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Thread: small question/suggestion on armour

  1. #1

    Default small question/suggestion on armour

    Greetings Traveller,

    For first time im looking at mods and this being a historical mod took me interest.

    One thing i have always looked at was the armour values in atilla being kinda wierd.

    i wanted to discuss with some people about shields giving armour to a unit. the way i understand it is a shield is used to possibly completely block a missile/melee blow. In game i think this is done with missile block chance and melee defence, but shields also add armour values to units. Is it logical for a shield to give blocking chance but when the attack is not blocked now it must penetrate the shield (the armour added from the shield) and then the armour itself to hit the person.

    I understand if the shield is mounted on the person like mail it could add a small buff to armour depending where it is (i've never seen a unit with 4 shields hanging in every direction).

    Another thing is alot of horse units are heavily clad in armour but instead of this adding to the units armour some health is added to the horse (maybe an extra 15% health when pretty much the horse is covered in full scale).

    Any comments about the possibilty of an armour overhaul, or even pass considerations and reasons for or against it.

    Thanks

  2. #2

    Default Re: small question/suggestion on armour

    One thing worth noting is that armor values are not fully applied to every blow, it's a random roll that determines how much damage is actually mitigated. So if a shield (or shirt of mail) is worth 40 armor, it might on a very good day reduce 40 damage, but it also might reduce 2 -I recall hearing that it's an unweighted 0-N roll where N is the armor value, but as I can't quote a source for that you shouldn't but too much stock in it. In a more complex modeling one might segregate the probability of hitting the armor from the strength of it, but variable armor is a fairly good result approximation anyway, if you apply the scores based on both the toughness of the armor and its prevalence.

    One way they do it in RPGs, for instance, is having a roll to just deflect the blow safely with your shield (akin to parrying), and then if you miss that roll by less than a certain amount based on shield size, the blow hits your shield rather than you, potentially saving you from injury. Balance of Melee Defense and Armor can be thought of as working in the same way, and similarly missile block chance versus armor score. Still, it's often better to have less mechanics going on rather than more - the more independent pieces you have moving, the harder it is to get a result you like out of the system through tweaking. Thus, a lot of mods go for a strictly Defense and Block Chance based shield.

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