Someone should twice as wide en passant meme this.
Grain of rice it
Nice. It irks me when the mongols are celebrated for their brilliance. Sure, they were incredibly coordinated and tactically proficient. But what allowed that, was that they had like 3 horses per man. In other words: They were filthy fucking rich in medieval terms. And there were lots of them.
I mean, the Mongols under Genghis were dirt poor in medieval terms initially. The Mongols still had significant numbers of their forces using bone-tipped arrows during the conflict with the Tatars, out of sheer poverty, and doubtlessly some continued using such low-quality missiles into the initial conflicts with the Western Xia and Jin.
Nomads having horses doesn't mean much; there are far fewer of them on a larger amount of land than sedentary peoples, and high-value goods outside of a functioning and united market economy means very little. It's one of the reasons why one of the high priorities of early Mongol looting was the enslavement of artisans - they lacked both goods and the expertise (or industrial base) to make them.
A lesson the europeans learned once they got guns and decided to travel everywhere and enslave everything by being richer/tech advantage.
Wondering what's the minimum amount of towers you'd need to keep that horde off you, supposing they always moved to capture when able.
