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So currently the plan, once 1.6 goes live, is to totally change the way horses work. Rather than feeding a particular horse, you will take riding lessons and increase the stats for the character. Each character will be able to have up to 60 points in speed, stamina and bag space, for a total of 180 invested points. And each stat may only be raised once a day.

When they convert our existing horses to 1.6, they will do something like the following:
Look at all of a character's horses.
Find the horse with the highest number of points in speed. That will become the player's horse speed stat.
Find the horse with the highest number of points in stamina. That will become the player's horse stamina stat.
Find the horse with the highest number of points in bag space. That will become the player's horse bag space stat.

So, if you care at all about optimizing your characters, and you've got a free horse (from the imperial edition or otherwise), here's what you do!
1) I assume you've already got a horse with a bunch of points in 1 main stat. That will be the stat that you won't worry about.
2) Buy 2 more 1g horses and start feeding them each for the other 2 stats. Make sure to feed each horse entirely for only 1 stat.
3) When 1.6 goes live, presumably in 3 or 4 weeks or more, you will start with higher horse stats than you would have had you not done this. For example, if you spend 25 days feeding horses before the patch goes live, then you'll begin with at least 25 points in each stat (more for whichever stat your main horse already had a lot of).

Hee. I already have at least 35 points in Speed on all my horses, but what I don't have is bag space. I've always figured that it's Speed and Stamina that I need most of all, since I'm mostly galloping away from pursuit . So I am going to be levelling bag space horses on all my characters.

Just as well I have a 1 gold horse available for everyone, right?

I just bought three horses. I named them after three of the Squadrons in the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, my stam horse is Ironhorse (1st Squadron), my speed horse is Eaglehorse (2nd Squadron) and my carrying horse is Packhorse (Regimental Support Squadron). Along with my main horse, "Blackhorse" which is named after the Regiment itself.

Some of you may remember the 11th Armored Cavalry if you read some of the notes in Fallout: New Vegas' Lonesome Road DLC, or killed a certain enemy that you can get a helmet that has the Regiment's Shoulder Sleeve Insignia on it even, so its kind of my nod to Bethesda/Zenimax's inclusion of the unit in one of their games.

Just to make this clear, this is how you save time on riding skill training post 1.6. However you will lose gold.
If you only care about your gold and are fine with raising one riding skill point per day you should not buy a second horse now. The only perk of a second horse will be its different looks.

True, which is why I wouldn't bother unless I had access to a free horse. I suppose that if your main horse already has 5 points in some stat, then you're losing money for the first 5 times you're feeding the new horse in that stat. To me, spending an extra couple thousand gold in order to have a huge boost to my riding stats come 1.6 is absolutely worth it, but I know that isn't true for everybody. This entire post assumes you're at the point where your main characters have a fully leveled horse, at which point money is surely not that scarce.

Skrofler wrote:Just to make this clear, this is how you save time on riding skill training post 1.6. However you will lose gold.

Of course. I wouldn't even consider buying twelve more horses - one each for Speed, Stamina, and Bag Space on each of my four characters - unless I had 1 gold horses available.

However, there is a very good reason why Serious Players who have the Imperial Edition or the Palamino DLC might want to consider it. My character Martin had two horses on the Live server, with his main one being a Light horse with Speed 38%, Stamina 31, and Carrying 18. He also had an old Imperial horse that I hadn't got around to selling yet.


So you might expect his riding ability to have values of Speed 38%, Stamina 31, and Carrying 22 (that stat being taken from his Imperial horse). However, look at the actual numbers from the PTS:


Speed 13% !

Having bought a Light horse which has a starting stat of 25% Speed, I only fed that horse 13 times. Your riding skill comes from the number of times you've fed the horse (old) or taken riding lessons (new). Therefore, if you are a Serious Player, you might want to save time now by buying 3 x 1 gold horses and feeding each of them every day.

I actually think that's a bug, Bara; you might want to report that - I'm pretty sure I recall them saying in the Tamriel Unlimited Twitch broadcast that if you bought a light/stamina/carrying horse, then it should take that extra bonus into consideration.