The Battle of Helm’s Deep is full of very obvious errors. There is an awesome Dutch historian, Roel Konijnendijk, who trashes movies for fun that talks about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPGdOXstSyk
My favourite one is when they are shouting orders to eachother. There is no way for the Elven archers to hear Aragorn’s commands, or for Aragorn to hear Theoden’s fallback order.
Pikes beat horse dudes, Rohan has horse dudes. Unbeatable logic. Dev did not code for horse dudes having different armour off horse.
meanwhile Gandalf makes a cavalry charge down a waaaaaay too steep hill towards the aforementioned pikemen
but he had the power of “making it really bright” on his side, and we all know that this is the achilles heel of all pikemen everywhere!
Aren’t Uruk Hai really sensible to light? So the riders had vision, the high ground, morale and momentum on their side.
Pikes are pushed against/into the ground, so neither morale nor momentum will do you any good against them. Discomforting the pikemen will also not do anything, since pikes and their use in formations are designed for that to happen. If you get charged by a fuckton of cavalry, you are bound to flinch anyway and you weren’t supposed to actually do anything with the pike but push it into the ground if you were charged. The momentum is provided by courtesy of the attacker. So the downhill movement and the momentum are a disadvantage against pikes.
And I’m not even counting the fact that horses will not charge walls of spiky things. They are living beings with a mind of their own. A fact that we tend to forget nowadays. But I’m willing to let that one slide, perhaps there was some super special sauce training only known to the horse freaks of Rohan that made them go through with the charge.
“Then he must be a noble beast indeed,” said Aragorn; “and it grieves me more than many tidings that might seem worse to learn that Sauron levies such tribute. It was not so when last I was in that land.”
“Nor is it now, I will swear,” said Boromir. “It is a lie that comes from the Enemy. I know the Horse Freaks of Rohan; true and valiant, our allies, dwelling still in the lands that we gave them long ago.”
He had sappers. And yeah Pike beats horse.
I mean, generally speaking, sending pikemen against a people famous for riding horses sounds smart to me lol
