This whole question got me curious about Warband's progress and I played it agian for the first time in a few months. It seems the jumping issue is alot less problematic than it was. The real problems now are:
1. Movement speed! People being able to move as fast as they can now (which is the same speed as in the current Mount&Blade single player) enables people to do the "cowards dance". Anyone whose played Call of Duty on PC is familiar with this. Run around in circles while firing the biggest gun with the largest clips they could find. Same here except that instead of firing weapons their running in and out of range of each others swords and taking quick swings here and there. Its a dance competition instead of a battle, and you rarely feel any satisfaction from taking down an enemy because your probably feeling bad about the amount of self respect you just lost in the process.
2. Screen turn rate contributing to swing speed and damage. Its unbelievable how effective it is to quickly jerk your mouse all the way accross the pad. Even if the other guys starts swinging first you can beat him like this. He just swung and moved his mouse a little to add to the impact, whereas you practically threw your mouse in one direction and therefore won. Can anyone say stupid? The animations can hardly keep up and most of the time if your on the other side of a "mouse-throw" attack you hardly even see the guy move. Nobody can swing a two-hander that fast, nobody.
So my earlier statement about a phalanx working is now obsolete. The best you might get is a group of people all using spears and walking back and forth as unpredictably as possible while jabbing at the nearest enemy once and then retreating. Who knows it might even be somewhat effective...but don't expect me to join in.
We successfully got a couple shield walls going in a battle between the nords and khergits though. Everyone got shields and we lined up inside a broken building and waited for the kergits to come after us. It wasn't generally very effective as they just stood a few feet away and shot under our shields from point blank range. Then some tried to rush out and deal with them and broke the shield wall and...well that was the end of that. We did have success one round though.
The remedy in my opinion would be to slow movement ALOT. Make people walk in sort of a crouhched down "**** I'm under fire and hiding behind a shield" sort of way at all times and lower the damage inflicted by arrows as well as making arrows easier to see when in flight. Then everyone'd be forced to work together more and try to trick the enemy rather than spaz out in front of them.
Anyway, time to go make my case in the warband forums, though i doubt Taleworlds is interested in making any major changes this late in the beta.
