Mod plan: Revising the armour of dom3

[Sombre]

Armour. The more advanced your armour tech and the more resources you put into it, the worse it is. Ok, a little hyperbolic, but this is a pretty well known issue in dom3, which is best represented by the longtime red headed stepchild of dom3, MA Ulm.

The fact of the matter is, the cons outweigh the pros when talking about any armour over medium on infantry.

I could go into great detail here, but since I think you know all of this already, I'll just list the cons without exploring just how bad or good they are.

Cons

High enc
Def penalty
High res cost
Low mapmove

Now to me, three of these same pretty fair in dom3, because they don't erode the point of having the armour in the first place. They make medium, light and heavy infantry very different. But one of them, I'm sure you know which one, makes all that prot kinda pointless. I'm not saying it should be removed entirely as a factor, but right now it is waaaay too bad a con.

So what's the answer? Reduce enc across the board? Well yeah, that isn't a bad idea. Compress the enc difference between armours? Ah yes, that's the ticket. So that's what this mod will do. No messing with units, no tinkering with anything but basegame armour enc values, at least at first.

I'm now going to delve into edi's DB and see what I can see. But my gut feeling is that all (non forged) armour should range from 0 enc to 3 enc and no higher.


Now a disclaimer: I don't care about 'historical accuracy' or 'physical properties of blah blah' or any kind of realism. What I care about is game balance which promotes variety. I'm modifying the world which Illwinter created, so I'm sticking to the basic tech advance set by Illwinter, but compressing the enc values. That said, my starting point is the armour in CBM1.6, where some sensible changes have already been made.

The tech levels:

Leather
Ring
Scale
Chain
Plate
Blacksteel
Other stuff

[Gregstrom]

Will this include adjusting shield enc?

[Sombre]

I think shields are a lesser problem, because the enc is lower in general and because they generally do provide a pro to match the con. I mean tower shields are enc 2 but they're also a really nice thing to have available to recruit. Can't say the same about a unit in full chain mail (enc 5).

But I could move the enc in certain cases.

[Sombre]

I attach my first workings in spreadsheet format. Please do have a look and critique.

Basically it works like this:

Light Armour = 0 enc and has prot below 10
Medium Light = 1 enc and has prot 10-13
Medium Heavy = 2 enc and has prot 14-17
Heavy Armour = 3 enc and has prot 18+
Stone Armour = 4+ enc

I also plan to change the hoplite helm to 0 enc, in line with every other helm in the game (other than the crown of might).

[Maerlande]

Okay I had a quick look. Reasonable. I'll tell you more tomorrow. But on a quick glance it looks like the required resources are also out of wack. They should have some relation to the difficulty of production.

[kianduatha]

Truly this sounds beautiful. I can't wait to mess around with nations like Oceania and Atlantis and Abysia to see how much more viable their heavy armor units are. I can't wait to try Centaur Cataphracts now, too. I also like the idea of making the light forgeable armors 0-enc so people are more inclined to use them.

Are you going to lower heavy cavalry encumbrance accordingly as well? Also, I sorta want to hear your thoughts on why especially Heavy Samurai Armor goes to 3 enc instead of 2.

[Sombre]

I was planning on changing some cavalry enc, yes, probably to an enc 3 - 5 range.

Heavy Samurai Armour is a bit of a borderline case. It's at 17 prot with a -3 to def, exactly the same as Plate Hauberk (a really bad piece of armour on a foot troop) but at a much lower res cost.

I chose to put Plate Hauberk in Medium Heavy because:

a) plate is high tech and full plate is definitely the heavy one in that group
b) the high resource cost needs an offset
c) prot 17 is borderline of MH/H

So why is Heavy Samurai Armor in Heavy then, with 3 enc?

a) 'Japanese' armour in dom3 seems to be from a lower tech than the Plate series, similar to "Bronze Hauberk" which offers 17 prot but is still in the Heavy category, rather than MH
b) To differentiate it more from Samurai Armour, which at prot 14 def -2 is definitely Medium Heavy
c) Because CBM gave it a resource cost of 12, compared with plate hauberk's 20

I think it's very arguable and I would be happy with it at either 2 enc or 3 enc.

