Horseman - The Mounted Combat Mod for Skyrim WIP

Are you tired of:

• Vanila Horses? Those whom are no more than a piece of moving furniture?
  
• Utterly useless if combat?
  
• You have to dismount every time you want to kill some body?

No more, This Mod will attempt to change that

>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXqydGgR6KQ <<<
>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD07afsS3iw <<<

>> https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-kWL2uroIFv0/T1yCNoV6MjI/AAAAAAAAAV4/43PRWnroXug/s1152/TESV%25202012-03-11%252003-38-48-86.jpg << >> https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-JNvHeFpmGyg/T3kQV09dbpI/AAAAAAAAAXY/ivHFDIeP178/s1152/TESV%25202012-04-01%252019-25-18-69.jpg << >> https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Rmwix7rXIbw/T3kQZ1pW50I/AAAAAAAAAXg/g09zexkuvmU/s1152/TESV%25202012-04-01%252019-26-14-32.jpg <<
>> https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-sbMeJ1pk6Js/T1yCKB09NKI/AAAAAAAAAVo/4ibWDLvwY0I/s1152/TESV%25202012-03-11%252003-38-29-36.jpg << >> https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-VU-o14lIBSY/T3kQBnzB9_I/AAAAAAAAAXA/PhSPFH14-yQ/s1152/TESV%25202012-04-01%252019-23-17-25.jpg << >> https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-3jotbb_HXm4/T3kQbxiyYhI/AAAAAAAAAXo/6A5CZx7j6Pg/s1152/TESV%25202012-04-01%252019-26-05-63.jpg <<
>> https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-mpPZi-oq-4U/T1yCMLGvWlI/AAAAAAAAAVw/nRWmhGQnD6M/s1152/TESV%25202012-03-11%252003-37-52-73.jpg << >> https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-8oOpoGmfMXA/T3kQSJfZxkI/AAAAAAAAAXQ/d4_9GF0LRxA/s1152/TESV%25202012-04-01%252019-24-19-54.jpg <<
>> https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-3yrsVQ7ueVo/T1yCD-jl_tI/AAAAAAAAAVg/5DRi2vFs_FI/s1152/TESV%25202012-03-11%252003-37-46-52.jpg << >> https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-i2bbQeu2t0w/T3kQIhiqy_I/AAAAAAAAAXI/WZVtSu0bl8U/s1152/TESV%25202012-04-01%252019-23-53-72.jpg <<

Features:

• Horse charge - yes, I mean Horse Charge!!! You can send enemy flying with a full charge (doesn't work on Big enemies), and it hurts, really hurts
  
• Horse melee attacks - Currently, the horse can perform 2 melee attacks: Headbutt & Front Kick, which can potentially damage ALL (yes, I mean ALL) enemies in front of the horse
  
• Realistic bumping - Horses in vanila just push everything aside, but in this mod, horse bumps can interrupt NPC's movement, even attacks
  
• Melee Mounted combat - With swords/axes and daggers (although you can rethink of bringing daggers to a fight ). Check the video for game play details
  
• Spears/Lances charge & melee combat - Player can use spears/lance to make the charge more deadly. After the charge, spear can be some uses in melee

Future features:

• Spear throw
  
• Dagger throw
  
• Mounted archery (high-priority)

Note:

• This mod will be available on Skyrim Nexus only, unless Steam workshop supports pex upload, scripts hook (ScriptDragon or SKSE)
  
• I plan to release this mod right after SKSE comes out. Currently, the 3rd party script hooks are somewhat inconvenience

And yes, please, if you have any idea to make this mod better, please share. Your contributions/Ideas are vital for the success of this mod

Sounds good. Steam Workshop does support PEX files though.

Nice job mate, good luck with the project

PEX files? what are those?

Would need a 1st person view for me to use, but that might be difficult?

This looks already like a good mod.
I watched the video and I think you could improve the realism if the horse would not be able to run through masses of enemies, but would get slower and also stagger.

Or maybe make the horse get staggered when hit (if such an animation exists) as a workaround.

Wow. I'm very impressed. This is great just so I don't have to dismount to kill a pair of wolves.

Very cool! I wonder, do you plan on implementing couched lance damage bonus? Also I do agree with some of the above comments that a horse should not be able to plough through a host of bad guys.

Oh my, what was I thinking.... Late night w/o sleep does that What I meant was script hook file like ScriptDragon or SKSE



Ok, I do have a good news for you. I already have first person camera for ridding horses. But the bad news is ...... the camera juggles a lot, like on real horses. Might give ppl ..... sea sickness. I will try to come up with something more feasible


Ya, you can stagger while on horse back. For the sake of that video, I only use melee bandit with daggers. So they won't slow me down or stagger. I once tried spawn bandit marauders with bows, and they constantly put myself in stagger mode Picturing like 40+ arrows coming at you in every second.....

Fighting Bandit Chief was even humiliating. (that why I don't include them in the video). They constantly shieldbash/weapon bash your horse, make her stagger all the time.



Ya, I will try to balance it on the release.... Regarding the lance damage bonus, I can, but I will need some animators to help me with the lance animations

Looks pretty good! The animations looked a little bit weird though when NPCs were flying in the air, but still great in general.

Sounds like a mod to look very much forward to.
Just remember to try to balance things nicely. The reason Bethesda has never implemented mounted combat in OB or SK is because of balance issues.

