I saw similar stockpiles of mounts in my games and agree that horses and wargs  should be made much more rare.

Horses should provide some sort of HP bonus as horses in theory should be stronger than wargs. Ideally it should be a trade off between mobility (wargs) and strength (horses). I've never understood why wargs got less moves.

But as for the actual resource I'm not sure how to make it work. It doesn't make sense to have a unit cost more than one horse since it will only need to use one horse. Using up horses to make your army move faster doesn't make a whole lot of sense either. You could trade horses to other empires but at a certain point they will become useless so perhaps there should be some sort of inter-empire trade. So you could sell your horses to people within your empire for a small amount of money. 

Charge more horses per mounted unit upgrade troop size.

Oh, and caravans. Give players an ability to "upgrade" caravans with up to 2 mounts.

This means your 2 Wargs or Warhorses are "pulling" the wagon and will defend it if attacked. Each time a wagon departs, you may pay up to 2 or 4 mounts to "protect" it.

If the caravan is attacked, it would simulate an auto-battle, and the mounts would increase the strength of the caravan.

Lastly, Legacy of Serrane could give more defense for caravans.

When a caravan is defeated, it remains on the map and rolls for survival. If it fails, the caravan is destroyed, if it did then the caravan is assumed to have survived.

Caravan Escort would add a new dimension to the game, and would be more than fun for everyone.

Maybe we need buildings that use up horses.

eg Chariot races Unrest -10%, upkeep 1 horse/turn

Slaughterhouse +1 grain, upkeep 1 horse/turn (empire only?)

Ploughed fields +10 food per grain. Costs 4 horses to build.

It is notable that in LH, as a change from FE, we have to now research the technology to build on Wild Horses or on Wild Wargs, and the building intially provides 1/turn. In FE, we could build without the tech, and get 1/2 a horse or warg per turn.

I think I liked the FE version better, as one could upgrade or not, if necessary.

Good ideas!

I would actually increase resource nodes like crystals and have tile features like forest or rivers help more.

I would also have 2 types of tiles" one with "normal" fertility and one with "high" fertility to increase the number of "spots". Each "settle zone" would have less spots in the range, however there would be more good spots tattered around and less big ranges of bad spots.

Also, the AI is bad at making choices, so giving it less but better choices is better.

Hey, what if mounted units just required an extra wage - .25 horse per turn. This represents the stable having to send in new, fresh horses and/or support the horses that are out there. Thus you need the initial horses to get started, plus some of the stable's resources to maintain horses in the field. This way, a standing mounted army would require a LOT of extra stables. 

If making the resource rarer is easier in engineering hours for Stardock, however, then that is the way to go. 

The comment about horse / warg maintenance is great.  something like a .1 or .05 per turn.

The other thing I could see is that any mounted unit that takes 25% dmg in battle loses it mounts and they have to be replaced or the troops become unmounted.

"Maybe we can convert some to food. Horse meat is good.  "

If your French.....

While an interesting idea, that's not going to solve anything because 100 horses is still a lot compared to what you need, and you generate horses fast enough with just a single node that it wouldn't matter if it capped at 6 instead of 100. At most points in the game training a really good group of units takes longer or as long as it takes to reacquire the horses used, with just one map resource. Like 5 turns early on for a group of 3, like 5-10 turns later on for a group of 6, while you are getting 1 horse per turn.

Also horses already increase wages, and production time, but they are so beneficial that it doesn't matter. They are one of the single most beneficial items you can add to a character, there's pretty much never any reason not to do so.

Add /wargs to every "horses" in my post.

I agree with the 'upkep' cost in horses or wargs for equipped units, it's realistic, those delicate animals were expended in training as well as in battle.  

It's also not unrealistic to expend mounts to increase movement in an emergency; they're called 'remounts' and their availability has limited the strategic mobility of cavalry units since forever.  It's doubtless beyond the scope of the current game-system, but a hero ability in a commander-type tree to forced march an army, expending mounts in the process, would be strategically interesting, useful, and historically plausible.