Pikeman

The pikeman of the Late Middle Ages was the Swiss mercenary's answer to the armored knight: a commoner with a five-meter pike who could stop a mounted charge cold and then push through the chaos of melee with mechanical precision. The pike square — hundreds of men packed tightly together, their weapons overlapping in concentric ranks — bristled in every direction like a steel hedgehog, one of the most feared formations of fifteenth-century warfare. Swiss cantons and later Landsknecht companies made this tactic their livelihood across the Italian campaigns and the wars of Burgundy. The mass and momentum of a coordinated pike push could scatter lighter infantry in seconds. In the game he is the definitive cavalry counter: cheap, effective in numbers, and nearly impenetrable from the front — but helpless against ranged fire and gunpowder weapons that ultimately rendered the pike square obsolete.