Since I made my initial post on the wrong forum, here a thread for the balancing on single player.
I've experimented quite a bit with spears since I made my original post, and they are even worse than I thought. The AI simply doesn't know how to use spears. The only way the AI is able to use spears is by heavy modding. I've wrote a mod that doubles all thrust damage of spears, and gives a 1.25 bonus to other thrust damage (weapons with swing and thrust). In addition to that, I've removed "sidearm" weapons, since the AI would rather use throwing weapons or daggers than any spear in melee. The AI only equips spears when fighting cavalry, but they are just really bad at fighting cavalry. Full cav army is simply still unbeatable, like in Warband.
That alone however doesn't really improve the spears quite enough. Spearmen will still lose 100% of the time against cavalry and barely manages against infantry with swords, like archers. Combined with a couple of other mods, that reduce minimum range, spear hitboxes and friendly hits, the spearmen are then able to deal some damage and even win against cavalry.
In my opinion spears should deal similar damage as other two handed weapons (swords and polearms).
In my opinion, spears currently are far to weak. You can basically only use them, when you're on a horse, or when fighting a horse. When on foot against infantry, it basically deals no damage, while it's difficult to land a hit.
I think it's quite ridiculous, that one handed swords deal a lot more stab damage than two handed spears. Regarding how difficult it is to land a decent hit with a spear, and how effective they should be, I think most spears should deal somewhere around 50 - 80 pierce damage, instead of the 15 - 30 they currently have.
I've experimented quite a bit with spears since I made my original post, and they are even worse than I thought. The AI simply doesn't know how to use spears. The only way the AI is able to use spears is by heavy modding. I've wrote a mod that doubles all thrust damage of spears, and gives a 1.25 bonus to other thrust damage (weapons with swing and thrust). In addition to that, I've removed "sidearm" weapons, since the AI would rather use throwing weapons or daggers than any spear in melee. The AI only equips spears when fighting cavalry, but they are just really bad at fighting cavalry. Full cav army is simply still unbeatable, like in Warband.
That alone however doesn't really improve the spears quite enough. Spearmen will still lose 100% of the time against cavalry and barely manages against infantry with swords, like archers. Combined with a couple of other mods, that reduce minimum range, spear hitboxes and friendly hits, the spearmen are then able to deal some damage and even win against cavalry.
In my opinion spears should deal similar damage as other two handed weapons (swords and polearms).