Could knights & kings not keep falling for Mongols' same old feigned retreat?

I played Medieval total war II and the only way to beat the mongols was to build forts and have them go to a river crossing. At the rivercrossing you had to have infantry in front to take horrible casualities, ballistas in the back along with archers to fire as long as possibe anything with fire. Then have 1-3 cav units in reserve to continue containing the mongols and hopefully they died before your last unit. In MTW2 there was one infantry unit that if formed square could hold the mongol cav and rout them.

THe only way to win as Russia against the mongols was using the cheat to spam armies and despite that it would take long to defeat them, especially if you autobattled.

As for reality i do not know how the fractured nations of Europe would hope to stand up to the mongols after Hungary
 
Could they have some basic intelligence gathering and sharing to avoid "fool me twice, shame on me"?
This is basically what happened durring the second Mongol Invasion of Hungary, where Ladislaus IV choose to fight them in the hills of Transylvania where their retreat would be hindered, he also employed light cavalry to ensure that any fake route quickly became a real one and a large number of crossbowmen to shoot the Mongols should they stand and fight.
 
Depends. Mostly they won. The Jin had archers. The Song had archers. The Xia had archers. The Namains, Merkits, and Qara Khitai were largely nomad archers. The Cumans and Alans and Bulgars and Mamluks had horse archers. The Kwarazmians had horse archers. The Russians had horse archers. The Bulgarians had horse archers. The Hungarians and Genoese and Koreans had foot archers.
That's (very roughly) the Great Eurasian Plain where the warriors were nomad archers by definition and where feigned retreat had been a favorite game for two millennia at least:

Chernykh2008Fig1.jpg

2 Steppe-Map-1-LARGE.jpg

Most of it had been conquered by the Mongols till they reached the glorious European knights & kings.

Approximately the same amount of territory was controlled by the nomad archers originated from the Great Eurasian plain (or carefully imitating them) - those also had been mostly thoroughly beaten by the Mongols by that time. Again feigned retreat was nothing new for everybody there, old trick.

My point is for the Mongols (at their prime) meeting (and defeating) an enemy who is fully aware of feigned retreat tactics is the most expected situation.
 
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