I was pondering the possibility of starting with a horse combat mod, but as you are already working on it, better if I share my idea instead.

I was planning to attach the character by the hips, to a dummy character mounting the horse with the MoveToNode command and then explore the possibility of making the player legs and the dummy character torso invisible. That would let you use your weapons. The problem would be controlling the horse, but if you are going to use OBSE, I suppose you won't have problems with that.

Something that would be wonderful is if the horse could kick backwards when there are enemies behind it. Sadly, I suspect the animations for that don't exist and would be very hard (or impossible) to add. But I'd love to be proved wrong !

I agree that the NPCs being sent flying is rather odd, although it fits with the general exaggerated knockdown physics of Skyrim. Have you tried it with the realistic physics/ragdolls mod?

Yep, the knock-down physics are vanila, which I have no control of. I will try with the realistic ragdoll mod and see if that improves the situation.

On the otherhand, I've been thinking a lot about balance. I do not wish this mod to break things here and there, or become overpowered.
One way to 'balance' is to make horse very strong against melee opponents, but very weak against range attacks/magic caster:

• Projectiles/magic bolts can stagger/disrupt movement and the charge of the horse
  
• There is a chance to actually knock the player off the horseback with arrows

The charge must be in full momentum / speed in order to send NPC flying. I will need SKSE for functions to check speed
For horses movement:

• If the horse bumps into many enemies, it can be staggered, movements disrupted

For melee:

• Daggers probably won't affect horse movement
  
• One-hand power attack might have a chance to stagger horses
  
• Two-handed weapons have bonus fighting horses? I've been thinking about power-attacks from the sides can knock players off the horse as well

Let me know if these ideas work out well?

Will the NPCs be able to have mounted combat? That should balance things out .

Actually, that's a great idea, kudo
I can try to make NPC 'look' for a horse whenever he enters combat w/ player (if there is a horse nearby), or any NPC already on horse, they will attempt to do so. But I think they might be able to use horse-based attacks only, as mounted-combat for NPC is rather......complicated and animations not supported

Thank you amgepo for such idea If I'm not mistaken, then this is how mounted combat was implemented in Oblivion? I do remember the clipper legs everytime player performs an attack.

There is also a mod which perfectly 'hides' that leg problem, but I don't know how it works. Does any body know the name of that mod?

Just had a thought. Spears could take this mod to the next level.

And even more so, a spear/halberd critical hit could kill a charging horse in one hit.

Say hello to feudalism!

Not sure if they do something similar to this in Oblivion. I learned of existence of deadly reflex after the remove of mounted combat, so I never see it in action.

As I see, the success of this method lies withing the posibility of making a part of the body invisible without affecting the rest. That seem to be done quite fine in the case of decapitations, but didn't check on that (probably is a native feature).

the merp guys were working on a mounted combat mod for Oblivion (Merp) based on the mount and blade mods...this one was looking very promising...don't know if they are still on it or if there is any chance for coorparation...bit it shows what is possible...

I have a question.

What if Bethesda Softworks release their own version of mounted combat onto a DLC? We know Beth already made it possible, right?

I'd still use this version because I'm a cheap bastard.

One possibility (which would be tricky to implement, but quite possible) would be to have a charging horse only stagger/knockdown NPCs that are directly in front when it hits them. If they're a bit off to one side it would just shove them aside without interrupting their attacks - in effect, give NPCs the ability to sidestep a charge and attack from the side/behind, but without having to mess around with AI or animations.

Only problem with that is it might effectively force players to buy a horse as soon as they possibly can, and replace it if it ever died. Rather than mounted combat being a nice bonus for the player, it would become a core game mechanic - but a rather clunky one, on an engine that doesn't properly support it. At least limit NPC mounted attacks to those NPCs that are already mounted, perhaps? And rely on balancing the mod by making the horse more vulnerable or less powerful.

A case in point, look at my hoverchair mod for Fallout 3. Making it extremely fast, with mounted weapons, and able to knock down even powerful enemies wasn't a problem, because it was tricky to control and most enemies had ranged combat. One on one, in open terrain, it was stupidly overpowered. Against two or 3 strong enemies in a cluttered environment it was quite weak. The same solutions wouldn't work for horses in Skyrim, but it should still be possible to make them a fun bonus without making them either overpowered or required.

Decapitations don't make the head invisible, they just make it fall off. It's still a visible part of the same model, it just gets separate physics. If you look around you'll be able to find the decapitated head and activate it to loot the body. It might be possible to give the player model dismemberment information for the legs, but they'd still be visible, and if you tried moving the player beyond the cell where the legs were lying you'd likely get all sorts of movement/crashing problems. Oh, and I'm not sure you can actually reverse dismemberment. I think if you resurrected a dismembered NPC in Fallout 3 they'd be running round with dismembered limbs.

I think some good ways to balance the mounted combat would be to:
1) Make it easy to get hurt by arrows.
2) If the horse gets hurt (doesn't have to die), you get thrown off the horse and... it will hurt you.
3) Make it easier to knock off the horseman as well using long melee weapons, like two-handed. This also gives us the reason to consider to implement spears.... Spears would greatly balance horse combat. It would be the horseman's fear.
4) Perhaps make it so strong destruction magic can scare untrained horses (horses that cost not much gold and aren't very special in the game), causing you get thrown off the horse? I mean a horse would probably go pretty crazy in real life if a loud lighting bolt struck nearby. This could be the mages' advantage to balance mounted combat.

No chance!