Mod plan: Revising the armour of dom3

[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.