Mod: Brazen Benevolence (Bronze Armors)

[analytic_kernel]

What whiplash says about mineral availability is quite true (and is one of the notes I put in the README). Historically, most bronze-making involved trade to get tin or copper, as they were often not available in the same region. One has no such problem with unalloyed iron, of course.

Llama, iron is indeed not as dense as bronze, and hence lighter, but not by a huge factor. I felt that some of the encumbrance penalties on bronze armors were exaggerated from a realism standpoint. Making those penalties more reasonable has the effect of making mobility on some units more reasonable, IMO. In vanilla, a Myrmidon has only 5 AP. With the mod, he has 7 AP - still less than indie heavy infantry, but enough to get an extra square of movement per round, which makes a tangible difference.

Steel, an iron alloy, is harder than bronze, and it may be that some of the armors I adjusted their bronze counterparts against are intended to be steel, as Maraxus suggests. Endo makes a good point about steel possibly being anachronistic for the EA. I do note that EA Ulm is called the "Enigma of Steel" though, but perhaps that is a figurative rather than literal title.

Maraxus, I did think about whether we might be comparing bronze to steel rather than iron. The armor pairings I came up with were as follows:

• Iron Cap - Bronze Cap
• Plate Cuirass - Bronze Cuirass
• Plate Hauberk - Bronze Hauberk
• Scale Mail Cuirass - Bronze Scale Cuirass
• Scale Mail Hauberk - Bronze Scale Hauberk

I guess that one could argue that Half Helmet (or somesuch) actually matches the plate armors and scale mails, rather than the Iron Cap, which would then be a stray without an accompanying family of armor. But, basically I started by comparing cap to cap, and then built armor families around each.

I'm guessing that some of the difficulty of this thread stems from the traditional bronze -> iron -> steel progression found in games. Yeah, steel pretty much kicks gluteals, but there are actually trade-offs between iron and bronze. From what I have read, the historical transition between bronze and iron seems to have had less to do with hardness and more to do with availability and metal-working technology.