Plowing into a gap and riding through. However, if the infantry did not disorder itself, then the cavalry wheeled away at the last second, and reset, or it attacked obliquely in the cavalry form of a drive-by, lancing/spearing the corners of the infantry formation.
The true value of cavalry, wasn't in plowing into infantry headlong, that is either a ****up, or an act of desperation. The value of cavalry is psychological. Cavalry appearing behind you is a very bad sign. Even if the battle is going in your favor, enemy cavalry behind you, or on your flank uncontested puts infantry in a very precarious psychological state. Slaughter comes after the retreat in almost all cases, if you're confronted with cavalry uncontested in a threatening position, you're left with, ignoring it, or reconciling what it probably means, and that means you don't want to be the last SOB to turn and run, even when that is literally the last thing you want to do. This is how Alexander used his cavalry. Slip them into a place they shouldn't be, and watch the enemy collapse.
Economically, it makes no sense to ride cavalry into the face of ordered infantry. Socially it makes no sense to send the flower of your upper class into the face of a mob of peasants who can, and will kill them to the man, in a gruesome pileup of horse and man. Tactically it makes no sense, when the advantage of cavalry is to counter other cavalry, and to ride down easy targets when the actual fighting is over.
We do need to address a couple of other issues now. First, why we can't take all medieval historians for granted when it comes to the efficacy and battle winning prowess of cavalry. The vast majority of this historiography, was written by the nobility, the people riding the horses, and vested in giving themselves good PR. That said, there is a very stark contrast between different eras that cover the era of cavalry. During the early medieval period, immediately following the collapse of the WRE, this was undoubtedly the peak era of cavalry for Europe. We're talking about men who trained all their lives to fight on horseback, typically facing an enemy army that was primarily a rabble of peasants with zero drill, no real weapons or tactical training. This was the perfect environment for cavalry to operate in. Loose groups of ill-trained peasants with no discipline, or understanding of how to counter cavalry. Push a few hundred years into the future, and things change. The moment drilled infantry shows up again in Europe, cavalry is relegated to a support role for all the reasons I've gone over. They can't ride into a press of men, and not end up with broken horse legs, and impaled horses creating a wall of dead and dying flesh for followup rank to crash into. Since they couldn't do this, they certainly wouldn't waste their future leaders, or the tremendous investment to train these warriors in this manner.
Lastly, the vast majority of these examples of frontal cavalry charges, are not exactly frontal cavalry charges, ala Kircholm. There was something else going on that allowed it to happen. From a dragoon being shot dead and careening into a pike square, busting it open, allowing followup dragoons to ride into the square, and then pursuing the survivors into the middle of a second square that opened up to receive the survivors, to chasing fleeing cavalry into gaps they forced open in their own lines.
You don't have to do anything but stand there, and the guy to your left and right stand there, and the 5 guys behind you stand there, and the 5 guys to either side of those guys stand there. At that point, the people receiving said charge don't really have an active role in what is about to happen, other than they are about to experience what it is like to have a horse slam into them. However, there is this thing called physics. Those lead horses, as they turn the first 3 or 4 guys into pulverized skin bags, lose momentum, trip, break legs, come to a halt, and then everything behind them piles into them as well.
Horses are not magical creatures, that defy the laws of physics. They have inertia, they lose inertia. They have delicate legs, they break delicate legs. They can trip and stumble just like you can. It's a zero sum game. Either the first animals have the inertia to penetrate the entire depth of the formation, or they don't. If they do, they make it through. If they don't, they stop, and everything behind them stops, and then it's a massacre. Both forces take horrendous casualties. One of those forces are the nobility, with decades of training, and the other force are levies, or militia, that have weeks, maybe months of training.
Yes it's going to absolutely suck to be on the receiving end of that, but at that point, you don't really have much of a choice. If the cavalry is intent on a suicidal frontal charge, either you turn and run, and die, or, you hold firm, and hope you don't die, but at least satisfied in the knowledge that the lunatics who just rode their medieval equivalent ferraris into a wall of men, whose collective net worth isn't equal to ONE of the horses that is about to die.
CryptidByte
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I'll add my two cents. Pikes were invented WAY later into the game, and showed up in the Late Medieval era. Cavalry started to have a seriously hard time keeping up in the Early Modern age. Given this game takes place before Warband, horses should be more effective based on historical examples, not less. The fact you need a real horse to upgrade troops in that direction, and a warhorse for a larger upgrade helps. Perhaps increasing food costs for horses in inventory would help too. There's several ways to tackle this, without trying to insist on an outdated and dull Rock-Paper-Scissors mechanic that takes away from the majesty and power of these animals.
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