Mount & Blade Review
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Yes, Swadian Knights are awesome. There is nothing quite like the experience of riding into battle on horseback, at the head of your army of Swadian Knights. At that point in the game (provided it's an open field and not a siege), your army becomes useful (in a siege they're useless, as per above). Enemies on foot will be obliterated in seconds as your Knights charge into their ranks. Strangely, the enemy war parties you encounter never seem to have many horsemen. Instead it's foot soldiers waiting to be slaughtered by your own cavalry. The enemies on horseback you do encounter will... Ride around for hours as your men can never catch them leaving you to do most of the killing there. But against enemies on foot, Swadian Knights pwn all. You can even take a break, charge into battle and just stop while you let your men clean-up which makes a nice change.
You can even not fight at all by ordering your Knights to attack without you. This is the M&B way of saying "I have too many men, please kill most of them off" (even with the maximum Tactics skill which is supposed to be useful here) as you're often better off joining the battle anyway but hanging back and not getting involved in the melee. Go away, have a cup of tea and when you come back chances are high that the enemy will be dead and you'll have most of your men alive - even though you didn't lift a finger. This is the disparity of M&B where there doesn't seem to be a balance. Battles that would have you outnumbered 2 or even 3 to 1 have you winning with less than 10 men dead and wounded if you join the battle. Use the "Attack without me" option though and it results in you losing. Badly. The code just doesn't seem to take into account the fact you have a bunch of guys on horseback while your enemy has an army of soft fleshy man things on foot with no shields. Instead losing all your men in some horrible massacre like some kind of imitation of the French at war.
Every once in a while, M&B shines. Those battles where your horse is killed underneath you and you fall. You run and battle wildly on foot, only to take out another horseman, hop onto his horse and continue fighting. Even having the same scenario repeat again only to get back on another horse and escape. Or when in sieges, you run out of arrows, and start using the arrows from people you've killed. Just has a nice touch. As you can see though, the combat is both the best thing about Mount & Blade and the worst thing. Dumb AI which at lower levels, you often have to exploit in order to win. Though even at higher levels, exploits are required. Like riding around in circles as they all daftly follow you and you skewer them with arrows. When they go "shields up" or fighting horsemen it becomes difficult but you can take out their horse from underneath them and watch them fall down, then if you're quick, shoot a few arrows into their backs while they're down. Else shoot at their shield until it breaks (big waste of arrows) or just ride ahead of them just that little bit so they swing and miss, after-which you skewer them.
