[Peter Ebbesen]

Originally Posted by Amorphous

When you look at the break down on the defence value in game, the parry value is added separately as parry value and not anything else.

So is extra defense from Quickness +3, which also gets its own line, or Prophet +2, Experience + X, and several other (all?) defense modifiers that get added separately and aren't labeled +defence on equipment, and the sum of all those are listed as the "Current Defence and Parry skill"

It seems very strange to me that the parry value should be counted twice in addition to the defence modification - a much simpler way would have been to instead have a defence value that included the defence bonus from parry and just count parry once.

I can understand what you are saying, but it also makes excellent sense the other way around.

The way you are thinking of it (parry value used once to determine whether an opposing attack is a shield hit that reduces the damage you take, but not adding to defence skill) a shield does not actually help prevent you from being hit - it merely reduces damage you take if you manage to interpose it between yourself and an incoming attack that would otherwise deal damage to you. The damage may be reduced to 0 (in line with the general protection mechanism) but probably not in case of really strong opponents.

This seems in stark opposition to not only several shield descriptions in-game (the Shield of the Accursed, the Shield of Gleaming Gold, and the Aegis all explain how the one using them becomes harder to hit because it is difficult to focus on the wielder), but also how shields have traditionally had dual use in warfare, both deflecting and absorbing blows (some better at one than the other and also depending on their martial use).

As such it makes excellent sense to have shields' both add to defense (value A) and to determine a range in which there's a shield hit (value B). This requires two different values to really fine tune - and shields have that: the parry value (x) and the defense value (y); in other words x = b, y = A - x

I know that you say the exact opposite, but consider e.g. the performance of light or medium shield-bearing infantry armed with spears. As a general rule they should not be able to hurt each other at all for quite a few rounds if your interpretation were correct. This is not consistent with what I have seen.

Independent Light Infantry using a spear: attack 10, defense 13 - including shield +4, and protection 15/8 [S15]. Damage is 10 + 3 + DRN - DRN - relevant_protection at location hit when considering shield protection into the mix.

Defense decreases by 2 per multiple attack and by fatigue/10 and attack by fatigue/20.

Under these conditions and given two groups of statistically significant size of Light Infantry, I most certainly expect a fair number of hits from the very first round they are in melee range of each other, for the difference between attack and defense and even attack and defense+parry is rather small (3 and 7 respectively) and the RNG will have its say in the +DRN - DRN business; moreover, the little light infantrymen won't square off one by one - given an equidistribution over each infantryman over those enemy infantrymen he can attack, it is practically certain that some infantrymen will be attacked more than others (and hence be easier to hit for every attack after the first one) and given the number of size 2 figures per square, some a lot more.

It might come out differently if I actually spent the time on doing a real statistical analysis of the problem but at least my rough mental napkin map (without a napkin ) comes nowhere close to your conclusion that "LI vs LI with spears and shield should not be able to hurt each other at all in the first few rounds if non-shield hits only occurred at above another +4 on top of the 13 defense rather than at above 13.