1)High encumbrance should affect some agility based skills like athletics (so foot movement speed should be affected), dodge bonus for light encumbrance would be great too.
Or it could be done like in Brytenwalda: certain heavy armors have a penalty to some agility based skills, and light armors should have a bonus. Some heavy armors, shields and helmets should have a penalty to powerdraw or/and proficiency to prevent using the bow efficiently when wearing tank armor. The bows could have a "cannot be used with heavy armors(armor ratings above "insert value here")" requirement.
2)&3)Regarding armor behavior it would be ideal to have each armor "class" (or item) use different values for armor soak/reduction against cut/pierce/blunt, but I don't know if it's possible to code that, and I certainly don't have the knowledge or the resources (module system) to do it. True that different armor types do have different trade offs and lamellar armor is a wildcard because of it's lacing system that is affected by prolonged attacks and weather, also the different materials that it was made off have an impact on shock/pierce/slash absorbing properties. The game does not give the necessary feedback in terms of collision and animation to "feel" the different armor compositions and behavior.
I think the "randomized_soak = (random.random() * 0.55 + 0.45) * soak_factor" is used to simulate a successful strike at a vulnerable spot in armor, but it might have a second role in simulating the effect on different armor compositions. I haven't tested how much impact it has on different armor ratings:
ex. 100 rolled damage on 60 armor and minimum soak vs 40 armor and maximum soak.
Since it's range is high, it might do more bad than good when trying to differentiate the armors by "classes".
Tweaking module.ini (for "best all around values") and item_kinds could improve some aspects, (speculating ->) even if using the soak/reduction values that would represent the best plate armors, having padded leather and other light armors behave the same, would not matter that much, since is rating will be low and will be vulnerable to all damage types.(speculating ->) Using the weakest weapons against those armors will need more strikes to kill the wearer, but it would not be a problem for the weapons to penetrate them. This could increase the difficulty of the game in the beginning, when attacking bandits. Most of the time the biggest difference in some armor's soak/reduction would be in the pierce/blunt categories: ex. high quality chain mail vs plate, both are almost invulnerable/invulnerable to slash attack, both offer great protection against pierce attacks (contrary to most beliefs regarding chain mail), the real difference would be shock absorbing properties (none vs good). If we consider the fact, that most of the times mail was worn in conjunction with other armor types and padding, the shock absorbing properties change.
My opinions:
-all types of armor are designed to protect (to some degree) against slash damage, so it's relatively "ok" to have a constant in the soak/reduction factor and differentiate with armor rating,
-piercing soak/reduction constant can also be "ok" since weapons that pierce plate armor should have no problem piercing through the rest of the armors, and also the differentiating factors would be the tweaked armor ratings, melee weapon's pierce damage, and ranged weapon's tweaked damage (I would prefer to leave this untouched if tweaked armor ratings, and soak/reduction would suffice),
-all blunt weapons that can affect the heavy plate wearer should prove even more devastating against the rest of armors, this also makes a constant in blunt soak "ok",
-big axes that can affect the heavy armor wearer because of concussion damage (which should be added to increase the final slash damage), should do even greater damage to less shock absorbing armors(less armor rating),
-swords should do less damage than axes, but compensate with reach and versatility (weapon swing speed could be enough to partially compensate for the versatility factor),
-thrusting attack damage of some swords, should be increased since most anti armor sword fighting techniques use this type of attack (it is useless to try slashing good armor),
-armor ratings should be increased for the best armors, to the point of being immune to sword's slashing attacks (considering that soak/reduction factors were already tweaked to achieve this desired effect), and almost immune to sword's thrusting attack (except best damage roll and smallest randomized_soak roll -- must test it's effect first), same thing with missiles (except from the most damaging crossbows)
-the most powerful crossbows should have the final damage greater than their equivalent in bows.
Basically the files that I want to tweak are: the module.ini, item_kinds1.txt, and troops.txt.
By tweaking I mean:
-finding the "ideal" values in armor_soak/reduction to work with,
-finding the highest armor rating (without making the player immune to all damage) that would be used by best plate armors, so only the anti-armor weapons would be effective against them,
-“reclassify” the rest of the armors with more ranges of armor ratings (to partially compensate for the lack of nuances in the ability to absorb shock/pierce/slash damage)
-calculate (in excel) min/max possible damage of all weapons, under different circumstances, in order to classify weapons usefulness against different armor ratings (some weapons only with the max rolled damage+all bonuses and modifiers, would affect the higher rated armors),
The list of tweaks is based on my assumption that: in 1257 AD, the desired effects were achieved mostly by the tweaked values in module.ini, item_kinds.txt, rebalanced troops.txt, and not by modifying the code in py files.
This tweaks doesn't make the damage system realistic, but it does make it close to.
After the above tweaking is done, I need to edit the troops file to rearm and balance the units and their items accordingly. This requires some units to be specialized in anti armor combat. Another isue is the AI's inability to "recognize" the correct weapon for the situation, so arming them with multiple weapons types might be useless (again the need for specialized units). Specialized units should be organized (which greatly reduces the knight's dominance in the battlefield), otherwise you would just hope that right units might engage the right targets in the chaos of the battle. The lack of a proper working formation system for the AI makes this much worse, so the outcome of battles might be based on luck.
From what I found on this thread http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,152057.0.html , it seems that the potential for improving the damage system is not that limited: ex. dodge and iron flesh soak (good job for implementing them in Perisno), critical hits, weapons breaking, slipping a dagger through some poor knight's visor while he's prone, knocking people prone or stunned occasionally, random knockback / knockdown/ critical hits for missiles, dragging people off of horses with polearms(which would finally make most unused polearms useful), disarming, ... . Some of them are implemented in Brytenwalda, and seem to be working fine.
I could probably make the tweaks in module.ini and item_kinds.txt for my private version, but for the those that require editing the python files are just wish list, in hope that someone with coding experience from the Perisno team would find the ideas worthwhile, and might have the willingness and the time to implement them in an alternate Perisno version.
A pool can be made to see some opinions on what features some would like.
This could also help in resolving the issue "Perisno is becoming to easy"!
Sorry if my english is not great, it’s not my first language!
