Please make shield wall like this......

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That's a lot of very closely packed dudes crouching in awkward postures just trying to make the shields look good from the front. One cav charge and these guys are all going to get crushed, some by the charging horses, others under the body weight of their comrades. And as the crowd starts to panic stampede would lead to more death. No. This is movie fighting at its worst.
 
i think that the whole issue of cavalry charging has to be
re-adressed in the historical community.
f.e(1), a medieval horse would charge a shieldwall of spearmen,
and it is said and re-said by historians, that they actualy were.
but on a 2nd example it is well dommented that in the napoleonic era,
no horse no matter what, would never charge a square of infantry with bayonnets.
that is well researched and confirmed by historians.

this seems obscure to me, and i haven't reached anything that seems conclusive.
why would a horse charge a wall of spears, with spears 2, or 3 metters?
and not a relatively small range of sticks 1.5 meters?
if anybody knows something about that please share it.
 
no horse no matter what, would never charge a square of infantry with bayonnets.
that is well researched and confirmed by historians.
Even though back in the 17th century horses were capable of charging straight at literal pike blocks? (Winged Hussars used in the wars against Swedish Empire and the Russian Empire in early 17th century)
I'm not going to say those charges were 100% successful, but they happened. So saying that a horse will never, ever do it is contrary to historical events that transpired.
 
Damn. That looks effective, but how do you fit the 4 rows of people holding those shields under the wall? I don't object to getting nuts to butt to save my life, but those guys would have to be inside each other for all of them to be protected from arrows.

By the way, that row of shields still isn't going to stop the charge of a row of 1000-2000 pound horses running at 20 miles an hour.
Horses don't charge walls,they will try to jump or they will stop. They usually charge until reach the enemy, use lances to open a gap and then try to enter. But usually they charge flanks or made a frontal attack against a target depleted by archers.
 
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i think that the whole issue of cavalry charging has to be
re-adressed in the historical community.
f.e(1), a medieval horse would charge a shieldwall of spearmen,
and it is said and re-said by historians, that they actualy were.
but on a 2nd example it is well dommented that in the napoleonic era,
no horse no matter what, would never charge a square of infantry with bayonnets.
that is well researched and confirmed by historians.

this seems obscure to me, and i haven't reached anything that seems conclusive.
why would a horse charge a wall of spears, with spears 2, or 3 metters?
and not a relatively small range of sticks 1.5 meters?
if anybody knows something about that please share it.

Who said this? There cannot be mathematic rules, for neither time. Quite often ancient and medieval battles are very badly documented, most often we do not know how a cavalry charge succeeded. There were battles where seemingly frontal charges into infantry formations had success, and there were battles where they obviously had not, Hastings 1066 AD for example.

Infantry squares of the Napoleonic era could be broken by cavalry, and they were broken, under certain circumstances. So your basic thesis, cavalry could break infantry in the medieval times and could not in Napoleonic times, is not true.

In 18th/19th century military training manuals the general rule is however that cavalry usually cannot break determined infantry in a static formation as long as the moral of the infantry did not drop before. So it was a huge difference wether cavalry attacked a formation of fresh troops, compared to troops who had been under infantry and/or artillery fire for a prolonged time.
 
this is saxon shield wall. Its an unmoving shield wall. Which means still highly open to flanking calvary. Would be good against incoming volley's.
 
That's a lot of very closely packed dudes crouching in awkward postures just trying to make the shields look good from the front. One cav charge and these guys are all going to get crushed, some by the charging horses, others under the body weight of their comrades.
Unfortunately this does not work in Bannerlord at all. The cav charge is more like a joke atm.
There was a mod which made realistic charges. That was great. I have no idea why TW does not fix the cav charge.
A looter or any footman hit by a full speed cav charge would be either knocked out for some time or seriously injured. Instead of this you see strange very gentle push of troops. It's a joke.
 
Because you can win every single fight with 40 horsemen, just running over your enemies. It was dumb.
How about compensate that with anti-cav units? Spearman, pikeman etc...
I mean if the party is full of pheasants thats how it should end up against 40 cav.
Dumb is how it is now.
 
How about compensate that with anti-cav units? Spearman, pikeman etc...
I mean if the party is full of pheasants thats how it should end up against 40 cav.
Dumb is how it is now.
A falling horse, realistically, would still kill or wound men.

Treating horses as battering rams is idiotic.
 
i think that the whole issue of cavalry charging has to be
re-adressed in the historical community.
f.e(1), a medieval horse would charge a shieldwall of spearmen,
and it is said and re-said by historians, that they actualy were.
but on a 2nd example it is well dommented that in the napoleonic era,
no horse no matter what, would never charge a square of infantry with bayonnets.
that is well researched and confirmed by historians.

There are a few things worth commenting on:
- "no horses charged a napoleonic infantry square" is not true
- Napoleonic cavalry as an umbrella term is not very useful. Hussars, cuirassrers and uhlans had different tasks on and off the battlefield
- Napoleonic infantry were not armed with 1,5m sticks. The bullets (and the lack of body armor because of it) makes a big difference
- medieval (pre-baroque) infantry blocks in general were not made up of drilled soldiers like in the 1800's. (there are a few exceptions, like hussites, brabancon, etc.)
- heavy cavalry charges usually worked, even against spearmen. The best defense against cavalry was not the spear, but terrain (hill, swamp, mud), and digging a trench or two.
- even the best early medieval infantry army, with good training, discipline, battlefield experience AND leadership (Charles Martel's franks) struggled with arab heavy cavalry. They struggled with this so much, that based on this experience, Charles started to organize a heavy cavalry force himself.
- cavalry charges were popular for an other reason too: the nobility had the best chances of survival on horseback, in armor. Even if this meant charging infantry sometimes, it was still a better option than to be the guy holding the spear on foot.
 
