Calvalry

[asdfsadf]

In older HOI games they had cavalry. They were pretty janky in combat, but they were able to build quickly, were highly mobile, and didn't have high upkeep costs like motorized infantry or armor. Their main uses were:

-to exploit a breakthrough to capture undefended provinces and cut off enemy armies from supply. Whereas motorized infantry would allow you to capture and hold this land, to hopefully create an encirclement, cavalry wouldn't be as sturdy, so they'd mainly be sort of a raiding force, just grabbing stuff to create border gore and annoy your opponent
-to mop up whatever unoccupied enemy provinces were left over after your infantry swept through and pushed back the enemy (You don't want to tie down your valuable vehicle brigades on cleanup duty)
-to bop rebel whack-a-moles --- this won't be relevant in HOI4, but they will still be able to have a region-wide suppression effect against partisanry

They definitely weren't front-line units, but they provided a bit of flexibility

 

[Kovax]

I suppose the point was that a lot of CAV didn't include the normal compliment of heavy weapons, which should by no means be a blanket statement, since many units had motorized support. Unfortunately, instead of the increase in techs providing the support weapons AND the motorization for it, which historically brought the supporting equipment up to the speed of the mounted troops, or faster, the last game had that support equipment slow the unit down, until it became nothing more than expensive infantry with worse stats.

Other than in bad infrastructure, where a low-tech CAV unit was far better suited than an up-teched one, there wasn't a lot of point to building them in the last game, at least after the patches fixed the issue with Defensiveness and Toughness. In the base unpatched game, Toughness and Defensiveness didn't work properly (the +0.05 tech increases (+5%) were being calculated as +0.05% increases, essentially meaningless), so CAV fought just as well as INF, and was slightly faster. With the patch, their lower stats made them more fragile. Unfortunately, all of the minor countries still had to research at least 4 CAV techs if they wanted to unlock and research MOT, while the majors got MOT for free.