evilthecat said:
Two words..
Rhodok Sharpshooters.
Yeah, siege crossbows might as well have been firearms.
Kelethor said:
OT: Well...I dunno. See, Guns, too me, tend too add certain...aspects of a game. i use the peasant/Knight example.
A Knight trains all his life in the arts of war with traditional mounted combat.
A peasant armed with a rifle spends a a few hours training.
That knight could have spent his whole life in training and fighting, but if that peasant gets a shot off him, all that armor and training won't do him much good. I suppose ill have too wait and see just HOW much of an effect guns have on the game.
Here the thing though, that's not a completely accurate portrayal of what's really going on, because it removes every element but weapons and the training to use them. An untrained peasant is still not drilled for battle. Musket or not, when a cavalry charge is barreling down on you - a group of peasants is going to break and run.
What really did in the knight wasn't the peasant with the musket but it was a proper arquebuser or musketeer, and even then it was more of a logistics problem. It took much longer to train and replace a mounted cavalry than it did another infantrymen.
That said, cavalry were used to varying degrees of success until the 1920s-1930s, when most nations started converting their cavalry to mechanized. At this point though most cavalry were using dragoon tactics, mounted infantrymen who used the horses to quickly maneuverer around the battle field, who would then dismount to engage and mount again to fall back. This was effective in that cavalry were often given superior weapons, like repeaters in the American Civil War, allowing you to quickly mass fire on flanks or temporarily fill holes until reinforcements could be called up.
