Edit: crap, posted in the wrong forum, was meant to be in the general suggestions forum. If someone would move the topic I wouldn't be sad, but actually it's not that important.
Thomek suggested me to keep my posts short, so I will try:
My idea would be to add some kind of overhead stab animation for all spear like weapons, including pikes. Yes, an ADDITIONAL animation, resulting in a second attack direction. The two handed version of this animation would look like in Fire&Sword, the one handed would probably look a bit like the throwing animation. Of course it is supposed to have the same stopping power against horses like the ordinary stab.
Next to this make jumping interrupt all attacks immediately, and obviously you also can't start a new one while jumping. Additionaly I would like to see a vastly lowered turning speed while stabbing with any weapon. I HATE jump stabs, jump slashes and spin stabs. It looks crappy, and always a bit lame to me. It's not what Mount & Blade wanted to be like, in my opinion.
In short:
(1) Add overhead stab for spears and pikes, both one handed and two handed
(2) Implement jumps making it impossible to attack
(3) Lower turning speed while stabbing with any weapon
Results:
(1) => spear and pike weapons would become more viable. It would be the heavily needed buff for hoplites.
(2) + (3) => would still make the buff not too severe, especially for pikes
(1) => will probably lead to an increased amount of spears and pikes on the servers
=> this will lead to a change in melee. It will almost always be a melee in four lines: the both front infantry lines with 1hd+shield, 2hd and two handed polearms, and the both support lines with pikemen, spearmen and hoplites.
=> (1) will make it more difficult for the front line to survive, because simply downblocking won't protect any more
=> this means that the amount of two handed weapons will lower (for the sake of variety, YESSSS!!!), and the amount of shields will increase (shields are one of the most important aspects of infantry in the game, I think)
=> the higher amount of 1hd+shield will make up for the cav nerf that applied the the increased number of spears. Perhaps you can even lower horse upkeep, or combine this with an increased difficulty of horses, to make cav more sustainable, gold wise
=> the higher amount of shielders will nerf archers, which is not really a bad thing in my opinion, but f the nerf is too severe (at the moment archers seem to be fine, to be honest
) you can buff ranged items a bit again, so no problem there
And no, I don't think that two attack directions make spears OP, you already have enough spears with an overhead swing, and they are anything else but difficult to fight. And if you meet two or more of them it's just as much of a problem as meeting two two handers. Perhaps even a bit less of a problem, depending on whether the slower turning speed of stabs and the flexibility of swung weapons can make up for the longer reach of the spears or not. I can't tell.
P.S.: lowering the turning speed of overhead swings for crushthrough weapons could lower my feeling of rage when blocking properly and yet dying to one of those things.
