History is unreasonable? Took me 5 minutes to find a page old combat manual dating to 1467 for dealing with HX.
The trick is to get us in a headlock:
Seriously though, hang around friendly archers/xbow/throwers and you'll notice HX don't pester you as much. I know for a fact, one person in this thread complaining is just a bad melee cav who always tries to engage me alone.
i was more refering to the role-image, the identification image of the class
e.g.
2h/polearm-warrior - damage oriented melee , either with elegant fencing or brutal barbarian style .. or medival piker as supporter
shielder - protection oriented , against ranged and to survive vs many opponents - kinda tanky style - hell, even hoplites have a propper role-playing pattern
archer/thrower - well , pretty clear romantic hunter-warrior image , stuff of many books and storries and games
horse-archer/thrower - with its rich historic background in many cultures, nomadic style
xbower - medival sniper or rogue image
mounted knights - lancer or 1h ; mighty mounted warriors out of the books
so, now you tell me what role you imagine if playing as an HX ... i know of two possibilities
1) mounted firearm soldier - yeah , but reloading medival firearms on fullspeed arabian horse in 5 seconds is not exactly telling , that game mechanics do map this role well, aswell, as its known, that firearms are not intended to be in cRPG, so that doesnt really work ..
2) horsearcher - well , there is horsearcher implemented pretty well in the game .. meaning , that playing HX is simply exploiting game-mechanics , and sacrificing any role-image and immersion for sake of kill-greedyness, aswell as its completely obvious that HX could never work like that in real medival world
hence, one could aswell implement motorcycles-and modern guns , which have the same medival role-image potential like current HX
Talking about realistic HX - if you did read any documentation and not just look at pictures ( really funny though
), you will know, that it also was mainly used to reach tactical positions faster and then shooting unmounted or , if mounted ,(to shoot over friendly units ) only on very low speed , to prevent the bolt flying out of the crossbow ... not even mentioning problems of putting a bolt into a crossbow or reloading propperly on high speed
I once posted a suggestion to change HX mechanics in a way to make it feasable to be played as some kind of badass rogue style, which was fully ignored ...