Now that I've seen an actual unit in motion with the art style, I would also say I'm a big fan of the style choice.  Well done and thanks for the movie, Brad!

Still some room for improvement, 

It's a great demonstration of how the physics are supposed to work and what they do for the figures.  It is a better implementation than a lot of other games, say, like Mount & Blade.

I love how the parts of model move semi-indepently with their own momentums, as well as how the textures of different parts convey what they are (compare the cloth saddle to the armor pieces).

Curious how it will animate moving uphill and downhill and when impacted on from different facings.

I wouldn't knock Mount and Blade. It's not perfect, but it has some physics ideas that could probably be borrowed.

Are you nuts? Mount and Blade has fantastic physics. Weapon hits do damage depending on the speed of the your weapon and hits are not random, you will only do damage if your weapon actually touches your enemy.

Sure it might not be a very "sophisticated" game but it does mounted combat like no other.

OMG THAT PICTURE MADE MY DAY LOL! God run for the hills THE BEARS ARE COMING! (dies to bear's headshot.) On a side note finally a video looking good.  That kid in the pictures going to die... soon right?

Agreed, Mount and Blade is a great little game. Considering how few people actually worked on the core game (not counting the hoard of modders working on it) they did a good job on all the right places. Physics are a little crude but Tamren points out some strengths. Watching a rushing cavalry charge get peppered with arrows and seeing some of the knights slide off their horses is awesome!

I'm hopeful that modders will have access to all the code for the physics. Tweaking existing behaviour or materials + creating new ones for modded content will be key to letting the masses mod in some really crazy stuff. Zero G combat anyone?

This.

"Zero G combat anyone?"

Or one could take it to the opposite extreme... 50 G combat anyone? *watches units implode under their own weight*

You know what would make Brad's computer explode? Gravity Golems

Tehee... I love the stampede of bear comments.

To summarize:

Honey God worshiping Paladin Bears with Guns protecting innocents while fighting a mysterious and unseen enemy army in 50g environments.

I think that's pretty gangster.

For some reason, that made me imagine a bear on the shore of an ocean, making the tides rise and fall by alternately standing up on its hind legs and going back to all fours, over and over.

If I were God, that's how I'd have done it. A much more creative way to make tides than by moving a giant ball of cheese around in the world in circles...

Argh double post. Silly forums, tricks are for kids.

I have one question about this though... What if the armor doesn't fit? For example, the rear armor plate of that horse does not look wide enough to fit on a bear or other wide mounts. The armor on that horse looks very much like it is tuned specificly for horse, what sort of system would be used to adapt it for other mount shapes? Would the game alter the armor to fit another body shape? After all, as I understand it the whole purpose of this system is to fit different (player made) armor models on to various (player made) mounts, and if the armor does not adjust to the mount it somewhat defeats the purpose.

Don't know if you've used the Galactic Civilizations unit builder, but I'm pretty confident we'll be able to scale things as we like.

True... but what I'm wondering about is whether there will be anything automatic, since the physics could cause some very odd results without automatic action taken. Something like this: Imagine the brown is the bear and the red is the armor... (front view)

       ___
      /     \
  ------------
 /               \
/                 \
----------------

As you can see, the armor would be forced up and off the bear, and when it moves the armor would flop around helplessly on top, looking very very odd...

If the editor is like the GalCiv editor, one could manually edit each peice on... But that would be a very long and painful process, since over the course of a short game, I would imagine the player would need to adjust armor on 10-20 units if they were into modding... Looking at that horse, the armor each unit has is around 5 peices (and thats just for mounts, infantry and the riders of the cavalry would likely use upwards of 10-20 peices) which would result in a large amount of work to fit a modded unit into your game, even more if you consider you will need to redo the armor scaling for each and every upgrade done. A GalCiv system would work, but would likely require quite a bit of work on the player side to make armor fit their modded units.