There's basically no war in Elder Scrolls.
None you ever see, and when you are exposed to the army it's all soldiers, no wizards or rogues in it. The 'army' faction being purely straightforward professional soldiers with swords or crossbows. With rogues and mages having their own 'guilds' and quest lines unrelated to the army one.
The 'civil war' for all it's abstractions is really the only represented on screen war in the series, and it's soldier on soldier, no wizards, no rogues, no horses, no boats, no nothing. And really even then all the 'big battles' take place off screen, while you're taking the fort the main army takes the city or etc off-screen.
Daggerfall had implied war but showed none of it, however it implied middle-ages style knights and feudalism throughout high-rock and hammerfell pretty strong, with knightly orders all over the place, heavy use of middle-ages tropes in it's setting, role of horses in the game and etc.
Battles as are described don't go into military or troop detail but focus on politic/plot-effecting events, who killed who, who stole what and etc. War is important to the games, but it's never described in any detail as the details aren't.
The lore is covered in Chivalry, from the lists of knightly orders, to the class in game, landed nobles in the upper ranks of the legion, the description of the Summerset Isles in the 'Provinces of Tamriel' and etc etc. The reason we have a description of a horse being used by a scout is because the story that description comes from was about that, not because that's to be interpreted as the only way they were ever used. Due to technically limitations neither a major battle nor mountain enemies have ever been seen in game. Not due to design decisions about the wider world.
While it's plausible to presume that in the Elder Scrolls mages are present on the battlefield, theres no evidence for it.
Just as it's presumable to assume heavy cavalry despite the lack of representation in the games, given the plausibility of them given the world as presented in the lore, which is the exact same jump you're taking.
Sorry, but no, all these arguments are irrelevant or based upon trying to muddy the waters, throwing out terms like "opinion" to try to ignore objective facts.
I'm honestly a little taken aback that someone would even try arguing that mages aren't canonically part of Elder Scrolls battlefields. (I'm not even here arguing that there should be mages when there are none, but that there should be more than just one type, since mages are already in the mod.)
You cannot possibly read the lore, and take away that mages had nothing to do with war. Take, say, the following lore books:
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:The_Art_of_War_Magic ("3. When planning a campaign, take account of both the arcane and the mundane. The skillful battlemage ensures that they are in balance; a weight lifted by one hand is heavier than two weights lifted by both hands. 4. When the arcane and mundane are in balance, the army will move effortlessly, like a swinging door on well-oiled hinges. When they are out of balance, the army will be like a three-legged dog, with one leg always dragging in the dust." So, an army without war mages is like a three-legged dog? Yeah, that sounds like there's no evidence anyone ever uses magic in war...)
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:The_Firsthold_Revolt (Where battlefield strategy is talked about in terms of how you use your battlemages and priests alongside your non-magical troops. It's actually the plot point that the castle levies are so depleted that there AREN'T the battlemages you'd expect from a common levy. Mercenaries carry mages, even specialist mages in their ranks. They even complain about not following the traditional uses of mages in battle when they are told to start with reflection spells. Restoration magic in battle is considered common, and it's chaos-inducing when it isn't used.) (Incidentally, this piece of lore also talks about how concubines are also traditional in Summerset, at least, which this game has yet to include, as well...)
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:The_Wolf_Queen,_v7 ("From a vantage point on the hills to the south, Potema and Lord Vhokken had excellent views of the battle as it raged. It looked like two swarms of two colors of insect moving back and forth over a clump of dirt which was the castle ruins. Occasionally, a burst of flame or a cloud of acid from one of the mages would flicker over the battle arresting their attention, but hour after hour, the fighting seemed like nothing but chaos." Again, mages common in battle formations.)
Although I could easily bring forth more, three examples is more than enough to disprove a statement that there are no examples of magic being used in war, much less there being no war.
Even the cultures that don't normally use "proper" mages, like the Nords of Skyrim (especially in earlier eras) talk of using their "shamans" to use thu'um (whether named so or not) in battle.
There is as much evidence for anything you're saying as mobility-cavalry and rogue-and-wizards-more-than-knights as there is for heavy cavalry being common. That is none at all bar your own projection into the void of abstraction. It's not something any of the games deal with at all, it's never come up and the lore doesn't say anythign to either side.
Omission is just Omission, it is not a declaration of non-existence.
Whether we take your interpretation or any-one elses, it's all filling that omission with content entirely made up to suit the speakers vision and yours is no more valid than anyone elses.
If it's the one you want in the game sure, but say so. Don't pretend that the lore is on your side and no one elses. You're as much making this up to fit your vision as anyone you're arguing with.
