H.T.'s Archery Tweaks

[Hanakoganei]

Wow. Did you guys change the naming convention? Or is the workshop simply not yet using the naming convention?

[JaM1977]

btw, some balancing might be needed, top tier armors should be able to resist even best bows available, especially those Full Plate armors. Good Plate armor made Knights resistant to arrows, no matter if they were bodkin or else. It is exactly the reason why arquebuses and Muskets replaces the bows and crossbows - they offered much higher penetration and lethality than bows and crossbows. Standard SPanish Heavy Musket from 16.century had firing bullets  of calibre 25-30mm... if such projectile hit the body, it would cause tremendous tissue damage, resulting in iminent blood loss which would effectivly stop anybody even if noncritical spot was hit.  Arrows at the other end stayed in the wound, effectivly preventing the blood loss, which meant that if no critical organ was hit, soldier was able to continue fighting (especially due to battle adrenaline) There are several mentions of knights looking like porcupines, but still fighting - Most of them had heavy linnen undervest behind the plate armor, so even if arrow penetrated the armor from very short distance, it also had to penetrate the vest. Per tests (you can find on Youtube for example) bodkin arrows were only able to enter the armor about 10cm deep, which wouldnt be lethal in most circumstances (except direct hit into heart).

Therefore my suggestion is to rework all armor values based on  weapon impact energy. Something similar was done for Medieval II Total War, where  Real Combat mod used public domain info about weapon energy, and armor protective ability. ( will try to find my old files and share it with you). Just and example, while best mail armor could effectively stop the 150 Joule attack, standard Arquebuse was able to produce impact energy of 600-1000 Joules, where heavy Spanish Musket could do around 3000 Joules on impact! which is similar to modern 7.62 NATO projectile!  Bodkin arrows were nowhere close in penetration ability...

[Hanakoganei]

Unfortunately, we have no means of differentiating chainmail from plate mail (or lamellar). Plate and lamellar may have been able to resist bodkin, especially if a padded armor like gambeson were worn underneath, which was often the case. The bodkin tips seemed to be ineffective against plate and lamellar (which were metal plates anyway) when it hit the plate head on. But bodkin did a very good job at penetrating chainmail, and unfortunately, a lot of our tier 5 and up heavy armors look like they're made of chainmail.

For this reason, I'll have to decline rebalancing for now. It would also make tier 6 and 7 guys completely unstoppable by arrows, which, while cool to think of, would definitely make the player's army too imbalanced because you're more likely to run around with a pure army of tier 6 and 7 than the NPC lords, who are more likely to run with an average of tier 3-4 troops.

Perhaps in the future, when somebody can figure out a good way to differentiate the two. For now, I tried running around in tier 6 armors and for the average bow used by the current lineup of tier 4 and below troops that most lords employ, I was taking almost negligible damage. Almost. I took 4 shots (mostly body shots but one went through my arm) before considering myself to be in danger of dying. I think the next body or even a leg shot would've knocked me out. I think that's a good enough compromise.

[JaM1977]

Do we atleast know what bonuses different type of projectiles have? what is the Penetration, Blunt and Cut damage formula? Because if we are stuck with single armor value for everything, it is still possible to modify the weapon values, so they will act properly vs armors - Let say, there will be certain distinction between armors, like let say Chainmail 20-40, Lamelar 30-50 and Plate 40-60. Then all you need to do is to change the attack values accordingly for certain weapons.

Another possibility is to differentiate them by protection AND weight. For example even if it sounds surprising, Plate armor was lighter than Chain or Lamelar, and didnt restricted movement as those two. But from technological perspective, it was  very costly to create. While Lamelar armor could have relativly similar protection values, it was incredibly heavy and unwieldy. Chainmail should be considered something like improved base armor, so while it should be more protective than padded armor, but it should be much heavier than Padded. Stuff like Coat of Plates were practically combination of chain and plate, having benefits of higher protection with disadvantage of heavy weight. I saw several tests with Chainmail vs Full Plate, where men in Full plate were more mobile than those in full Chainmail.

