[Sombre]

A thought for CBM that I believe I've mentioned before: Skirmisher shields.

Currently a fairly useful unit against massed xbows is a cheap fairly low rcost unit with a shield. This is because if the bolt is parried by the shield, prot no longer matters. Cheap units /without/ shields are generally too quickly killed no matter what their cost and numbers, to be a useful counter.

But I personally feel the counter is not well realised enough. Although it's certainly better for a cheap prot 5 guy with a shield and a spear to be used as crossbow fodder than a medium infantry with prot 13 and a shield, or any unit without a shield, it isn't the kind of significant difference that makes you want to actually use light/skirmmish infantry.

So what I propose is that suitable 'skirmisher' units, such as the Arco peltast, get special 'skirmish' versions of their current shields. So the Velite would get a 'Skirmish Tower Shield' instead of a shield, the Peltast a 'Skirmish Shield' and the Machaka jav armed warrior a 'Skirmish Hide Shield'. How would these shields differ? Well they'd have an extra point of parry and a slightly lower prot value. This represents the fact that though the shield is no larger, the skirmisher is used to using it as his first and last line of defence - he understands better than others how to shelter from missile fire and he doesn't have such heavy equipment, armor and weapons wise, allowing him more freedom to manuever his shield. With the parry 1 level higher, he's significantly better against missile fire, while still being killable and expendable - he's also more likely to parry in melee, particularly with his already high def score (due to lack of malus from heavy armor), however with the reduced prot (you can imagine the skirmisher uses a slightly lighter version of the shield, or that he's less able to ignore glancing blows due to lack of armour) if he does parry and it's against heavy infantry, cavalry or the like, he's still toast, just like before.

Thoughts?