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Old February 25th, 2008, 12:22 PM

Agema Agema is offline
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Default Re: \'Skirmish\' command

A skirmish command would be perfect for light cavalry.

Horse archers are expensive, and I've never seen much use for them in Dom, except those reasonably tooled up for melee as well. I guess they're pretty versatile with a high mapmove, though, if you want to dash armies around quickly.

I do think that hoof attacks for light cavalry is very unrealistic though. Light cavalry were never used as shock troops. Even heavy cavalry are overrated. There's barely a battle in history where there was a decisive cavalry charge against infantry which won the battle.

In the ancient era heavy cavalry were used to drive off light infantry and defeat the opposing cavalry on the wings, not to charge heavy infantry.

In the medieval era, knights were used as shock troops. However, they were successful because the infantry of the era were unprofessional, so tended to be both disorganised and of poor morale, who could be broken up. Whenever knights attacked infantry with resolve and cohesion, the infantry were comfortable winners (e.g. Bannockburn, Battle of the Golden Spurs, lots of battles with the Swiss). The myth of knight superiority is added to by the fact they were essentially the ruling classes, who ensured that their performance and skill was emphasised or exaggerated when historians and poets spoke of their deeds.
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