If you tell your companions to loot the items in the pool if they loot armor, they seem to go after the most expensive armor and the heaviest armor even if the more expensive armor or much heavier armor has worse stats than the cheaper and lighter armor they are wearing, it is even more annoying for my foot companions, i got sigasmund a nice set of ranger armor but he keeps taking it off for trash heavy armor, so I told him to stop aquiring new armor I did for some others but its a bit annoying as I have to manually swap around their helms, boots, and gloves, and yeah i got high persuasion, skill/books/acheivement and Im trying the 20 companions. which I like, I like the dialog and bickering and banter, but inventory management is becoming more of a pain, is there some tweak around this? Say make a companion only consider armors below a certain weight threshold?
Also i have noticed on foot, high athletics and lower armor weight makes a difference to the units I am fighting against, speed does matter in melee. movement speed, and weapon attack speeds. If I have to knock out spearmen from horse back i would much prefer to take on hordes of sarleon halberdiers than the much maligned ghazi spearmen as i find the faster ghazi spearmen are more likely to hit me and I have less margin of error. Its a bit similar with dervishes and huscarles, the darts have much lower damage but faster throw speed and faster through the air, so they are more accurate vs moving horsemen/me and I have less time to swerve or lift up my shield. Its the same thing in melee, the dervishes seem to have a faster attackspeed/movement and can catch you off guard easier. While the huscarles are much much more tankier Ideally I like to mix the two together. And have some spearmen, and metenheim greatswords, hauptmen, to back them up. If I bother with a infantry line or in sieges. Sometimes the pole arm users can do bad in sieges but if they get in good positions protected by those in front they can kill enemies over and over.
So am I being smart by trying to get a good combination of light weight/protection for my foot companions or should I just focus on stats only and not bother with weight?