Alright, i noticed recently alot of whining about being bumped by cav and all that.
So here are two suggestions that might change how cav works.
1)
When a cav bumps an infantry person, there is a small % chance of the cav being bumped himself and his horse taking damage (dependant on the armor).
This has been tried before and didn't work (yes it was my suggestion, and yes it ended up stupid). But the idea now is that you give cav what I call the "charge mode" button.
+ When cav presses this button, they get immunity from being bumped by collisions and gained an increase amount of charge damage for a certain amount of time. A small armor increase is also a possiblity (armour of valour!)
- The balance would be that during this time, while horse speed is maintained, horse maneuverability is decreased substantially (would require testing as to the amount). This means that once a cav starts charging it is now dedicated to this charge, as aborting it will not work very well. So if the cav suddenly sees 5 pikes ahead, he is pretty much fucked.
The exception to this is that while attempting a couch, the cav ignores being bumped.
2)
Allowing infantry to brace themselves against a horse charge by blocking upwards. If you know you are about to be bumped, you start blocking upwards to "ready yourself" for the coming bump. This would lead to decreased damage to the infantry as well as the chance of being knocked down being decreased.
At the same time, the chance of the cav being bumped by the collision is increased as well.
Lastly, I think a change like this would mean that cav require a larger radius of stabby lance range, since with the current small range its difficult to avoid bumping infantry...