What is the best defence against a army of heavy cavalry and horse archers?

fort wagons and muskets :^)

Guns. Lots of guns.

This + artillery.

this and light cavalry.

Some cavalry are essential or they will raid your supply lines. You will inevitably have less cavalry than steppe peoples, but they can be supported by your infantry.

At the battle of Kulikovo, the Russian cavalry were held back and hidden then released near the end of the battle when the Golden Horde were exhausted. Their fresh men and horses meant they could drive away the greater numbers of cavalry.

Wagon forts, guns and your own horse archers. That's what the chinese did, anyway.

Agreed, but I would say Medium cavlary and Horse archers of your own will crush most attempts to raid supply lines. Also, more archers.

we hussites now.

confined areas

a gun

that's not fair

neither is feigning retreat, all steppe niggers need to die.

t. Swadian Knight

lmfao

how the fuck do you pronounce "ibn", why can't it just be bin like osama bin laden

Gorilla warfare

Crossbows.

Barbarians of all kinds fear crossbows.

Thats what the Genose Crossbows thought during Agincourt.

Tanks

ebin

Anglos are the only civilised people to have ever existed though

This. Mounted troops are dog shot against high volume archery. The problem is most of the time Horse archers had better bows and outranged others. The Chinese got curb stomped for this reason even with overwhelming numbers the only thing they had was artillery to fight back.

Shitty leaders who do not know how to use crossbowmen and are only interested in their own prestige leads to loss.

A Hind-D helicopter.

Han dynasty destroyed the Xiongnu empire. Tang dynasty destroyed the Gokturks. Song dynasty's fall was due to internal power struggle. Not their crossbowmens. Ming dynasty lost to Qing due to defects from a general who opened the gates.

I wouldn't say Chinese got curbstomped, internal dissents are plenty for an empire that large.

Actually how I pronounce it
How is it actually pronounced tho

There's no good solution before gunpowder. Foot archers can out-range and out-shoot horse archers (you can pack them close together and get much larger volleys) but of course the horse archers can simply ride away and refuse to engage, plus many horse archers doubled as shock cavalry and could ride down foot archers. Historically, the solution was for settled princes to hire other horse archers to fight them off, this works but has obvious problems of its own.

E-bin not eh-bin. The big E.

An ascendant Chinese Dynasty fought horse archers by using their wealth and power to raise more horse archers than the nomads. The benefits of civilization meant that the Imperial horse archers had access to better equipment and better metallurgy.

Tang dynasty was heavily into crossbowmen and they wiped out the eastern Gokturks and made the western Gokturks flee westward. The Han dynasty also had heavy crossbow but I don't think it was as heavy as Tang dynasty ratiowise. They made forced the Xiongnu empire to collapse. The eastern wing once again were destroyed/assimilated and the western wing fled westward (later became the Huns to the west).

this

How useful were trenches/wooden spikes/various debris and did anyone employ them to any success?

The nomads live most of their life on horseback and rely on their skills as horse archers to survive a hard existence. It'd be like comparing real cowboys to dude ranchers.

When they conquered steppe tribes, they would join the Chinese ranks and furthermore, their commanders would train Chinese troops.

The Chinese learned how to deal with horse archers effectively in Han dynasty against the Xiongnu, the crossbows.

Best defense would be to assassinate a khan that was charismatic and powerful enough to unite all the other tribes.

It's like comparing one real cowboy to 6 dude ranchers who were trained by cowboy defectors.

Quantity has a quality all to it's own, and a number of steppe nomads accepted vassalage under Han in exchange for a settled life and military service, because having material comforts like a steady food supply, a solid roof, and a heated bed is pretty nice after a life of steppeniggering.