How to change armour values from armour upgrades?

[Dilion]

So after all my testing i have come to the conclusion that armour upgrades are +2 no matter what the base value was before.
What the armour upgrade is called dosnt matter, its merely a name. Upgrade 23, *gothic* is the same as upgrade 1 *leather* they both give +2 to armour stat.
Armour upgrades are clumulative adding +2 per upgrade to a max of +6, with gold shield upgrade.
This goes for any unit regardless of their base value.

Why the ingame unit card displays +1 i cant explain its a mistake that has stayed in the game from the start. But its really +2.


This knowlagde does not lead me to having ALOT of work cut out for me with redoing and remodding my SS game. As i have units who go from having light mail *base 4* to full plate, where i assumed they went to 11 armour. But no they only go up to 6, if you buy full plate upgrade for them.

Lots of units and tooltips i have to change now. However now i finally understand how the armour system works.

Below is my data from my testing, should anyone want to take a look at it themselfs.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Same test done as i explained above.
here ill only post the averages to save time.

https://imgur.com/a/D8reh

*I cant figure out how to add a picture.*

As you can see from the table the base +upgrade is nearly identical with just base +2. Showing us that indeed a armour upgrade is +2 regardless.
The slight difference would be, ofcause as i did testing in a small batch 5 vollies, 6 tries, taking the averages from that. And ofcause i didnt fill out my table here, as i believe it to be the same anyway, i have gotten what info i need. Its clear to me.

[Titus le Chmakus]

Thanks a lot for testing ! Very helpful !!! Cannot give you rep as I have to spread around (to who ?) but I'd really want to !

[Dilion]

Thank you. It was quite a hurdle trying to figure out how to work with this new info. Some units went *visually* from No armour to wearing Plate armour. In those cases the unit looks to have the same armour as a heavy late era knight but actual value would only be like 6. Where the late game knight would have twice that with 13, or even 15.

So i have had to redsign the armour upgrading table. And redo armour upgrades for all units. As any unit now can get +6 to their base value.

To give an example, Before Pike-Militia went from - Unarmoured 0 armor - Gamberson +2 armour - Light mail +2 armour - Partial Plate +2 armour *where partial plate for units that start with it, is a 11 armour value. So in this case Pike militia would like the same as heavy units, but only have an armour value of 6. I have changed this now. By making more types of plate armour in the game files so Pike militia is using a different type of plate. that protects less.

This gives easy freedom to mod the units how i want, and not have the game breaking experiance of watching heavy plate armoured units get shredded by peasant archers.

[Titus le Chmakus]

Yeah but the thing is that it does not look very logical ! You do not equip milita units with Plate armour. The unit is so costly, that giving such an advanced equipment to soldiers with so few abilities is just a waste of money ! Better giving Plate armours to Medium/Elite units ... In this case, I'd rather make another unit in the EDU ... To me those upgrades are only valid for small equipment increase ... From leather to studded leather to light mail ot something like that ...

And remember that you can do some graphic upgrades without stats upgrade.

[Callistonian]

+rep to you Dilion. After sifting through a bunch of threads from 2007-2009 with mostly speculation and incorrect numbers, I finally find this - good tests and results.

I performed basically the same tests as Dilion and got confirming results.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Method: 1 unit of archers shooting at 1 unit of infantry until the infantry make contact, then pause at note the number of remaining infantry out of 70 starting, test run on Grassy Plain in clear weather and midday. I adjusted the number of upgrades and armor stats to try to see if any produced the same average number of casualties indicating equivalence.

Results:

Test 1 - inf base armor 5 - armour_ug_level values: 2, 3, 4, 5 - 0 upgrades given: 44 48 53 57 avg. 50
Test 2 - inf base armor 5 - armour_ug_level values: 2, 3, 4, 5 - 1 upgrades given: 54 57 60 60 avg. 58
Test 3 - inf base armor 5 - armour_ug_level values: 2, 3, 4, 5 - 3 upgrades given: 63 62 64 67 avg. 64
Test 4 - inf base armor 5 - armour_ug_level values: 2, 3, 4, 10 - 3 upgrades given: 64 66 66 62 avg. 64
Test 5 - inf base armor 5 - armor_ug_level values: 2, 3, 4, 1 - 3 upgrades given: 64 65 66 66 avg. 65
Test 6 - inf base armor 8 - armour_ug_level values: 2, 3, 4, 5 - 0 upgrades given: 59 59 61 61 avg. 60
Test 7 - inf base armor 11 - armour_ug_level values: 2, 3, 4, 5 - 0 upgrades given: 66 66 60 63 avg. 64

The armour_ug_level values only indicate what value of 'armour' in EDB is needed to buy the upgrade. As tests 3-5 indicate, they don't impact the number of armor defense points the unit gets. My tests are not thorough enough to rule out the possibility that each upgrade gives +1 then +2 then +3 (which would also result in total +6 armor defense with 3 upgrades), because I stopped testing after finding this thread. With Dilion's results, it's clear that each upgrade gives a flat +2 to armor defense which is misrepresented on the unit's info scroll as +1.