As some of you may have seen from other topics, I'm doing a complete reinstall of Oblivion right now; hopefully I'll end up with a stable build that doesn't change as I'm playing my next character.

As part of this, I got to thinking about horses. To tell the truth, I rarely use horses in Oblivion, because usually my characters are at a high enough level to outrun any of them.
BUT, if there's a mod that allows a horse's stats to change - say, one that you ride a lot will end up with a higher health or endurance, or maybe become a bit faster - I'd be interested in it. Does anyone know of such a mod?

Similarly, does a mod exist that allows combat from horseback? I've read about several attempts to create such a mod but am not aware of any successes.

Thanks in advance.

Horse commands. Link's in my thread linked in my signature.
It won't level-up like a character, but you can put it through 2 stages of combat training to give it Fority Health and Shield effects.
It has my very old mod of increasing it's walk speed to 110% your player speed incorporated in it.
Other features: A little horse AI, saddlebags, ride through load gates

Maybe you know http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=8766 It features horse training purchased from guildhall leaders of the Fighters Guild that can boost a horse's stats nicely, but that's the smallest of its features: it basically allows you to control horses PROPERLY, and has many concepts from previous smaller horse mods integrated: where's my horse, saddlebags calls, etc...

A long time ago I saw someone working on what looked like a character menu for the horse, so you could consult its stats,inventory and active effects like in the regular menu for the player. But i assume it never went past of alpha, and even the author said it was terribly unstable.

The main problem with altering a horse's speed is that it scales tremendously with the stat magnitude, and horses don't 'stick' very well to the floor while running due to their size. 33 is pretty much the upper limit for safeness, but it is much slower than a human at 100 speed and athletics. A horse with 40 speed will be faster than most quick characters, but anytime you ride it downhill you will almost surely have to deal with fall damage... but I've just had an idea for a mod using a simple OnFallImpact event handler to avoid that, thanks for the thread!

For horse combat, the only option right now is pretty much Deadly Reflex, which is good enough. I've also read about such a feature being worked at for the MERP mod (Middle Earth RolePlaying)

Edit: :ph34r: by the man himself

I'm an odd one in that a great many horses, at least the mod-provided mounts my avatar tends to uses, gallop faster than I feel is realistic for an armored horse carrying a heavily armed and armored Nord warrior. I've taken to editing horse speed in TES4edit to slow 'em down. It's easy to do. But again this is with mod-provided mounts, not vanilla, and I always back up the original ESP.

(For some reason, many of the modded horses I am familiar with come flagged with Corpse Check. This too gets disabled (easily) with TES4edit. Quite jarring when riding a full gallop and your horse slams on the breaks at each body it comes upon. Har.)

Sign me up! I know what you mean about the dangers of increasing a horse's speed too much...my current character has a couple of Fortify on Touch Speed 100 spells--add those to a horse in Bruma's stable and, if you could manage not to have fall damage, you could be in Leyawiin in under a minute. Sadly, I've never been able to safely navigate the hills in the Bruma area...

Is there any way to increase the "weight" of a horse so that it sticks to the ground more effectively in-game? If we could find some way to ensure the horse doesn't go flying when it's descending uneven ground, it would fix the problem. (Perhaps a script attached to the horse that modifies his Z-axis position so he's always on the ground if the player didn't make him jump?) Alternatively, I like the idea of an OnFallImpact event to mitigate the problem, but only if the horse has been trained to have the necessary Agility to be able to fall quite a ways safely - AND the player hasn't overburdened the horse with too much weight.

In the meantime, I'll be using Horse Commands, thanks for the tip

Agreed re: horse speeds at gallop. Hence my mod, removes that speed boost when you're galloping the horse.

I never found a way to increase the creature's combat skill safely (as you previously suggested Migck - or I think that was you). There is the OBSE way, but my preference is to increase stats via enchanted tokens. So, I did not implement that into the mod. However, I did keep the Fortify Health and Shield effects in their training. I also found the Creatures flee behaviour from my NPCs Yield mod helped my horses stay alive.