Horse Size

Just a suggestion for the devs: please make horse sizes across all units more historically realistic. The heavily armored horses of the various "cataphract" units across factions are just way too big vs the regular unarmored horses. You can argue that these armored horses are Ferghana imports...but even those were not that tall in the shoulder. Also, to tell it straight, those cataphract horses are just reused models from vanilla MTW2. Whatever decision you devs will make in the (hopefully) near future about steed size, please sync the size of the unarmored horses used by regular bodyguard cavalry (buqu) with those of the armored horse cavalry. It makes no sense that the general's personal retainers were not given the largest, tallest steeds if other elite cavalry could get them.

P.S. Maybe some modded horse models from EB2 would do the trick? They get their horse models more or less the historically correct size...

Check out the recent 4.1.1 update, as it overhauls the horses and barding in the mod.

But, to respond to your post, horses used specifically to carry heavily armored riders and/or be heavily armored themselves, were selectively picked for such tasks due to their size, strength and stamina. This has been the case through all cultures throughout history. Warhorses, as we call them, were either separate breeds (like imported Ferghana, which were then bred wide-scale in China) or sub-breeds of existing native stock, selectively bred to produce bigger and stronger mounts. Also, I haven't seen any specific archaeological evidence as to the historic size of horses in China (aside from various steppe breeds) during the Eastern Han and Three Kingdoms period. If you have something, I'd love to see it.