A guy with a big axe hitting you while charging at you with a warhorse would do a LOT more damage then it does in Skyrim, also, a power attack while on a moving horse should be like being hit with shield charge. This is ust to make mounted combat more exciting then just circling an enemy repeatedly.

They need to fix the enemies blasting off like Team Rocket every time I hit them.

Yeah mounted combat is a good feature but not fully fleshed out yet so I don't use it much

They really should have spent more time looking at Mount & Blade for their mounted combat. That game does it so much better.

I agree they do a decent job of giving you the advantage as cavalry but don't express it in the animations or abilities. You should be able to use a lance at least, to great advantage, which instantly skewers your enemy!

It needs a lot of work but it won't happen, the mounted combat we have now is a big concession.

I like being able to hold a strike and charge at the target then release as I pass.

But my ideal situation there would be to say, continue moving while swapping melee for bow, twisting around and loosing an arrow to finish.
On paper the mounted combat we have now seems to let you do that, but in practice it's awkward and clumsy.

But where does the list of needed features end?
Mounted combat is a Pandora's box.

Bethesda are skittish about the horses for a good reason, they could easily add storage/saddlebags for example but they have stated that making the horses too important would amplify their flaws and create an unending cycle of players calling for this or that to be added/fixed, tweaking and patches until the horses become this monster feature overshadowing everything else... or words to that effect.

As it stands players don't care too much about horses in Skyrim, they're just a peripheral feature.
Mounted combat has made players care a bit more about horses and start looking at horses more closely, so seeing their flaws more readily... and caring more about those flaws... and consequently start asking for those flaws to be addressed in preference to features that Bethesda considers a higher priority than horses.

The reason being that the potential list of features they could add to horses is never ending... so better not to start.

I'm not sure I agree with your anolysis. The reason horses were relegated to a peripheral feature isn't because people didn't care. Horses were heavily scrutinized and picked apart almost as soon as the game was released. They were found to have a number of issues including, among others, difficult controls, forced third person and the total inability to do anything on horseback. They were relegated to a peripheral feature not because people didn't care, but because people found them to be poorly implemented and more of a hassle than running.

Mounted combat makes them less of a hassle and that's a big part of why people wanted it. Unfortunately, yeah, people have issues with mounted combat now that it's out. Why? Part of it is that many of the original issues of the horse are still present and make it more difficult to use. The other part is that it feels incomplete or missing aspects one might expect to find in mounted combat.

Agreed. I'd like to be able to charge into a group of enemies with a couched lance and inflict some real carnage.

I do see great potential in the cavalry aspect of this game, if it were given full attention I think it could launch it to another level. Everyone loves being a mounted cavalryman on the charge!

Mounted combat is a lot like Bow/Spell kill cams. There were bugs at first but they were mostly fixed in the following update that added mounted combat. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that I believe for the most part that mounted combat will be tweaked if not mostly fixed in the update we are sure to get on Tuesday. That being said, the main feature I would like to see added would be NPCs on horseback, especially in the Civil War.

Copy paste from Mount&Blade = smart move from Beth (if they make it).

I wouldn't even mind if they made it a bit faster that it is in MB as skyrim's combat areas are much smaller.

It's almost impossible to hit people with a one-handed weapon.

to PC guys, http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/14950
this make's mounted combat almost perfect, and you can even loot and talk to people from horseback
the only thing yet missing is spears/lances and npcs fighting from horseback, maybe one day... @@

Not really. One of it's biggest problems is the horse controls themselves and that mod does nothing for that. It does, however, fix a lot of the problems with the horses, themselves.

aaaan, no '-'
it's very easy, in the first 1.6 beta the detection hit was terrible, but they fix it and it's very good now in the latest 1.6

I enjoy it for what it is. However, I mostly use a bow while on horseback to chase deer or charge into forts to shoot the men guarding the outer walls. Fighting a dragon while riding a horse is interesting, also.

Ah, I only did it in the beta, never tried again because of how horrible it was. Thanks.