First let me say that I'm really happy with these daily patches, thank you for your hard work. However, I would like to offer a constructive criticism on two things:
1 – I understand that the experience gained with the skills in practice fights cannot be equal to the one gained in real fights. The problem is that right now, and I believe this is a consensus among players, leveling up your abilities is unbelievably slow (all of them, not only the fighting ones). Of course, this is something you guys will eventually balance out. The point is: right now, leveling in practice fights/tournaments or in real battles is slow and you just made the practice fights/tournaments even slower, without making it more attractive to do so in real battles. I few it is nearly impossible to level things like athletics and one-handed fighting in real battles. Either you get killed because you are fighting alone and looters are harder in this game, or you have an army and you can’t grind the XP because your army is also killing enemies. As I’ve said, I understand the need to balance the practice fights and tournaments, but please consider that you also need to balance the skill levelling as well.
2 – Another similar situation with the horses. Yes, we were receiving too many horses upon defeating caravans and lords in battle. The problem is, some of those horses were necessary. Let give you an example: I started a new game Sunday at night, so yesterday I spent most of the day levelling my character with the practice fights. I was happy that now my character had a fighting chance, since enemies have like 150 points in the combat skills and before that I had 50. I managed to get the most important ones, for my character, to 100 or 75. Went on to pledge myself to the Southern Empire and started building an army. Then comes the need to buy horses and war horses to upgrade my troops (I like to focus in cavalry early on, given the mobility and how they ravage infantry in open battles). I was fighting some enemy lords and using the horses that came from them to upgrade my troops to Heavy Cavalry or Bucelarii. Now I’ll get less horses, which makes sense. The problem is that the available horses in the villages that produce then is not enough for me. So, you guys fixed something, without fixing the other side of it. If those villages offer more horses for the player to buy, no problem. Otherwise it’s just going to be more difficult to upgrade your army to higher tiers of cavalry.
Sorry for the long post.