Agree with OP and others that some balancing is required.

- Too many horses/wargs available. 

- Can have both. Would prefer a choice.

- Should have combat downsides and costs as well as providing mobility and some combat upsides. Base this on reality if possible. 

The medieval game theme is hurt a great deal with no brainer all mounted units armies.

NERF.

Firmly Agree with this. This would also make upgrading iron/crystal/horse/worg resources an important feature of game play; after all if you have to upgrade these resources in order to increase max storage capacity as well as resource gather rate you will really want to research prerequisite techs and build these upgrades. Also it would make protecting resources much more important since losing a resource means an automatic reduction in max resource and potential loss of any resource that is greater then the new max resource. This makes raiding enemy territory and destroying resources a better tactic.

Edit: Also increase mounted unit wages far more to better represent the value of mounted units. If you need more of a reason for increased wages then just say that mounted units need to pay for fodder, stabling, grooming, and so on. Mounted unites have such an increase in overall unit ability that the much higher wages are justified. Thus it doesn't matter how many horses you have if you don't have a large enough treasury you simply won't be able to afford to have all that many mounted units.

Could use the civ5 way? Each horses/wargs nodes can support 2 units (or 1). Champions & henchmen who can buy at shop should not be counted in.

Compared to civ games, mounts are full win with no malus. In civ mounts give you an offense bonus AND a def malus, and cavalry have a counter unit in pikemen. Spearmen could have a def/att bonus vs mounted units? Or introduce pike as special spears in the warfare tech tree.

EDIT: Give mounted units special skills, like charge for horses, a rush with a boost damage, but with the def malus they are left easy prey to swarm after the initial attack.

Warg could get different bonus/malus. More Initiative + dodge but still vulnerable to pikemen.

I'm actually surprised elemental didn't go the CiV way of resources.

Ie. a horse resource gives you say 12 horses. Its not cumulative, you only get the 12 horses. Tech and building upgrades would increase this number but it would really limit the amount of cavalry in an army.

Edit: This could further be extended by the current system. Say you gain 0.1 horses per turn up to the current limit. Again i'm pulling numbers out of my head; think of the concept behind these numbers not the numbers themselves.

You would be able to conduct a war on your opponent's economy. Cities are too well protected? You don't have to reach them. At least not for the moment. Raid your opponent horses harvesting buildings and they will end with only the few horses they could storage in their cities. Also, they won't be able to stockpile hugresources of resources to sell to other empires. 

Sell your excess horses.

I like this. But limiting the placement of horses and wargs is probably easier. 

how about an extra slider on the world setup that sets the relative abundance of mount tiles? pretty much a copy/paste of the resources slider, but only affecting either the number of wild horses/ wild wargs on the map, or the production rate of the stables/kennels (or both).

"high" setting would be what we have now - virtually no restriction once you have the tech; you'll typically find a horse or warg node within less than 20 tiles of your starting spot; with high setting, mounts are almost guaranteed and generally available

"medium" would be a bit rarer (less than 1 horse or warg node per AI faction, and not in the immediate vicinity of the starting spot; you'd typically get them in the mid game, but you wouldn't have a stockpile of dozens or hundreds already, so you would play with mixed troops for most of the mid game and maybe switch to full mounted armies late in the game

"low" would make them really rare - maybe 2 or 3 nodes total on a medium map; also far away from the starting areas, so you'd have to fight your way through some leveled up lairs and roaming bands of critters to build your stable outpost at some point in the mid/late game; mounted units would be the elite of your armies since you'll only have few and probably not enough to outfit more than a select few elite units

with a slider, players who like it as it is now can just use the high setting, others who are fed up with the overabundance of mounted troops could reduce it and probably eventually settle for the balanced medium setting

Quoting igncom1, reply 21Could we compensate the amount of one type of mount by adding more?

Like pegasi that boost initiative over health

Or unicorns that boost magical ability's over weight carrying ability......I just asked for unicorns...


Would love to have more 'fantastic' mounts to choose from.

Pegasi can fly...

Unicorns can teleport...

Naturally, other magic types would require they're own fantastic creature types.

 

 [/quote]

I am going to start a thread suggesting these units as fantastic mounts as a summoning spell or as alternative familiar units.  Saw your posts and it encourages me that others feel the same way...

One thing I never really understood in FE & LH is why you had to learn the Horse Tech before learning Warg Riding.  Seemed silly to me.  Would also have thought Horses would require Pastures from the Civ Tree, and Wargs having a similar pre-req, probably from the magic tree.

Agree with the OP about the overabundance of mounts available w/o any disadvantage whatsoever in their use.  Many ideas have been presented to balancing mounts in the past and have no desire to repeat them yet again. 

Like the idea of a maintenance cost.  I would prefer it hitting my food supply, rather than money.  Too many mounts in the field will impact city growth as grain goes to keep them supplied in the field.

So did they fix horses/wargs in the latest patch?