When horses bail...

[mfp]

I'll admit I haven't thoroughly looked through the forum to see if this has been suggested before or not, but I've seen a lot of posts recently dealing with horses and specifically, giving them personalities or barding or whatnot.

All of these ideas are fine.

What I think would be a good addition to the game however occurs when these mighty beasts bail; when they get incapacitated/killed/knocked over/etc. In the game they scream and tumble around until they drop dead, and their hapless rider is summersaulted about with them.

But, somehow, a mere second after his mount skids to a halt, he stands up and is again ready for combat. I've played this game enough to see some specacular horse-deaths and its occured to me that no one (that is, riders) could possibly survive them.

So, I think it would be good to have a rider of a dead horse take damage from the fall. To keep in line with the HP system already established, this could simply be a number of damage that depends on the speed the horse was travelling at before crashing. In this case, I don't know if armor would even protect too much, but that's a minor issue. The damage should probably have a random element to it, but it should have a high upper bound as realistically, a simple fall from a horse can be debilitating if not outright lethal.

This would obviously make it more dangerous for horse riders, and it might serve as a work-around to taking out heavily armored opponents on poorly armored horses, but I think a cavalier with these modifications is still superior to a footman (inside the M&B world, from my experience). At least the modification would tie in nicely with customizable barding, should it be implemented.

So, any thoughts?

 

[twelveways]

I think we weould need to see the horses hitpoints in order for this to work.

 

[guspav]

I also think it is a good idea but for gameplay'ssake I thin it should be "blunt" damage since hired cavalry almost always get knocked off their horses when fighting infantry

 

[Volkier]

Theres already a post regarding this, and I disagree that at the speeds horses currently run in the game, a fall from a trained soldier would do any significant damage. May be only a slight one, or under sertain circumstances (like landing on a rock) a more painfull one. As for horses rolling over the riders, once again, the most probably thing which will happen is the rider will get pinned to the ground, but not seriously injured (unless the horse rolls over their heads with the hard part of the saddle maybe)

Anothing thing, like somebody wise already mentioned, it would force players (and may be NPC's) to deliberately aim for the horse, in order to kill the rider. Unless the damage is very minor (like 1 or 2) it would also make it feel as if horse + rider are joined, like in every other game, so the damage is shared. If the damage IS minor, then this is a minor addition which would not do any significant difference. Just my 2 denars :