But in the beginning of the game, you shouldn't be able to afford a horse, you should have to be able to fight on foot by necessity. I always end up using a horse in battle, because it really makes the game a lot harder when you are on foot. This may seem pretty stupid in the grand scheme of things, but improving this functionality or getting the preview to match the actual horse that youll be buying/equipping would be amazing. The upkeep for high tier cavalry in your armies is significantly higher than that of infantry or archers, making an unstoppable all-cavalry army unsupportable financially until very late in the game. Once I go into a battle scene, though, it will revert back to the original color of the horse I first had at the start of the game, and it will update on the horse that stands behind my character. The base level of horses should be a lot more expensive. As far as I know, they do not dramatically increase food consumption like they would in real life either. They are similar to a Steppe Horse with higher Charge, Speed, and Hit Points. Unlike Skyrim's horse riding and combat system, in Mount & Blade, horse doesn't change its direction while you are moving the camera, horse will go its way and is ONLY DIRECTED BY WASD KEYS, so it's way more easy for Archery. Even these cheap saddle horses can give a huge advantage in battle. Desert Horses are a new type of horse introduced in Warband. After playing 'Mount & Blade : Warband', i noticed that its horse riding and combat system is very easy and fluent. In Vanilla, and in many mods of the game, you start off with a horse or you can buy a horse for <300 denars. Horses shouldn't be nerfed any further in battle, but they do need to be nerfed on the campaign map. They are still overpowered to some extent, but they should be, because they really really were in real life. Pikes and Spears have extra bonus damage vs mounted units, creating a sort of rock paper scissors dynamic between melee units (Cavalry, Spear infantry, Sword/axe infantry). In my opinion, Floris does a fairly good job of this.

Mods go some way to nerf their abilities.

Mount and blade horses