1: Why should I?
2: I didn't say they are invalid excuses. There is always valid reason why one side won and other side lost. That does not change fact that when French charged at Crecy, they did not intend to loose.
3: Did Alexander's companions know that they can't "fully apply the force of their charge" against Persians or nobody told them again? Yet cavalry charges existed for centuries before that. And also existed for centuries after they stooped to use couched lance.
4: Speaking of couched lance, did you know that Norman cavalry at Hastings did not use couched lance? Or that Franks did not use couched lance at the battle of lake Antioch? Of course you did not. You're mixing things up without understanding timescale and relations between events.
5: They won the battle all right, they just failed every single of their cavalry charges.
6: 200, rest of the Franks did not have horses to ride so they charged on foot. You're pulling numbers out of thin air.
7: And even then when horses were supposed to actually collide in to them, they refused. I have already exposed that video elsewhere. When you watch that video in slow mo or by frames, you will see that those few horses that managed to pass through actually did not collide to anybody and those horses that could not because they would have to collide in to somebody, refused to do so.
8: That's the point, they don't look threatening.
9: I don't care when Machiavelli wrote The Prince. It's citation from Art of War, a different book. And Machiavelli wrote it at the time of maximum height of heavy cavalry development in Europe. Besides lesson is universal, horse will not willingly charge in to a spear point, does not matter how long the shaft of the spear is.
1: Because that's how an argument works. You're claiming that everyone else is wrong and that cavalry were actually super weak in real life in Bannerlord's time period, and if you're going to make that statement it's up to you to provide proof. I've already provided plenty of proof of cavalry charges being enormously effective against infantry and resulting in victory.
2: Sure. I didn't say they intended to lose. But how is that relevant to the discussion? If anything, the fact they didn't intend to lose and were overconfident is a strong indicator that people generally considered mounted cavalry charges to be quite an effective way of winning battles. Also, more importantly: Battles from the 1300s, with 200 years advancement of military technology and tactics, are largely irrelevant to discussions about Bannerlord's 1000s setting.
3: Nobody is saying cavalry charges didn't exist before the 1000s. I am saying that
the level of power that could be achieved through a cavalry charge had not been seen up to that point. That's why Byzantine Emperor Manuel I went to the trouble of retraining all his cataphracts in "Frankish-style" couched lance techniques, because they were so effective.
I like how in your version of real life, some of the most elite troops in the world dedicated their lives to practicing something that was apparently super ineffective!
4:
The Norman cavalry at hastings DID use couched lances, it's on the damn Bayeux Tapestry. More importantly this argument is about heavy cavalry charges in the 8th-12th centuries in general. Not just about couched lances. I've just looked at some of the primary sources for the Battle of the Lake of Antioch and I'm wondering where you get your information that they "didn't use couched lances".
5: If each charge gradually wears down the stamina and morale of the infantry on the ground until they finally break and run, and forces them to hunker down in a single place, and thus eventually wins the battle then it's not a failure, it's a success.
6:
"At this point in the siege the crusaders had very few mounted knights at their disposal - only 700 total". Do you actually have a source or are you just going to keep accusing people of pulling numbers out of thin air while doing it yourself?
7: What BS are you spouting? The guy at the front was sent FLYING. At least 4 other people got bowled over by horses as well.
8: They look literally just as threatening as 90% of the spears that people are equipped with in Bannerlord, and you're also refusing to acknowledge that not all infantry in bannerlord even have spears, and none of them have super long pikes as were used in the 1300s and onward.
9: Mental slip since I associate his name with "The Prince", I knew it was a different book. Anyway, Machiavelli wrote Art of War in the 1500s. The world had fully adapted to the most effective possible way of dealing with cavalry by using VERY long pikes, hence the Pike and Shot era. But in the 1000s, and in Bannerlord itself, such super-long pikes were not a common battlefield weapon at all. Therefore, horses refusing to charge a super-long braced pikewall in the 1500s is not relevant to a discussion about a game set in the 1000s where you don't have super-long pikes and you can't brace them.
Here is further description of a devastating single cavalry charge.
https://books.google.com.au/books?i...tly+timed#v=snippet&q=perfectly timed&f=false
The amazing thing here is that you actually think it's okay that highest-tier Vlandian cavalry take multiple attempts to even kill the ****tiest, weakest looters in the game. Somehow to you that's a great state of affairs, and you'll clutch at every straw you can to defend it.