EUIV and the Discipline of History

[viper37]

You are not counting the overwhelming importance of fine beaver pelt hats. Clearly, these were the most significant source of European dominance!

they started a damn war because of these hats and then told us we were only a few acres of snow. 

[viper37]

Incidentally, I feel like the Total War games handle it quite badly, at least where Romans and Greek Phalaxes are concerned, because the engine focuses on one on one combat rather than (maintaining) formations, so having two phalanxes  clash immediately devolves into tons of single combat (if they even maintain any cohesion until they meet).

yeah, visually, it does not resists contact with the enemy.  I think some of the mods, like DarthMod attempted and somewhat succeeded at mitigating this problem. The unit cohesion were much, much improved after that.

As for the base game, I think it wasn't until Warhammer II that I've seen real spearman formations holding the lines and cavalry battles being somewhat more realistic and these units being less overpowered than they used to be.  Heavy cavalry used to be god-like units on the battlefield against anything but heavy spearman units.