[Leifdin]

If chainmail and plate would be realistic, it would cause great imbalance. For example, Nord units don't use plate armor, which would need changes(improving their power or giving them different armor, which looks good on them, maybe lamellar).
I made fine armor for myself in Morgh's editor, which is better than best plate armors.

(click to show/hide)

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It is quite effective against arrows, while it doesn't make me unstoppable killing monster.

[JaM1977]

Maybe Nords should all get some athletics build-in bonus so they wont be affected by increased weight? They were taller and stronger than normal populace anyway... Plus, Nords carry shields, they use Shieldwall which gives them bonuses vs arrows anyway..


btw, is there any plan to do something about Swadia inability to survive? they seem as the worst faction of all if lead by AI.. in most of my games they get wiped out quickly by others...

[Windyplains]

Wow. Did you guys change the naming convention? Or is the workshop simply not yet using the naming convention?

The workshop isn't really a sub-mod of Floris.  It was built from scratch using a native module system which is why it has all native troops and mostly native items.  So the naming conventions do not match at all.

[Leifdin]

btw, is there any plan to do something about Swadia inability to survive? they seem as the worst faction of all if lead by AI.. in most of my games they get wiped out quickly by others...

Because they are French. They need foreigner or woman to lead them in order to win war. I am actually trying to help Lady Isolla of Suno, so we will see, if my theory is right.

[JaM1977]

Their army composition looks more like English to me.. Longbowmen, Heavy Cavalry....   

[Hanakoganei]

They're a combination. These aren't real world armies lol. They seem to have combined the English and French styles into one.

Also, don't hijack this topic so it's easier for me to monitor bugs, comments and requests and stuff.

Wow. Did you guys change the naming convention? Or is the workshop simply not yet using the naming convention?

The workshop isn't really a sub-mod of Floris.  It was built from scratch using a native module system which is why it has all native troops and mostly native items.  So the naming conventions do not match at all.

Oh right... Well I still have 1.143 installed in a separate folder. I could probably tweak the stuff for the workshop there too. After all, Floris 2.6 will come out in A.D. 2101, when war was beginning.

[JaM1977]

np, i just wanted to point out that stronger bows results in unrealistic casualties vs armors that should be much more resistant than they are now. Anyway i like the way how it is done, with strong bows to have lower accuracy.. Also arrow to be the damage modifier.. you should even reduce the damage of bow down, while increasing the arrow damage based on arrow type (training arrow, bodkin, etc...)

[Leifdin]

Also, don't hijack this topic so it's easier for me to monitor bugs, comments and requests and stuff.

I'm deeply sorry, but it was just too tempting to resist

[Hanakoganei]

Also arrow to be the damage modifier.. you should even reduce the damage of bow down, while increasing the arrow damage based on arrow type (training arrow, bodkin, etc...)

I'll consider this. It'll take a lot of testing. It seems that the arrow damage doesn't add into the bow's damage 1:1. I'm not sure how it works, but I tried making it so that bows had 0 damage while the arrows did 40-50 (which, in theory should be the same as the bow having 40-50 damage while the arrow had +0 damage, and I was dealing significantly less damage. How significant? I can't kill a tier 2 or 3 unit on a body shot using the same bow I was using in the video.

I think the bow's damage is its direct base damage, while the arrow's damage is how much gets applied after the hit, but modified by the distance and amount of time the arrow had to travel, and probably other things like your Power Draw level. I dunno when Power Draw bonus damage is applied, and it could be applied to the bow instead of the arrow. If the bow has 0 damage + 12% == 0, or at least that's just my theory considering I was doing such negligible damage. Needs a lot of testing.

[Leifdin]

Well, power draw and bow proficiency are probably applied to bow damage, so this could make that difference. You said something about 400 proficiency and 5 power draw? One power draw level increases damage by 14%, so 5 levels would increase damage output by 70%, which is quite huge amount, while counting only power draw skill, there is also proficiency.

[Hanakoganei]

Yes but that's not the issue. The issue is the difference between the damage on the bow and the damage on the arrows, and why it seems to be different if you apply high arrow damage but low bow damage versus reversing them.