This is more about questions than comments regarding Dawn of the Horse Warriors and the caldrail review.
First, does Mr. Noble devote any text to logistics? I'm a lifelong horse-person and any discussion has to start with that. From where I stand, moving horses over long distances is a lot rougher, riskier (to the horses) and slower than non-horsemen think. No one ever deals with this. Horses need to graze. For a few days, you can keep up their nutrition with grain which you might carry. But after a little while, failure to move a lot of dry grasses through that huge intestine weakens it. It will rupture where the large and small intestines meet and you have a dead horse. Lose 10% of your horses and how are you going to move your stuff? (Not to mention fighting -- and that the horse may not feel well enough to make a good fight.) If a foot soldier can make 20 miles a day, every day for a long time, I don't think a horse cavalry can. And the larger the group, the slower it must be. The horses should be stopped every few days, and set out to graze. If there are a lot of horses, they'll need a much larger area for grazing, perhaps miles from the camp, and it could certainly mean two or three days with no miles traveled.
My second question would be about training. Caldrail mentioned four-horse chariots. Is that a big thing in the book? You don't need four horses to pull a driver and a couple of archers, especially if, as suggested, these rigs were not huge and heavy. The wheel horse is going to take 60% of the load, whether you use two or four horses. Four horses is less maneuverable, more subject to problems on a littered battleground, and vastly harder to correctly harness and drive. So why would they ever use four horses, except in ceremonies? And apart from Xenophon, who has written about training?
Third, is the author planning a sequel -- starting at 600BC? All the really fun stuff that I know about is much later. How did the Visigoths, Huns and other later horse warriors become so effective? Just collecting and covering accounts of fighting techniques, even without tactical diagrams, would be interesting and worthwhile to cover in one book.
-N