There is no evidence of Heavy Cavalry in TES, just as there is no evidence of there NOT being Heavy Cavalry in TES.
However there are implications, and you're free to interpret those however you want just don't forget that private interpretation is all it is.
While it is unfortunately all too common, I have to say this method of "argument" is a particularly perfidious form of bad faith argument. It is essentially argument by solipsism. This argument is based either upon denying that lore exists at all or seemingly not being aware of even the most basic elements of the lore in a mod based upon Elder Scrolls lore.
Either you have to accept the text in the lore books as being canon, in which case there is plenty of examples of war magic and battlemages marching with the troops, and several different types of magical units being distinguished by their specialties, while there is no attempt to distinguish any non-cultural cavalry units from one another, or else you have to somehow make the argument that lore books aren't canon, and only what's in the games is canon... in which case there's no mounted combat at all, and the games make nearly 1/3rd of all sentient characters mages. No matter how you want to argue this, the games inevitably would pull you towards having to accept magic as a major portion of combat.
If you're somehow going to try to argue neither the games nor the lore is canon, then I have to ask what you're even doing in the forum of a TES lore-based mod to begin with? Is all this just arbitrary whimsy, or are we making a subjective reality argument, here?
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Turning instead to arguments at least made honestly,
There's actually evidence of heavy cavalry in TES. It's horse armour.If there isn't any heavy cavalry, then there shouldn't be any horse armour. Yet, there's a horse armour dlc for oblivion.
^These are not light cavalry.
Actually, the way those are used, yes they are "light cavalry" as CKII actually uses them. The problem is you're confused as to what "Heavy Cavalry" actually represent.
Once again, I will say men wearing armor on a horse is not the same thing as a charger. What the heavy cavalry in CKII represent are a
very specific type of unit.
Just like the pikemen that are being (rather correctly) removed from this mod did not represent just anyone with a long stick with a point on it (and there are a lot of military formations that used spears or polearms that get lumped into "light infantry" or "heavy infantry", instead,) the heavy cavalry in vanilla CKII represent something more than just cavalry with armor. Pikemen represent specific tight formations of polearm users organized specifically for spearwall formations. (Done in specific response to mass cavalry charges as a counter. Not that CK2 combat is sophisticated enough to represent such counters very faithfully...)
"Heavy cavalry" in CK2 is more than just armored cavalry, it's a style of battle based upon heavy chargers in formation (yes, with that stirrup,) to crush melee combatants with the sheer mass of their formation. (Although their lances certainly helped.) This is, again, something very specific, and not at all shared with most of the rest of the world.
This talk of chivalry (to go back to Orinsul for a moment) is likewise nonsense. One doesn't need to be on horseback to have a culture of chivalry, and chivalry has nothing to do with battlefield tactics.
While I could bring up examples of chivalry in footsoldiers, I get the sense there would be quibbling over the nature of chivalry, so I'll go for a more indisputable example. Look at the Japanese - they are famous for their code of chivalry, and they never created the charger.
And before someone tries to somehow make an argument of how you want to perceive samurai as something they were not in spite of facts, no, samurai were not heavy cavalry, either. The Japanese never developed chargers, nor formation charge tactics. They were more often than not horse archers, but even what melee cavalry they used were used specifically with light cavalry tactics, where horses were there for mobility, not weight.
The reason that Romans didn't have heavy cavalry is because stirrups hadn't been invented yet. The Byzantines certainly used heavy cavalry and there's no reason to assume that the Imperials don't
Frankly, if we're going to go by what's in the game DLC as evidence, I'll point out those horses don't have stirrups, and battle is engaged by using horses purely for mobility, and dismounting to fight... which is decidedly light cavalry tactics. The horse armor, further, was treated as something unusual, and for the rich, not something you make a full formation out of. It was common in history to armor the horse of the king or nobles without actually using them with full charger formation tactics. It was just a sensible way to keep the commander's horse from being slain from under him.
Even if those horses have armor, it doesn't matter to the argument being made, because they are still used with tactics designed for "light" cavalry.
And to respond to the most recent quote's argument directly, yes there is reason to believe that the Imperials don't have stirrup technology. They are not depicted as Byzantines, they are
clearly and unambiguously depicted as equivalent to Imperial Rome. Meanwhile, the rest of the cultures around them are not depicted as being technologically more advanced than the Imperials besides the (un-created) Dwemer and arguably the Dunmer, who as the last batch of arguments already established, don't have horses. In fact, most of the cultures are purposefully depicted as less advanced than the Romans for a purposeful Romans-versus-barbarians motif as something to make TES stand out a little from more mundane Medieval fantasy. Only the Redguards hypothetically (more by their modelling upon the Moors rather than anything I have specifically seen) and the aforementioned Khajit "tiger cavalry" would potentially have a real distinct heavy cavalry unit, and those are easily handled by cultural units.
