A Cunning Plan: Trample

[BigandScary]

sorry about the block of text, most of it is taken from my thesis on medieval infantry tactics. The whole point is the the greatest strength of cavalry is all based on movement, and, as you say, the battlefield mechanics are simply not up to that level of advanced combat.

[Humakty]

Yeah, and my pike wall is so much crappy, and it's principle ar so ovious for logical people I won't consider explaining why I find it so painfull to play as arcos mid or late.
An infantry well trained and prepared can wistand a cavalry charge without too many loose : Sikhs (india) have played a bad trick to english cavalry, without any polearms.
I think that if you increase their impact, you have to reduce their melee defence, for the reasons BrigandScary explained. ( a horse is almost never a 'dog of war')

[Agema]

An infantry well-trained and prepared may be able to confound a cavalry charge: assuming they have the liberty in battlefield conditions, which is far from sure. Plenty of infantry formations have been ridden down by cavalry up until the 19th century.

[Humakty]

Cavalry have not been efficient as a shock force before stirrup. It was mainly use as a mean to outmaneuver the ennemy, and give a support afterward in melee. The only people using horses as a main shock force were europeans, and I cant remember any great battle won by a brutal cavalry charge.
I'm not talking here of the mounted archers, who have a different use and are very deadly to all types of infantry.

[BigandScary]

That is not completely true, before the 14th century most conflicts(mainly in europe) were won by the army with the most heavy cavalry. The military innovations that ended this trend were, mainly, the crossbow, gunpowder, and proffesional soldiers. The tool that allowed England to defeat the french knights at Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt was the longbow, but training in a longbow took almost as long as the training of a knight, making this yet one more obsolete technology. The true killer on the medieval and rennesaince battlefield was the proffesional soldier. These men, using polearms and crossbows, and eventually firearms, could kill vast numbers of warriors that had trained their whole life for war. The only problem with these innovations is that they have slowly crippled the fighting spirit of soldiers. But, back to my origional point, while there will always be casualties when fighting heavy cavalry with a force of infantry, a man on a horse is only viable, militarily, when he is moving. The notion that cavalry can stop, as they do in dom3, and still defeat infantry, is somewhat ludicrous.

[Autochthon]

Humatky's got a point, but before the use of the stirrup, cavalry were pretty much a skirmishing force, which brings us back to the fact that Dom3 lacks skirmishing orders.

It might be a good idea to have dual-mode units that mount on the go and then dismount to fight, like dragoons. The horses are easier to come by that way. I believe the Vikings used this method quite a bit, and there was a midieval infantryman that did this too (a "hobbelar" I think.)

Another interesting point BigandScary makes is the fact that maneuvering on ancient battlefields depended a great deal in subtle undulations in the ground. These "minor" features will totally screw with Phalanx formations and Chariot charges.

The dressing of a Phalanx ranks gets messed up if they move too fast, and the chariots can't get up to speed due to their bouncing around.

Unfortunately, there isn't a feature in Dom3 where Province attributes affect battlefield terrain, which in turn modifies combat.

[Agema]

Cavalry could be used as shock troops prior to the stirrup, just not against decent heavy infantry. In a battlefield situation, calvary generally would not slog it out with infantry, they'd use their manoeuverability to withdraw and charge again. That's getting way beyond the scope of Dom3.

Secondly, it's not really the professional soldier that doomed the era of knights, it's just the firepower. There's no point training and equipping a knight who can be downed easily by a poorly-trained peasant with a powerful projectile weapon, who you can't get at because another load of peasants are holding long pointy sticks. Professionalism hasn't that much to do with it - professionals existed all throughout the medieval era to varying degree in varying nations. Byzantium, for instance, maintained a standing army just as the Romans had before them.