You can choose different paths :
- Cav anticav :
Heavy lance
(facultative) shield
A self-defense weapon . One hander, two hander is better if you can block.
A horse chosen for it's maneuvrability : steppe, desert or sarranid. Obviously, try to use the sarranid as much as possible, it's a wonderful horse.
light armor. Because those horses are damn expensive, and you really don't need armor if you play accordingly to your skill and equipment setup.
Avoid archers and any kind of ranged attacks. Concentrate on defending your team against bump & slashers. If you feel confident, try to lure HA's to your ally archery.
- Bump & slash
a lance for defense against cav
a shield (allmost mandatory)
a onehander (twohander if you are confident). Never tried two hander cavalry myself, and allmost never seen anyone doing that, but some very powerful twohanders are usable on horseback (the hopefully-soon-to-be-nerfed barmace for example)
A powerfull horse, with armor, health points and charge damage. Your "good times" horse will probably be the destrier, and the economical choice will be the rouncey. Depends on the amount of character armor you want.
At least medium armor, because you don't want to be onehit when your horse dies. You'll be an arrow magnet, so armor really helps.
I played a few days recently with 37k gear : rouncey, tunic over mail, mail coif, mail mittens, splinted leather greaves over mail, knightly arming sword (+2), knightly heather shield, heavy lance.
I switched to that same equipment with the lance replaced by a pike and no horse for stupidly done CS-like maps. What I use isn't really my idea of medium armor (tunic over mail is the higher tier of light armors). But it's to use the regular set of my clan.
Concerning the one hander you want to use, there are various choices :
if you want to have ghost reach and use the uber fast ones :
- the spammitar
- the side sword
- the pick (yes it's ridiculous but the reach is ten times longer than what you see)
now if you have self-esteem :
- the morningstar
- any high tier straight sword