Formation charge tactics are kind of a big deal. They sort of revolutionized the way that war was fought. They are
the defining thing people think of with regards to combat in the era. Someone would have mentioned it had it happened. Instead, we have plenty of mentions of how magic is used to change the flow of battle that mostly consists of infantry.
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Still, yes, I'll grant that's not absolute proof that no such cavalry exists, but that wasn't my argument to begin with, anyway.
The core of my argument is that there is reason to put more magic-based units into the mod because heavy cavalry are not a serious part of lore, don't add any flavor to the mod, have no particularly good player strategies, or even impact upon player strategy at all (beyond maybe strategies revolving around their supply/maintenance cost) and are generally inferior in-game compared to their direct alternatives.
Heavy Cavalry are, in the vanilla game, undermined by always being in units that undercut the ability to use them properly. Even cultural units only allow you to use at most 60% cavalry if you make a flank purely of those units, and the tactics that help heavy cavalry virtually always exclude helping light cavalry, resulting in wasted tactics bonuses that undermine the unit.
Simply put, light cavalry cultural retinues, like Cabellero, are better in every way to the heavy knight cultural units.
Let's compare 5 Knight, Gusar, or Cataphract retinues (total of 8000 supply) to 8 Cabellero retinues (total of 8000 supply). Knights and Gusar are both Heavy Cavalry/Light Cavalry splits. Knights have +60% HC offense, while Gusar have only +30% HC offense, and +30% LC offense. Cataphracts have horse archers instead of LC.
In the skirmish phase, which is the more important phase, due to the fact that so much more time is spent skirmishing than melee, heavy cavalry are basically just going to sit there, waiting for the chance to charge. They do, at least, have a special ability that gives them a chance to charge early, but it is not frequently used enough to really save the unit on anything other than lucky circumstances. Putting all commander and terrain bonuses aside, in skirmish, assuming Knight retinues versus Cabelleros, the Cabelleros are going to have 5.33 times the offensive firepower of the Knights. (4000 LC with 9.6 offense versus 1500 HC with 0.8 offense plus 1000 LC with 6.0 offense.) Knight defense is about 1/3 higher, but it is still not nearly enough to make the skirmish phase anything but a win for the Cabelleros. Things go slightly better for the Gusars, which have +30% offense on their light cav, and significantly better on the Cataphracts. (4000 LC with 9.6 offense vs. 1500 HC with 0.65 offense and 1000 HA with 20.8 offense.) ("Swarm" tactics for Horse Archers are basically the same thing as "Harass" tactics for light cav. +300% for the specific unit, and penalties for anything else.) This still amounts to 1.76 times more firepower on the cabelleros, however, which is more than enough to counteract the marginally higher defense of the Cataphract. (Horse archers also have slightly lower defense.)
Skirmish phase generally lasts with units like these until at least half the morale of the side that is going to lose is gone. However, certainly, Heavy Infantry, Pikes, and pure Heavy Cavalry could wait that out.
In melee, however, the single unified unit type still has its advantages. Cabelleros get to use a "Raid" tactic that gives them the slightly lesser +240% power, but to their whole unit gets the bonus, and a pure unit has little reason to use other tactics. Meanwhile, there are more-or-less even odds that Knights will either raid (for the LC) or use "Awesome Charge" for the +300% bonus to HC power. In order, if there is an awesome charge, (4000 LC with 24.48 offense versus 1500 HC with 51.2 offense plus 1000 LC with 4.5 offense) it still gives the cabelleros a 1.20 times damage advantage, while a raiding knights unit (4000 LC with 24.48 offense versus 1500 HC with 12.8 offense and 1000 LC with 15.3 offense) amounts to a 2.84 advantage for Cabelleros. Granted, the defense advantage on the knight's side is now basically double the cabelleros, still, this averages out to a slight (1.01) advantage to the Cabelleros.
Note that regular charges would bring things to melee with a +300% bonus to heavy cavalry, which is basically the same as the awesome charge, anyway, while the harass tactics for the light cav would still be in effect, essentially giving the Cabelleros a slight bonus during that transition. If there was an early charge from "Crushing Charge", it's actually a mere +175% bonus to Heavy Cavalry, which actually gives the Cabelleros even more of a relative advantage while they lose the early skirmish lead.
