Question about Ulm/Armor
 

I'm still trying the demo waiting for the full to arrive in the mail and I chose iron dominion Ulm to have some fun with forging.

So I forge up some suits of black armor, a helmet and various weapons, but then when I slap them on say a Lord Guardian or Black Knight lord, his defense/protection goes DOWN from his normal equipment? Does this mean I need to just put that stuff on other, lesser troops or amy I missing something?

Thanks

Re: Question about Ulm/Armor
 

Those armors are more cumbersome ... so while they raise your protection, as counterpart due to heavy wheight they lower your defence.

Re: Question about Ulm/Armor
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Which armors? the forged ones or the ones that come with the unit automatically? I guess I don't well understand the difference between protection and defense either.

Re: Question about Ulm/Armor
 

Don't remember exactly, however:

Defence: is the skill of dodging, parrying and avoid strikes. When someone attacks you there's a confrontation beetween his attack skill and your defence (Att+2dd vs Def+2d6, rolls open ended - if a dice has rolled 6, it rolls again and adds the new number).

Protection: this is usually your armor, thick skin, or other type of magical defences.
If the attacker strikes successfully, he does some damage on the struck unit, and protection diminuish it.
(weapon damage + wielder strenght + 2d6 open) - (protection + 2d6 open).

Armor piercing weapons/spells halves the protection value.
Armor negating weapons/spells ignore protection value.

I hope I've been clear in explaining since I'm not a native english speaker, I'm Italian.

Re: Question about Ulm/Armor
 

If their protection went down, consider the following:

Your commanders are already wearing very good armor (they come with that when you recruit them). So, you probably made armor that was worse than what they were already wearing.

Re: Question about Ulm/Armor
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">You did great! I understood it.

Re: Question about Ulm/Armor
 

Yes, the armor that Ulmish commanders come with is better than the various Black Steel items that can be forged with low-level Earth magic. This might seem a bit strange, until you discover that an Earth mage for any nation, not just Ulm, can make these black steel items. For these other nations, black steel is likely to be a big improvement.

By the way, you can check out the stats for an item that a unit starts with by clicking on the name of the item in their unit display.

Re: Question about Ulm/Armor
 

Except... not.

Full Plate of Ulm is actually 1 point of protection weaker than Black Steel Full Plate. In all other stats it is the same.

So if you put Black Steel Full Plate on a unit with Full Plate of Ulm (e.g. Black Lord or Lord Guardian), the total net effect is +1 to protection.

littlemute is incorrect that stats go down in those cases.

What I imagine he saw was the effect of putting Black Steel Plate (not full plate) on someone with Full Plate of Ulm. In that case, protection will go down by 5, defense will go up by 4, and encumbrance will go down (though cavalry is different from infantry for encumbrance).

That's because "Black Steel Plate" is only a breastplate, so it's much lighter than a full suit of armor.

PvK

Re: Question about Ulm/Armor
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Oops, sorry about that.

Re: Question about Ulm/Armor
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Oops, sorry about that. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">No problem. It gave me an opportunity to ramble about Ulmish armor! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

PvK