A Cunning Plan: Trample

[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.

[Humakty]

One thing appears ater this discussion :
Never as a weapon been supreme, there have always been efficient maneuvers to counter each tactic.
True military efficacity relies on how you employ what you've got, at a precise momentum... Sun Tzu as explained it all far better than I could do.
What gives a unit its 'elite' status relies maybe more in the way you use it, than on it's intrisic qualities.
ie: an average cavalry force, charging at the right time can turn the odds in the favor of their army, even if they cannot win the battle alone.

[BigandScary]

First of all, I don't mean that there were no professional soldiers during the middle ages, but the rising trend in professionalism was the thing that defeated chivalry and the knight. If a band of twenty knights was to flank one of those giant pike block the peasantry would run like frightened rabbits. Thats why many of the soldiers used in those formations, and many of the other elements of battle at the time, were professional mercenaries. The best example of this are the Landsknechts, German mercenaries that fought in almost every pre 17th century conflict. These companies, sometimes as large as 25,000 men, dominated the battlefields, easily defeating the peasant armies of Bavaria and many other countries. Also, the most devestating soldiers on any pike driven battlefield were the doppelsoldners, elite professionals who were payed double the wages of other soldiers because they would wade into enemy pike formations and break them up, letting their own forces push through.

Also, while the stirrup was a major innovation, its main strength in the cavalry charge was to allow the effective use of a lance, and to allow greater reach in combat. The early cavalry forces could still charge with some effectiveness, but cavalry vs. cavalry combat was mighty strange.

[Agema]

If knights still had a useful function on a battlefield in a professional army era we should expect to have seen large bands of mercenaries taking over that role.

I think we're maybe confusing two issues: the social role of a feudal knight; and the battlefield function of a knight, which is to say heavily-armoured cavalry.

The rise of mercenaries and professional armies was largely about the social limitations (and therefore eventual decline) of the feudal/chivalric system. That's mostly an off-battlefield issue, and hence the decline of the *knight*. On the battlefield itself and occuring roughly coincidentally were the technological advances that made *heavily-armoured cavalrymen* obsolete.

[BigandScary]

It does seem that we are confusing the issue, as well as the meaning of professional. I have been mostly refering to them as the career mercenaries of that time, but it also applys to the very system of large standing armies of paid troops. The technalogical advances of gunpowder weapons did allow inferior warriors to kill knights, but it also allowed a govornment to raise larger armies, armies made of peasant levies and career troops, that could never be acheived by knights. A heavy-cavalryman could don thick enough armor to stop a bullet and still outmaneuver a pike block, but it would still end up with ten thousand knights against one hundred thousand infantry, and the knights would lose. So, while I still think that you underestimate the tactical impact of professional soldiers, it is a valid point that technology led to the end of battlefield knights.

[Agema]

Yes, I think you're right that there's an economic factor that the professional infantry era also made knights cost-ineffective: knights could smash huge armies of peasants, but not professionals.