Figured why MB heavy cavalry is op.

Mount e Blade is famous for heavy cavalry being OP, with many mods "fixing" it by limiting the amount of heavy cavalry (for example many mods use "realistic" recruiting where only nobility is cavalry), or by enhancing other troops.

Vanilla MB has Swadia often dominating the entire map too for example.

I was reading about roman heavy cavalry, that were basically tanks, the rider had literally zero exposed areas except eyes, and horse was armoured too, sometimes even the eyes of the horse were mostly armoured.

And found out that one fundamental game mechanic missing from MB that creates the imbalance: fatigue.

The reason romans put heavy cavalry in their auxiliary army (instead of joining the "legions"), and the reason although it was clearly overpowered in many senses, many countries didn't relied on it, wasn't the cost or rarity, it was that the heavily armoured horses would overheat, the heavy cavalry was useful for charging and causing massive damage, but they sucked at long term engagements, and if flanked by skirmishers they were in trouble. Strange as it sounds, although each individual in a heavy cavalry unit was a tank, the only use for heavy cavalry was offensive: breaking apart infantary shield walls, or charging while under arrow fire.

Thus the fix in MB is simple, add a stamina bar, and have it decrease whenever you reach top speed (otherwise moving your formation on start of battle would suck a lot), and the decrease should go faster the more armoured whoever is doing the running (Foot soldier, or mount).

No more OP swadians... they can keep their cool cavalry, but 100% cavalry armies aren't viable anymore, needing infantary to charge after the cavalry break enemy formation.

Submitted August 10, 2018 at 12:28PM by OrSpeeder https://ift.tt/2nt7zBo