Greater power in upgrading armor

[Ahiga]

Given that we can now see a visual change with the addition of upgrading armor, and that for some units they can go from cloth to plate, I'm thinking that the trivial +1 to +3 bonus seems rather odd.

I think it would be rather interesting if a mini mod were made (I Might try my hand at it myself, since it would require only a few tweaks in the text codes) to put a greater emphasis on the armor upgrades. For Instance, while upgrading from cloth to leather or light mail to heavy might be only +1 or +2 armor, upgrading from leather to mail, or mail to plate, would be far more drastic, and far more expensive.

I'm not sure of the values, I'd have to look at the text files when we can unpack them, but basically this would let players, if they were rich enough, afford to 'create' new units, where previously the game mechanics limited them. It's not logical that a wealthy faction cannot decide to arm it's spearmen with enough armor to become heavy infantry, and this would remedy it.

[Ack_[FHA]]

I think it's fine the way it is. If anything it's not as realistic as it should be. Armor made a huge differance back in the day, the only issue I have with it is that it should be more cumbersome having your troops tire more often. They do tire now but just walking long distance, compared to light troop types.

- Ack

[Templer]

Yes, I agree, but they should have at least more types of armors an since I am bringing that up, weapon types too.

[Ambrosius]

I think it's fine the way it is. If anything it's not as realistic as it should be. Armor made a huge differance back in the day, the only issue I have with it is that it should be more cumbersome having your troops tire more often. They do tire now but just walking long distance, compared to light troop types.

- Ack

jesus...
so not only should we pay 36,000 florins to build an armor factory, and waste 27 turns of the game, but for the paltry +1 armor bonus we should take a stamina penaltry too?

i started a thread on this a couple of days ago. i am still waiting for someone to justify the rediculously low cost:benefit ratio of an armour factory to me. with the current state of the game, there is no way i am ever going higher than an armourer.

unfortunately with the incredibly high base armor stats of some units i think it would imbalance things now if we modded advanced plate to give, say, +3 armor.

a really NICE way to fix it would be to reduce the base armor stats of many units, and then make it so that different armor upgrades actually changed your defense to different weapons. for example, an upgrade from padded to mail to plate would increase your defense from arrows, rather than just give you +2 armor, which is nothing. thats a lot of work though, and probably will never happen, so i will settle for modding the cost and build time of the three top armorers down to reasonable levels as soon as the unpacker is released.

[the_mango55]

I think I'm going to try something like this myself when we can get the tools.

The idea is to make it to where the armor the units are wearing gives somewhat more of an effect. I would accomplish this by making upgrades +2 armor instead of +1, if possible. Also, this would lead to crazy amounts of armor on units with 2-3 upgrades, so I would actually reduce armor on units that are wearing leather or light chain and have a lot of armor.

For example, I present this picture:

On the left is plain Italian spear militia, to the right is fully upgraded pike men.

As you can see, the pike men are wearing partial plate, and the Italian spear militia are wearing simple leather armor. If I were to create this mod, I would reduce the armor of the spear militia to 2 (they are pretty overpowered anyway). Then, with the 3 upgrades to pikes they would have an armor of 6, and a fully upgraded italian spears would also have armor of 6 (which is what their fully upgraded stats are anyway).

I will also give units a bonus to defense if I feel they are too weak with original armor downgrades.

[the_mango55]

So I have been poking around in the text files that were just released, and it looks like this is not only possible, but also this has already been done by CA for every armored unit!

It looks like, however, that the changes have been commented out at the last minute.

Here are some explanations, the first part will look familiar to anyone who has modded RTW, but the second part is brand new. Bold parts important to the to the topic.

; stat_pri_armour Details of the man's defences
; armour factor
; defensive skill factor (not used when shot at)
; shield factor (only used for attacks from the front of left)
; sound type when hit = flesh, leather, or metal
; stat_armour_ex Details of the man's defences
; armour factor. 4 values. First for base value, then 3 upgrade levels
; defensive skill factor (not used when shot at)
; shield factors. First for melee, second for missile fire
; sound type when hit = flesh, leather, or metal

And here is an example of a unit's armor, from the generic pike militia unit.

stat_pri_armour 0, 1, 0, flesh
;stat_armour_ex 0, 4, 5, 7, 1, 0, 0, flesh

The bold numbers are (presumably, if my assumpion is correct) what the armor values would be for a pike militia if it weren't for the semicolon in front of the line.

I'm about to test this out after I can figure out the mod switch feature, back soon!