Is plate armor too effective in SS?

[Hoki]

It seems like western european plate armor's effectiveness is being over exaggerated a little bit in SS.

Plate wasn't bad but neither was steel scale-mail and steel lamellar, which offered excellent protection.

Many of the units in game you can see clearly as wearing chain, padding and a scale/lamellar.

For example a fully upgraded boyar vs a non-upgraded HRE ritterbruter, fully upgraded a boyar only matches an unupgraded ritterbruter, which is visibly wearing a chain coat with padding, with presumably a steel breastplate and a funny looking helmet.

Which the ritterbruters aren't wearing bad armor by default, but it isn't as good as the fully armored boyars imo. Imo it shows that we of western history have a bias for the look of the western european armors, and not fully appreciating the effectiveness of the armors of the east, especially considering how much of a difference 3 points of armor make in this game when swords and maces do 6-7 damage.

For a late period example, gothic knights vs heavy boyars (don't know why heavy boyars aren't available in high but ok lets roll with it). Very heavily armored gothic knights vs very heavily armored boyars. Disgracefully one-sided, yet costing nearly the same amount, and come in same sized units. Only difference is that plate armor is simply better than all other armors in this game. I mean it must be because it looks cooler. That may be trite but there are a lot of disadvantages to plate armor and this mod just doesn't recognize them. I know its impossible to simulate the complexities of a medieval battle in this game, but randomly assigning 10 more defense to one heavy cavalry over another definitely isn't the way.

Love the mod btw, just get annoyed when a western kingdom's cavalry completely outclass mine for no reason.

[Ichon]

That point has been recognized before though I have to say I've never bothered to compare the stats to how the unit models look in the game. It is quite a big work to make them match in all cases and sometimes the model artist was not very good on history while we can fix the stats much easier.

Early plate wasn't much better than some of the eastern armors if it was better at all and probably worse in regards to weight distribution however by Gothic plate era it seems fairly clear plate was superior to anything else around though it was also quite expensive for the high quality stuff but even mass produced plate in later eras was quite strong vs all other armor types.

I believe the Heavy Boyar is available so late to try and show that early Boyars were strongly eastern influenced while later Boyars shifted back slightly to a western influence.

The main issue for me is that a plated knight riding a horse wearing partial plate is going to tire and move slower than a boyar wearing eastern armor on a mostly unarmored horse which is sort of reflected in SS with RC but not much in the current version. Latest version of RC shows that affect better but its not incorporated into SS and probably won't be for some time. Usually speed and tactical flexibility was more valued in the east than the west.

Also keep in mind the very high armor of late western knights is reflecting the horse armor as well. Not ideal but since MTW2 the horse and rider are a single thing the fact of a heavily armored knight riding a heavily armored horse should be reflected. I think the value of horse armor is made too high as it nearly doubles the plate value. Gothic is 15 armor which doesn't sound so bad but then add the +10 armor of the horse and since they are stacked not figured individually there becomes a problem.

Give SSMAP a try in submods forums, armor values are not changed alot but the prices will at least reflect the differences where a Gothic knight has to pay for all that extra armor and moves slower and tires more quickly especially in the heat.

[Hoki]

Thanks for reply. Yeah when it comes to heavily armored horses idk what the best way to balance them is. The problem with portraying a "super tank" by giving it a higher and higher armor value is that it breaks the game. Where 100 peasants with knives can't kill 1 heavily armor knight because, by game mechanics, it literally becomes impossible for them to kill the knight. When in reality 100 peasants could easily tackle a knight and stab him in the eye.

So we can see its a bad idea to balance a unit based on a 1v1 scenario, its also unrealistic to balance on a 1v100 scenario. Thus the damage amounts vs armor values should really be fine tuned first by classification threshhold or you end up sacrificing a functional game for the sake of "well historically X they had better armor than Y" when it doesn't matter because armor higher than Y ends up destroying gameplay.

[brapollo]

There's no doubt this is one of the deeply flawed mechanics of the current version of SS. The sad thing is that the original Medieval Total War did such a better job with relating stamina to armor than Medieval 2 or any of its mods (it also had a lot of other much better things but that's another discussion).

Also, as said, any mod should have to pass the "100 peasants can kill any knight" test when trying to create armor and weapon values.