That's being
extremely generous, and presupposing that battle starts out in melee, with no damage at all. In actual practice, the already-weakened knights will have less troops and less morale at the start, and be pushed down to the 25% morale breaking point more quickly, even with roughly even losses. As far as morale goes, we are talking a fairly even 16000 to 19000 total morale in the units, so the losses advantage the Cabelleros inflict in Skirmish still carry the day.
Now, Frankish knights can use their special racial charge ability on some occasions, although it's not entirely reliable. For completeness sake, the "Couched Lance Charge" can do the following: (4000 LC with 24.48 offense vs. 1500 HC with 66.56 offense plus 1000 LC with 4.5 offense.) That amounts to an actual advantage for the knights in terms of firepower, with a 0.93 ratio for the cabelleros. The heavier defense will carry the day, here.
The primary advantage of horse archers in melee is that they at least don't have any real tactic of their own, so they don't get in the way of the other units, the way light cav does. The Embelon charge is just a +240% bonus to heavy cav, while the Awesome charge is a +300% bonus to heavy cav, so the supposedly fearsome Embelon charge is not actually helpful unless your units were stuffed full of Light Cav, which would generally be worse. Hence, just doing the Awesome Charge, (4000 LC with 24.48 offense vs. 1500 HC with 41.6 offense plus 1000 HA with 5.2 offense) amounts to a 1.49 offense advantage to Cabelleros. However, a little over double defense does put melee in the advantage of the heavy cav, at around a 1.43 ratio for the Cataphract if it can get to melee at exactly ideal conditions.
If you want to talk levies instead, things get even worse for heavy cavalry, because you don't get to build any heavy cavalry levies outside of a tiny 5-man unit per cultural buildings until you get into the most advanced, expensive, and fairly rare before 1200 AD cavalry buildings. By then, you will have had to have built plenty of light cavalry at the same time to have even more completely diluted the heavy cavalry.
Simply put, the way that vanilla tactics work, they heavily,
heavily flanks that are made of a single unit type, since tactics basically are designed to give massive bonuses to one unit at the expense of all others.
Finally, arguing the merits of one type of cavalry to another is rendered moot by the fact that archers are provably the single best unit in the game. No heavy cavalry will survive the skirmish phase against Wlesh/English Longbow retinues (mixed with defense retinues to prevent "Charge on Undefended Flank") firing a Massive Longbow Volley. Against even light cav using harass tactics, the damage archers in a massive longbow volley can put out in skirmish phase is greater than most units can deal in melee phase. With equal odds (even ignoring maintenance), the cataphracts would only survive to even attempt an embolon charge under the most extremely lucky of circumstances. (Basically requiring the 2% or so chance of an early charge.)
Incidentally, the Bosmer apparently get the Massive Longbow Volley in the current version of the game, so they'd be the best unit. (Although their Jaqspur is undermined by Light Infantry, there is a generic retinue that gives you a 60/40 split on archers and pikes, which is nearly the ideal distribution. You can set up all generic 60/40 archer/pike retinues plus one Jaqspur with a bosmer commander to create an ideal retinue flank.) Notably, the longbows are sort of a gamble on a round-one knockout, their supposed weakness that compensates for their power, but if you go all-out on the archers, you will almost always win, and even a flank that gets to melee and loses early will then just go back to skirmishing while flanking another flank. This basically means that the longbows might retreat on one flank, but the other two likely will stand and defeat their own opposite flanks, then turn and kill the other flank that charged early unless more than one flank gets lucky with an early charge in the same battle. While possible, the odds are so slim that I've literally never seen it happen after using these retinue combinations for hundreds of hours of gameplay.
This isn't some interpretation thing, either. It is not opinion, it is what is called a "solved problem game", and the math is pretty clearly solved. The vanilla game has a quite broken and easily exploitable combat system, which is exactly why I'm making the argument that this mod can fix that.
Simply put, using different types of mages instead of just keeping heavy cavalry the way that they are in the vanilla game is both more lore-friendly and also helps to fix some of the flaws of the original game, as well. There is no good lore-based reason to say that cavalry is anything but cavalry in a generic sense in TES unless there is what would become a cultural unit in this mod is involved. Meanwhile, there is plenty of good reason both in lore and in the spirit of game balance to split apart different kinds of magic-users.
There are unfortunately only a few ways in which you can set up "counters" in CKII through modding that I can see, but adding at least some sort of counter to things like archers being the dominant unit by adding magic users that are good counters to them is at least some layer of balance and strategy for the player to consider, which is better than the complete dearth of it in the vanilla game. Perhaps, with some use of modding to change more tactics to switch between skirmish and melee, a more delicate balance can be reached, where
Regardless, this seems to clearly be the sort of thing that is going to demand some distinct thread to contain its discussion, as it's going to obviously get quite rambling.
