I played EB2 for 42 hours now and currently i am playing a pretty fun campaign with Carthage. I also played many custom battles with every faction and almost every unit. I noticed a thing that bugs me and it has not anything to do with gameplay but design choices. I already posted it around a week ago, but i want to repost it again just for the case, that no one of the team read it:
So i want to talk about armour-variations within a unit. The first time i recognized something weird was when i choosed the Indian lancers. I was pretty excited to see this heavy, unpreviewed cavalry unit. So i selceted them, started a battle and was pretty dissapointed. The first i saw was a soldier in thin clothing and without any helmet.
After some seconds i finally found one guy with scale armour, but in the whole unit there were maybe five guys with scalearmour and two of them weared a helmet. While i could live with some units wearing a helmet while other wearing a turban or a hair-knot, the variations between the armours are to crass. The Indian lancers are supposed to be a heavy cavarly of the highest of all Indian castres. And if a unit is supposed to be heavy, you shouldnt mix up heavy armour with thin all day clothing.
An other example are the batairoi, the Celtic combatants. Just compare these both:
Some are heavy armoured, wearing a linothorax and a bronce helmet, while other are almost naked, only wearing a pant. Of course, historical this happened that some Cetls wearing barchested while others are armoured, but in Total War you have to be able to classify a unit. Is it light, medium or heavy? While mixing so much, you are no more able to. You look at their stats, seeing 3 armour, which is to low for a heavy armoured warrior as you can see him in the left picture, but to high for the naked guy to the right.
There are many units which mix up different classes of armour, not only the two examples above. I just want to mention the "light" Illyrian cavalry. Their unit card shows a rider wearing a heavy bronce breastplate (!) and a helmet, but on the battlefield only a few wear this heavy kind of armour, while the most others are actual "light" cavalry.
Of course, there are also units which fit exclusively one category of heaviness of the armour (Light/medium/heavy). Examples are most skirmishers and eg. The Parthian cataphracts, the royal kinsmen cavalry or the Median cavalry:
My conclusion is, that every soldier within a unit should wear an armour of the same class of heaviness like his colleagues wear. Mixing scalearmour, a linothorax and maybe a bronce breastplate (An iron one would be to much imo) as the Baktrian cavalry wear them seems plausible to me, as these armours roughly offer the same value of protection. It would be cool if a dev could write something to this.
GG