I'm also starting to think I should expand this mod somewhat to encompass changes to prot (though very minor ones) and the def malus too. I have absolutely nothing against heavy armour causing some serious def malus - to me this makes way more sense than it causing your guys to gas out and collapse after three swings. For one thing when you're wearing heavy armour you have much less reason to worry about def, dodging or parrying enemy attacks. It makes sense that you would trust your armour to deal with the minor spear jabs and the like, far more than a guy with no armour on at all, or just a ringmail cuirass.

So I'm currently thinking:

Cuirass/breastplate = -1 def
Hauberk = -2 def
Full body = -3 def

With big weight differences adding to or taking away from that malus. So while full chain mail is now at enc 2 (MH) I think it would be either def -3 (as it currently is) or def -4.

[Kheldron]

I may be wrong but under cbm at least most nations tend to be balanced now. While this mod goes in the right direction, it clearly makes life harder on those light armoured nations.

To even things out, couldn't you trade fatigue for defence? I mean less enc is ok but you'd also get a defence malus.

Heavy units under this mod would not collapse so soon and still be able to attack efficiently but not become invulnerable tanks.

[Sombre]

Kheldron: You are definitely wrong. Compare CBM1.6 MA Ulm with MA Pythium. MA Agartha with MA Ashdod. But that's besides the point. This mod isn't designed to deal with major imbalance like that. The point is to make heavy armour less craptacular, so the pros might actually weigh up to the cons.

Units with heavier armour aren't going to be invulnerable tanks.

Let's take a unit with seriously heavy armour. MA Ulm blacksteel infantry with tower shield. In basegame he has enc of 7 (3 base, 4 plate, 2 shield). With this mod, he has an enc of 6. It helps, it's true, which is good because considering the cost of the unit in resources, it sucks. But does it make it invulnerable? Not even close.

Heavy infantry is still going to be beatable by tiring them out. Even if they had armour and shield enc of 0, this would still be true, because they'd have the base 3 enc and they'd represent a higher cost than the chaffy units they're up against. Remember that this heavy armour isn't coming for free - it has to be paid for. 90% of the time, in current dom3, people are choosing to not pay for it. Medium armour, yeah, sometimes. Shields? Sure. But heavy infantry? Only very rarely, when they are expected to die before fatigue really comes into play, and people want them to absorb as much fire as possible before that happens.

Regarding def malus - heavy armour already has it. I will tweak it in some cases, but a big part of this mod is flat out boosting it, because currently it just isn't a smart thing to have. I mean you have to pay resources for something which is /worse/ in many cases.

Is this going to make things worse for the lightly armoured nations? I don't think so. For one thing a lot of lighter armour is also dropping enc, just less overall. But more importantly, heavy infantry wasn't actually a real advantage to nations that had it before - they were avoiding it and getting the medium or light troops, or cavalry. Really all that this will do is diversify the stuff lighter nations will be dealing with, rather than handing everyone else a new superweapon.

[Maerlande]

If you are seriously considering technical skill, then higher end heavy armour is both lighter and more mobile. I know you don't want to debate realism, but that's not my point. You could give benefit to say Ulm that the advantage of black steel is higher strength to mass ratio and much better joint design. Which is both historically and scientifically accurate. Additionally later tech armour had small geometry changes like boat hull shaped breast plates that vastly improved effective protection.

My preference with samurai armour would be to improve the defence malus and maybe even drop protection a bit. It wasn't light, but it was very mobile. However, coverage was quite uneven.

It seems to me that Dom3 is equating armour mobility to defence, mass to encumbrance, and amount of armour to protection.