Is cavalry swarming theoretically invincible tactic in pre-modern era?

They would struggle against lancers or any decently armored troop on uneven terrain.

Would the tactic even work against a phalanx?

In other words, if you're an agrarian society you will get zerg rushed by screaming Mongols and then have your race cucked into oblivion.

>Would the tactic even work against a phalanx?
I think so.

Even the more flexible roman legions fell to cav archers.

The wise khan does not engage heavy infantry in pitched battle. He circles around, burns supplies, picks off scavenging troops. The enemy defeats itself.

what about heavy calvary?

You think you're going to catch an unarmoured rider with an armoured rider?

The only way to fight light cavalry hordes in the premodern world is either with a better light cavalry horde, or by creeping forward with forts and strongpoints. Preferably a combination of both, as in the Russian conquest of the Ukraine.

>an unarmoured rider with an armoured rider
Yes actually. Europeans had larger horses which could also run faster, unsuprisingly
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_horse#As_warhorses

Foot archers do not outrange cavalry. They beat horse archers because they are smaller targets and are able to fire more densely.

And nomadic peoples did it like it wasn't even a big deal. It's like their lifestyle gives them an inherent military advantage per capita despite agriculturalists making use of a lot more energy.

Nomadic peoples are OP. Please nerf.

>it wasn't even a big deal
It was literally their lifestyle. If they had poor grass or droughts it fucked them over. Their life was harsh and literally savage. There is almost no mongolian literature. They had to barter with sedetry people for extra food.
>an inherent military
Mongolian military success came from having a particularly good rainy season, good strategists, a mixed army including good siege engineers, and an inadequate enemy. There's a reason the mongols got fucked after people began to adapt to their combat.

Only autists worship mongols and nomads, like a bunch of larpers

>Would the tactic even work against a phalanx?
If they flank them right, yeah

It depends on what scale you're considering. On an instantaneous tactical level, yeah, horse skirmishers are about as close to invulnerable as you can get on a battlefield.

But on a grander scale, they're not exactly all that great. Horse archer tactics tend to revolve around harassing fire and feigned retreats to break up enemy formations and bait the enemy into a disorganized pursuit, at which point the forces can turn around and cut down the now disorganized enemy force. But if the enemy is well disciplined and can hold formation, there really isn't anything horse archers can do alone. Depending on how the enemy is holding formation, they may be vulnerable to other kinds of attack - like how the Parthians used their caraphracts at Carrhae - but at that point regular skirmishers could do the job just as well, if not better, while being far cheaper to field.

On an operational scale, large horse-borne forces are a very tricky proposition. Horses are very expensive to field, so any cavalry force is going to be significantly smaller than an infantry force that similar resources could have fielded. Cavalry may offer better operational mobility along with advantages like scouting and raiding enemy supply lines, but they're not some kind of unbeatable force.

Take the march to Jaffa during the 3rd Crusade. Though they were marching through enemy territory and shadowed by Saladin, who harassed them with skirmishers almost nonstop, they were able to keep together, conquer their way down the coast, and ultimately defeat Saladin's army at Arsuf. Notably, the battle of Arsuf even had the Latins break formation into the very disorganized charge that horse archers traditionally rely on to work effectively.

>There's a reason the mongols got fucked after people began to adapt to their combat.
it's a good thing they managed to conquer nearly all of eurasia before that then

Yeah, I'd like to see a horse scale a city wall even in the pre-modern era.

I think the problem is stamina there, unless you can catch the Mongols by surprise just trying to charge your moderately faster horse at them isn't going to work because your horse will tire out before you reach them.

sure, given theoretical infinite numbers of horses and horsemen

No, but it required specialized troops, excellent planning, and use of terrain and fortifications. It was the mark of a genius commander to be able to defeat it in the field.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jaxartes

This guy gets it.

>cavalry
>swarming

Was never the case. That sounds very wasteful. After any given battle you will have lost more horses than you can steal from the enemy.
If you "cavalry swarm" to win fights you will run out of horses within a generation.

because they got surrounded in the dessert. They could not have chosen a worse place

I'd chalk Carrahe up to Crassus' incompetence more than anything else, desu. He ignored his Armenian allies and marched his way right across the desert, hiring local guides working for the Parthians.

Yes. Roman heavy infantry got BTFO famously by a smaller Parthian mounted cavalry force. Can't remember the name of the battle.

Exhaustion and mobility are your friends. Bait and switch tactics as well

Additionally Romans didn't use phalanxes later on and that battle was using the maniple formation

A phalanx is possibly even more vulnerable to missile cavalry on an open field

you might as well say nuclear weapons beat horse archers, the heyday of the horse archer preceded the use of crossbows by several centuries

Romans had a cavalry too. It just got chased off the battlefield, like it did every single time. Every. Single. Time.
Always they put their "aristocracy" and senator sons there, always the best equipped guys, always get blown the fuck out.

>What is dismounting

They do poorly in broken terrain.

They also carry bows that are larger and can hurl arrows further than the compact shit horse archers tend to use.

>What is not being trained as professional infantrymen and get wrecked by footsoldiers.

>what is a clusterfuck of assaulting the wall where there is no space to manoeuvre and the combat comes down to who can shank more enemys and hold out longer witourh running

Of course. But OP said: pre-modern era.

maybe that was the strategy all along

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Carrhae

>what is wall garrison being trained to defend that wall while much of your experience involves just horsing people around.
There's a reason why Mongols used other people for sieges, you know. The first major siege the Mongols had in Kaifeng, they were nearly wiped out.

