Horse bumps. Prepare for the wall of text.
One one hand, they are very powerful at the moment, and can at speed inflict a lot of damage, which I, from a realistic perspective, can only encourage. On the other hand, perhaps damage is a tad too high. However, what I want to adress here is the reflective bump damage. The damage a horse receives when riding into any character, without that character actually doing anything to attack the horse. With a hunter, a decent and rather expensive horse, it is easily possible to receive reflective bump damage equal or greater to 40% of the hunter's total health, while also causing a bleeding effect. While usually reflective bump damage lies aroun 5% health per person you ride over, these hits also have the possibility to trigger bleeding. This makes playing cavalry very expensive and very annoying.
As a cavalrist you pay upkeep for your horse dependant on the amount of damage it takes while you are mounted. The fact that you take ridiculous amounts of damage with a decent and expensive horse such as a courser or hunter when riding over people, one of the main advantages of having a horse, makes using one very inefficient cost-wise. Only armoured horses do not take any form of reflective bump damage, but their repair cost is so high it is beyond consideration to use them frequently in a battle.
Currently as a result of this cavalry is punished for playing as cavalry through increased repairs and a system that deals a seemingly random amount of damage to their horse every time they use it for more than running away from enemies, namely, engaging people. This is both infuriating for both the cavalryman as the infantrist, as the mounted soldier gambles half of his horse's health every time he runs over a footman, only encouraging him not to do it, and stay away, and use ranged weapons from horseback instead.
I understand that the mod wishes to take a realistic approach to things, but as things are currently with this reflective bump damage, I must say that I feel that a horse in-game is more like skittish deer than a mighty steed. Alright, they inflict rather large amounts of bump damage, but the same massive and sturdy horses weighing 500-1000kg dependant on breed that in this mod accurately inflict painful amounts of damage apparently also receive major injuries from running over comparably flimsy creatures such as us, humans. Not only that, they have a rather large chance to receive a major bleeding that saps their health from running over these weak creatures. I think that this reflective damage is an attempt to balance the high bump damage through realism, but that it's way too far-fetched and annoying of a mechanism to be of much use. It is indeed possible that a horse receives injuries from running over a man, be he armoured or not, but as portrayed currently in the mod, that seems to be rule rather than exception, which is most certainly not the case in real life.
Let me summarize;
- Reflective bump damage deals up to 40% of a 'heavy' unarmoured horse's health in a single hit, while also being able to cause bleeding damage over time.
- Due to the way how upkeep works, reflective bump damage makes unarmoured 'cheap' horses a lot more expensive, because they can take such large amounts of damage from bumping players.
- From a perspective of realism the idea is unplausible at best.
So, for the love of God, do something about it. I personally would like to see reflective bump damage completely removed, since including a mechanic at all that gives horses a random chance to receive damage when bumping someone would in fact translate in someone being bumped having a certain chance to receive double the amount of trample damage if we apply the same logic. If the horse has a random chance of being seriously wounded, let the footman have a chance of being actually trampled (a chance that is far greater in real life than the former) and take grievous amounts of damage. A random punishing mechanic like this serves noone, especially if it has such severe effects on only one of both parties such as currently. I personally wish to see the mechanic removed, or at least severely hampered so that it does not have a major effect on gameplay anymore. It makes no sense that after having a streak of bad luck and after running over two players in peasant rags wielding wooden sticks and having lost over 2/3rd of a hunter's health, not including bleeding damage, forcing you into repairs and to completely adapt your playing style for the rest of the round.
tl;dr
Reflective bump damage is a random and punishing mechanic that serves no real purpose except as a strange and undesired balancing mechanic for bump damage. It ruins gameplay and drives cavalry players into repairs, and for this it should be either removed entirely (random punishing mechanics are no good feature in general) or heavily nerfed, so it does not influence gameplay nearly as much as it does now.
And adressing the inevitable footman wine that will be a reaction to this (I have already received less proper remarks when talking about this issue in-game, where people incurred righteous wrath of the Divine because I was using a horse etc)
Pretty much every horse is extremely fragile already to (random sprint-)attacks from two-handed swords that just about everyone uses. Trample damage is indeed high, but unless you are caught either unaware or completely alone on a flat open plain, it is easy to avoid being trampled.