I thought the same things until I had to fight a heavily armored party with them.

There's your problem, you've only fought lightly armored enemies(sarranid and vaegirs), once you get to the western half of Calradia, you'll see the hate. You can make them work, and if you're pure top tier with them due to trainer you'll excel because most AI lord armies are mostly mid to lower tier garbage with few high tier, but other factions will do it better. Lancers have the same problem with crap shields.Īll in all I feel the Khergits needed an additional tier to both their troop lines to be truly solid. All of their horse archers also always have shields of crap quality, so the shield isn't even that useful, but denies them additional arrows so they run out faster. On top of that their archers are also less killed and lower level than all other top tier archers in the game just like their lancers vs any other melee options. Then going into their horse archers.the way the game works and the AI behaves, horse archers don't really do as well as they should as they tend to run into things and get caught up in melee instead of well kiting and actually using horse archery. Only the lancers who ride on steppe chargers (warband only and only sometimes) can be classified as somewhat tanky as steppe chargers are actually pretty good horses.still not as tanky as Swadian/Sarranid heavy horses, but more maneuverable. Lancers are as far from 'tanks' as melee cav could really be TBH. The horses that the other factions use on their top tier cav are also much sturdier as lancers ride on coursers with about 110hp and like 12 armor half the time. Lancers wear okay armor, fairly middle tier, while mamlukes and swadian/vaegir knights wear heavier armor. If you scroll down you can see a big difference in the stats, and then there's the equipment to consider.

They're a little quicker to train up and cheaper, and fair fairly well in fields, but they lack the raw power and endurance the other cavalry has for the other kingdoms.

Not really, their stats and equipment are actually fairly sub-par compared to the other factions.

Mount and blade khergit