>what is setting up camp and living in front of the city, foraging and getting supplies, while the people inside starve

Nomads on horse can live off the land, especially if the land is the villages around a big city, better than a full city can live under siege.

>Nomads on horse can live off the land
YEAH, IN THE FUCKING STEPPES.

Not in that stupid countryside they or the defenders just burned. Meanwhile the city they're besieging has a granary.

There's a reason why most nomadshit invasions in history are just extortion campaigns: giev money or I will raise all sorts of shit. They couldn't stay long.

Nigger have you seen the fucking steppes? Its a desert. I'd rather live in a burned city than a desert.

Besides we were talking about infantrymen and every fucking successful Horsenigger empire had a mixed army with loads of infantry for all that fortified position assaulting. Seljuks with their Persian/Afghan/Daylami infantry, Mongs with their Muslims and Chinks, and the Huns with their Germans.

By the time the mongols had muslim armies they were on the decline.

Actually they could live plenty well destroying your crops and turning your fields fallow. The problem is that besieging requires them to keep their semiautonomous warbands together with no booty in a prolonged engagement with an uncertain chance of success.
Don't kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

yes. Desert. It's not great land for agriculture buts pretty damn great for animal husbandry if you're nomadic

Another example would be the Battle of Lechfeld, Magyars using horse archers against heavy, disciplined cavalry and getting btfo

>that idealized romantic image

More like this, IF you are lucky,

Where it is logistically feasible, ie. in and around these places

foot archers screened by heavy cavalry BTFO cavalry archers

Examples?

People sometimes wonder why nomads who conquer settled people invariably adopt the settled lifestyle and lose thier horse culture. The answer is economics. You can use good arable land to raise horses, but you'll be wasting most of the land's economic value and will thus be out-competed by your rivals, who use their land to grow cash crops and use some of the profits to simply hire horse nomads to do their fighting for them. Horse cultures can only exist on steppe, where the land is unsuited to agriculture but not so worthless as to be unsuitable for horses.

Actually never found a solid explanation on how Trajan and especially Septimus Severus rolled over the Parthians. Anyone care to enlighten me?

1. Avoid open battles.
2. Take cities.
3. Claim victory.
4. Pretend you didn't lose all that territory immediately after leaving.
5. Raise a tax to replenish all the cavalry you lost due to genetic roman incompatibility with horse riding.

>People sometimes wonder why nomads who conquer settled people invariably adopt the settled lifestyle and lose thier horse culture.
More like being barbarian as fuck and for all your military prowess, your administration, government, and even socio-cultural aspects are below the people you conquered in every possible way.

Many of these peoples don't even have their own writing, sheesh.

You do realize that for example when the Proto-Bulgars settled in first in today's Ukraine and then on the balkans they used locas as their ground forces because they pretty much realized their horse back steppe tacktics were worth fuck all when encountering actual walled cities with thought out layers of deffence. Practically all of the battles they won to establish the empire were in the open field and not during sieges. Hell the Bulgars couldn't storm a town even as late as the in the 13th century, like 600 fucking years after they settled and became assimilated with the locals.

>be on open plains
>run around

Yes cavalry was the most potent force but is unsustainable when you get off the plains, notice how the Native Americans became horse riding mongols when we gave them horses on the great plains.
Conquering a bunch of Tundra and wide open plains isn't very impressive, their claim to fame is for destroying the old allowing the new to grow.

The only reason the Genghis Khan genetics thing is remotely true is because everyone in China is a mongolian rape baby.

did people live in the steppes before nomadic pastoralism? it seems like the only way you could eek out a living on such a barren land is to have agriculture or herds of food animals. i can't see hunting being a viable method of survival there?

...

That's pretty fucking good for husbandry, and all the manure you produce will only make it better

This triggers the horse archer.

>Always they put their "aristocracy" and senator sons there, always the best equipped guys, always get blown the fuck out
More like unreliable auxiliary or federated troops.

*blocks your path with Spartans*
What now horse fucker

Sept that isn't true. Roman cavalry is pretty good if its actually Roman. When it is 1 to ratio they hold there own normally they only suffer when super outnumbered.

>become client kingdom because got btfo
>muh horse archers dont care about country getting burnt to the ground
>Thats cool Ahmed but thats 10,000 talons or we will come back
>ok :(
>HA DEY LEFT HORSE ARCHER AM STRONK

People with food and water stored up in preparation for a siege have it worse than people who need to literally forage the probably barren countryside for food? Do you know how much grazing land is needed for each horse? Remember that nomads often had 3 or 4 horses for each rider, so what you propose is even more absurd than you think.

why is this thread still going after this post

Remember that Trajans conquests in the East were almost immediately abandoned by Hadrian because they were too tenuous to hold.

More like the Romanboos
>THEY ONLY WORE THAT FOR A SHORT TIME! D:

Spartans die in the

This.
I'm sick to fucking death of having to pay 40 wood and 70 gold per cavalry archer while the fucking Huns only have to spend 30 wood and 53 gold. It's unbelievably cheap.

what game?

Looks like Age of Empires 2 to me.

Cavalry would be useless in the mediterranean where spears were predominant.

you forget about crassus though, his soldiers didnt puss out but the parthians just didnt run out of arrows