Horses: want to love them, but hate them

[ElricOfGrans]

Horses. They seem like a good idea, but I just cannot justify them to myself. They cost a lot of money, trot slower than a level one character walks, galloping gives me a really slow frame rate and increases the frequency of crashes (I have the same issue with running in exterior cells), are difficult to manoeuvre, and generally end up getting killed by the first group of enemies you come across by the time you dismount and take care of them. Are there any mods I can use to make horses less painful? The most important one for me is fixing their slow trot speed, as I cannot see the point of taking one if I can walk faster.

[SaintAnon]

Windom Earle's Oblivion Crash Prevention System

Streamline

Oblivion Stutter Remover

 

These to help with your frame rate issues and for the horses check out Slof's Horses :thumbsup:

[ziitch]

Check out MD Saddlebags - You can buy saddlebags and turn your horse into a walking container with somewhat realistic limits.

[David Brasher]

If you are a bit of a modder, you could go into the CS and change the speed, health points, aggression, confidence, and combat skill of your horse. Those are all easy things to do.

 

Your other problem with frame rate and CTDs is more like you have a weak computer, too many mods, a bad combination of mods, or incorrect and excessively high Oblivion graphics settings.

 

Horse manoeuverablity is an issue, but if you are a veteran console gamer, your skill will increase with practice, and you will improve your deftness and precision at controlling your horse.

[ElricOfGrans]

I have been through all the guides on improving FPS/reducing crashes and have taken all the common measures. Relatively high-end system (quad-core, 1GB VRAM, etc), but I have approximately 200+ mods installed, which would be killing the performance. I bet removing QTP3 Redimised alone would probably make a huge improvement, but it looks so good I am not sure it would be worth it ;)

 

I already had Slof's Horses indirectly from installing MMM. That is a major reason why I wanted to give them another try: they now *looked* REALLY good.

 

I have bought a horse, which seems to auto-drop FPS considerably (even without moving), though I no longer crash when galloping. I added a lot of performance tweaks since I last tried horses, so I guess they did the trick (I have Silent Feet MAX, for example, which I heard makes a major difference with horses). I added the saddlebag mod, but had a lot of difficulty getting them to work (after using and reusing the console commands in the readme several times). Eventually they finally showed up in merchants, however, and should make a big difference to my gameplay. It looks really ugly though. The horse already has a saddle (presumably from Slof's), so when it tries to layer a second saddle over the top, there is horrid clipping.

 

Is there anything that makes horses stumble less? I was trotting down a road and saw some bandits ahead. I was not interested in fighting them, so I decided to gallop past. The horse took two steps *on a flat, straight road* and fell! By the time the horse got up and I was able to dismount, I was almost dead. I had to use all my healing potions before I could even begin fighting back. VERY tedious.

[albonaut]

Some people consider this a cheat I guess, but I do believe there is a mod out there that makes horses (or at least player owned horses) essential, so they cannot die. Like I said, could be called a cheat, but is also nice if your sick of your horse dieing. Or could be used if you're a horse lover and don't want to see dead horses.

 

Wow, I didn't even know horses could stumble. I've never actually used a horse in all the time I've played the game. I don't know if this will help but there is a mod that gives horses trample damage, so you can run over bandits and other NPCs or creatures while on your horse. It's a tough call though, because it also changes the controls for mounts, and I can't stand what it changes it too, but at the same time, it's oh so much fun to run over a group of four or five bandits :)