Is black plate worth it?

[CUnknown]

Silhouette, yes! I love that idea, about "hardened." Armor-negating attacks would still work as normal, of course, so there would still be good counters available.

You wouldn't have to change anything else about the black plates (although I've love to see a slight morale boost), and they would certainly be worth the resources at that point.

[CUnknown]

Test with Man Knights:

I tested this 3 times each with 18 knights and 40 Ulm Inf (morningstar) and with 18 knights and 40 Black Plates.

Ulm lost all 6 battles.

The Infantry of Ulm lost an average of 33.7 guys and killed an average of 4.3 knights. They lasted an average of 5.7 rounds of beatings before they routed.

The Black Plates lost an average of 31.3 guys and killed an average of 4.7 knights. They lasted an average of 6.3 rounds of beatings before they routed.

So, the Black Plates fared slightly better in this test, but not as better as I was hoping. They did marginally better on all counts. I will leave it to you guys as to whether you think the slight improvement is worth the extra resources.

[Lord_Drakken]

I know I am not a long time veteran of these forums or anything... but if you are not having money problems in this game then you don't have enough forces on board. Resources are not the limiting factor in this game, gold is. Unused resources are lost gold is stored. Upkeep is only in gold and that is what limits your force size.

This being said I will take the black plate. It is as an archer shield that they are useful. the Arbelasts do a decent job of harming the enemy along with any mounted troops. Throw in a little magic to reinvigorate the black plate and they love you long time...

Someone do a test with archers pelting chain vs plate for a period of time and watch the results. They will be much more dramatic...

[Sombre]

Well obviously black plate is better vs archers. But is it that much better than chain + shield that you want to use an extra 10 resources on it? Hell no.

And in my experience resources are a serious limiting factor in the early game. Gold is also a limit, but when you're trying to grab indies and possibly muscle another nation, high resource cost is a serious factor. If you're taking prod 3 then that's even more that resource costs are limiting you, actually taking away design points. After the early game, these troops basically become useless anyway, because battlemagic renders them largely obsolete. Sure you can use them as a walking shield, but there are better units for that purpose, including (imo) the chainmail guys, who you can replace quicker.

[jaif]

I would say that if gold is your issue, then you aren't balancing our check book well. You have a maintenance cost, so once you get an army big enough for your purposes, all you do is maintain it.

But resources are killer. I just checked my current game - ulm has 435 resources per turn. So if an army gets wiped out, I can replace with roughly 12 black plate infantry per turn, or 17 chain infantry per turn. Sure I can also build at other locations, but then I have to ship them to the point of contact.

Now this would be ok if those 12 could do the job of the 17, but I don't think they can in my experience. I think the margin of difference is too narrow - only in the early game, only for short fights, only with the right support, and even with all of that, they are only a little better.

One thing I'm trying now - assuming black plate is so great, then I shouldn't need shields. Arrows are going to bounce off anyways, so why bother, right? I tried out battle axes and pikeneers, and I've quickly moved to all pikeneer forces as lasting far longer than battleaxes. It does seem to work against the weak archers/slingers - the little stuff bounces off the armor and the pikes hold back the melee damage.

But I'm still not convinced that black plate is all that big of a deal. It doesn't seem that wonderful, and I don't think I've expanded any better than I would have just buying chain.

-Jeff

[Velusion]

jaif said:
I would say that if gold is your issue, then you aren't balancing our check book well. You have a maintenance cost, so once you get an army big enough for your purposes, all you do is maintain it.

But you miss the point that someone with more gold income has a high ceiling so his army can be much larger. An army can never be "big enough for *my* purposes". Don't forget gold can easily be spent on mages. In the late game resources are worthless, while you can at least still use gold to buy more mages.

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

I'm interested in seeing how the armies do versus huge hordes of low-level undead. Flails, of course, but both black steel and full plate.

[jaif]

Velusion said:In the late game resources are worthless, while you can at least still use gold to buy more mages.

Originally I said:

More importantly, I don't find the black plate all that usefull. In the beginning, it's too expensive, and the chainmail guys get the job done nicely. Later on, black plate is nice and all, but by then spells are doing the job and the black plate boys aren't that usefull any more.

So we completely agree on the end-game: at that point, magic rules all.

But in the early ot mid-game (being loose), where you are balancing multiple opponents and a budget and still waiting to form a dominant gem economy, troops matter. For ulm, that's supposed to be the hey-day of black plate. I can field about 1.4 chain for every plate. Does the plate make up that difference? I haven't seen it.

-Jeff

[Baalz]

When I play Ulm I recruit chainmail for the first 2 or 3 turns, after which I usually switch to plate. At that point I'm willing to sacrifice a little bit of expansion speed to hoard my gold and focus on getting a second castle up so I can leverage one of Ulm's primary strengths - cheap units. Cheap smiths, cheap infantry. With Ulm you generally have more gold than other nations so you should put up more castles. More castles mean more smiths which you should be recruiting as fast as possible at that price. As a side effect, having lots of castles means you've got lots of places to recruit infantry, and I find that by the time I'm a little less desperate about throwing up additional castles I usually have more resources than I need to field all the black plate I want. The limiting factor is gold - I'm much more concerned about how many smiths I have than how much infantry. If I'm gonna spend a set amount of gold on my infantry I'd rather have the plate. If you're getting 1.4 chainmail guys, I'm getting 1.4 smiths instead with linebackers at 24 protection. I'll stack that up against your 1.4 chainmail guys any day of the week.

[Shovah32]

Lazy_Perfectionist said:
I'm interested in seeing how the armies do versus huge hordes of low-level undead. Flails, of course, but both black steel and full plate.

The encumberance on the black plate infantry would kill them, due to the fact that they would have to keep swinging until the very last undead died.

However, a small number of black plate troops+smiths against undead compared to a small number of chain troops+smiths vrs undead might be different.

There are plenty of cases where chainmail would be quickly smashed but blackplate can survive. As many have previously mentioned; Ulms troops are there to survive while others do the killing, not to fight on their own.