Human armor weight and horse speed

[Claytonium]

As of the current patch:

1. Does the weight of the armor your character wears affect your horse's speed in battle?
2. Does the weight of the horse's armor affect it's speed in battle?
3. If so, does either make enough of a difference to really matter?

I'm asking because I use medium armor on horseback, but heavy armor when sieging on foot. It's annoying to constantly switch all my armor and weapons between each battle type; and accidentally selling the armor I want to save half the time. I'm wondering if I should just stick with heavy armor the whole time.

Edit: Weight has no affect on horse speed. See my comment below.

[Paet]

HEYYYYY

[odin11b]

when i gear out my guy i never look at weight and i havent ran into any issue with my horse speed, i just go with the most protection. by time you get the better horses speed isnt really an issue

[thunda]

No, no and no.

[Claytonium]

Well, I might just keep my heavy armor on all the time then. I thought there'd be an effect on horse speed, but I guess not.

[GIJoe597]

Never noticed it having an affect. I can give my horse armor that weighs 15 or 60. The only thing which affects its handling is my Riding skill level.

I do not know if that will change in the future as the game is still being developed. I hope it does. I know my character runs much slower the heavier the armor he/she wears is. I also know I run slower up hill and faster down hill. Meaning there is some code to calculate these things.

[Liro Raériyo]

from what a friend told me, your weight on a horse impacts how much fall damage it takes and reduces the threshold you need to cross to trigger fall damage.

i think thats probably not true, but i wouldnt be surprised.

[Claytonium]

I did a "science experiment" and found out that weight has absolutely no affect on horse speed at all as of the current game version.

I went to a village and ran straight forward from the starting point on a horse until I hit a cliff. I used a stopwatch to time how long it took. I did it with 3 conditions:

1. man with 0 weight and horse with 5 weight saddle
2. man with 0 weight and horse with 15.2 weight saddle
3. man with 40.5 weight and horse with 15.2 weight saddle

I did each condition in triplicate and took the average of the 3 trials because I'm actually a scientist in real life and that's required to publish in any peer-reviewed scientific journals.

The 3 conditions and average times were as follows:

1. 10.89 seconds
2. 10.85 seconds
3. 10.82 seconds

The minute differences between times were not significant and were due to human error.

This conclusively proves that weight of both the character riding the horse and the horse's saddle has zero affect on horse speed.