Didn't the Romans use interlocking shields in the 'Testudo' - formation and the Byzantiens used something similar called a 'fulcum' to advance through arrow fire.

Philip Rance: The „Fulcum“, the Late Roman and Byzantine „Testudo“: the Germanization of Roman Infantery Tactics? In: Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies. 44, 2004

And those were inspired by the Greek Phalanx where each soldier was covered by his neighbor's shield on his weak side. Just browsing a bit in wiki I find many historical examples from the classic ages and medieval ages.
Isn't that the "turtle" shield formation for the romans and shield wall for the vikings?
 
Battering rams? Where did you get that?
From actually running the enhanced charge damage mod. You could take cavalry's weapons away from them entirely and still utterly crush everything not mounted on the battlefield -- literally.
Adding huge trample damage without the attendant risk of being thrown off and severely injured will do more to distort the tactics in Bannerlord than having slip-and-slide charges that do puffball damage. Because if you can easily and reliably trample infantry formations wholesale, then it becomes the go-to use for cavalry.

Just look at this ****:

Every single shield and weapon you see go flying is a dead footman.

Do you want to see Bannerlord where you can trample anything in front of you and don't need to care about anything like tactics or equipment? Because that's what happens when a charging horse is the best weapon. If you personally want that kind of dumbed-down experience, by all means, mod it so charge damage is ~50 per horse or higher.

But leave that stupid **** to mods.
 
Even though back in the 17th century horses were capable of charging straight at literal pike blocks? (Winged Hussars used in the wars against Swedish Empire and the Russian Empire in early 17th century)
I'm not going to say those charges were 100% successful, but they happened. So saying that a horse will never, ever do it is contrary to historical events that transpired.

i don't know a lot about 17 century warfare. i know tho that the lances carried by the winged-hussars were
a lot longer than most cavalry units in history. so thatat least the mount 'felt' the distance of reach above it's head.
are you sure that the horses charged straight a t lances? in my understanding that would
be a excellent way to destroy your cavalry forces.
now we go to historic sources. it's a huge topic. who wrote them, why, was something he needed
to report or something he wanted to report.
anyway in the 1700's, a strategy that was used by the cavalry, if the ennemy infatry was
coherent, was that they would gallop near the ennemy infantry, shoot them with pistols.
and then retreat.
battles were fought for hours, maybe to make the matter more clear. it probably
happened to give the general's more time to hit, at weak points, such as a disrupted formation.

@Askorti napoleonic war, is the first war that has the priviledge to be documented so well,
from multiple and different sources, that most of the academic community has found itself
unable to contribute much more, after the original plethora of original texts.
the fact that the cavalry force was unable to break a square, is documented so many
times that you have to instead search the times a square was broken, you have to dig up the times a cavalry square
was indeed broke.
in my reading of napoleonic warfare i have yet to find more than 5 to (max) 10, 'squares'
being destroyed while beinging tp form square.
 
the fact that the cavalry force was unable to break a square, is documented so many times that you have to instead search the times a square was broken, you have to dig up the times a cavalry square was indeed broke. in my reading of napoleonic warfare i have yet to find more than 5 to (max) 10, 'squares' being destroyed while beinging tp form square.

Cavalry squares were kind of a self fulfilling prophecy like the Old Guard and British "cold steel". A single cavalryman making it into the inside of a square would cause guys to shuffle and turn around, eventually unzipping the entire formation. But nobody wanted to send 1000 heavy cavalry to maybe possibly break an infantry square when they could just blast it with artillery or even better just shoot at it. Not all countries in that era used squares either, so they weren't perfect.

Either way there is no possible way to say what would or wouldn't happen in these circumstances because routs in battles are almost completely unpredictable. Elite battalions of well drilled professionals would sometimes rout if they heard nearby noises, or if their officer happened to walk to the back of the line, or someone shouted suddenly. Conversely you have lines of infantry shooting each other to pieces over hours and hours, seemingly for no reason. All the napoleonic manuals and reports in the world will never give more than a vague snapshot of contradictory information.
 
@Askorti napoleonic war, is the first war that has the priviledge to be documented so well,
from multiple and different sources, that most of the academic community has found itself
unable to contribute much more, after the original plethora of original texts.
the fact that the cavalry force was unable to break a square, is documented so many
times that you have to instead search the times a square was broken, you have to dig up the times a cavalry square
was indeed broke.
in my reading of napoleonic warfare i have yet to find more than 5 to (max) 10, 'squares'
being destroyed while beinging tp form square.

Napoleonic cavalry and square is not a good comparison.
- guns (much more important than the bayonet)
- difference in the role of cavalry (hussars/light cavalry was not armed with lances and armor)
- difference in the origins of cavalrymen (conscripts vs. nobility)
- difference in the equipment of cavalry (which limits their use)



If you don't want to accept pre-Nappy written sources, because of biased viewpoints, it will be difficult to discuss this topic :smile:
 
Infantry squares of the Napoleonic era could be broken by cavalry, and they were broken, under certain circumstances. So your basic thesis, cavalry could break infantry in the medieval times and could not in Napoleonic times, is not true.

when we are counting 1000 times a square hold, to 1 or 5 or10 times a square was broken, then it doesn't
diminish theargument, it strenghthens it. yes there were a few times that a square was
broken, but if the percentage is so minimal then you just make an argument for the opposite site.

@Kentucky 『 HEIGUI 』 James wars in napoleomic era were chaotic. massive cavalry
charges were present in all battles fought. with maybe one exception the battles and skirmishes
during the retreat from moscow.

yes there were times that squares were broken by a single horseman. but it was extremelly
rare that something like this would happen.
 
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