hueman337 said:
i feel that i must speak my opinion about the overall "balance" in this mod, because it feels really off
First off, to be fair, the underlying problem is probably with the relative simplicity of the base game as well as design choices there. I am not an expert on PoP either.
Considering that, however, it sounds like it fits perfectly with typical hollywood (or longbow/english-prejudiced) perception of how armor (speak: "cardboard") and ranged worked. It's one of the most widespread misconceptions in modern times about the medieval era, right up there with 20 pound swords and "knights couldn't get up," despite there being quite a lot of contemporary evidence that was to the contrary. I am thinking, for example, of the saracen chronicler's description of the "terrible" sight of european warriors walking around looking like pincushions because their arrows did nothing to harm them, or the recorded note of purchase from one european king who ordered hundreds of layered gambesons, because they made warriors, according to him, impervious to missile fire.
This is reinforced by gaming developers who intentionally nerf the historical usefulness of armor quite a lot for "balance" reasons, and simply because a generation of twitch gamers wants quick resolutions, which does not lend itself to long duels and battles where men line up and bombard each other before engagement, which is exactly what makes attrition via ranged useful. Look, for example, to the now abandoned game War of the Roses, where initially armor was quite historical, but the developers caved to some minor but vocal complaints that it was "too good" and made combat take too long. (Despite this, armor remained quite good at deflecting light cutting attacks.)
Anyway, rambling aside, my recommendation is to adjust the values yourself, it's not too difficult, I routinely do it with some mods. Off the bat, I would first make sure all ranged weapons do cutting instead of piercing, because from everything I have learned about the topic, that is the best representation in Warband.* I might also tweak armor soak and redux values up a few points, no more than 10. After that I would compare bows and xbows etc to vanilla and bring the values back down if they exceed them by a lot.
The soak and reduction values are super easy to change, they are global and in a single file, I think module.ini. I would first check if PoP reduces these values from vanilla. They should be at least as high as in vanilla, imo, but not too much higher, either. This is assuming PoP doesn't radically change values overall, but I can't think of a good reason that it should. Changing weapon damage types requires checking each one, but will be much easier if you get one of the troop editors for Warband.
*That would not be true if it were possible to make different armor categories have different soak/reduction values per damage type. Then you could have maille that stopped cuts cold but did less for piercing and nothing for blunt attacks, layered gambeson that stops piercing attacks cold, but does less for cutting and blunt, and so on. Naturally this explains why armor was always layered. Warriors would wear a padding with maille armor for just this sort of reason, plus it takes the force out of the attacks on the maille - there's a reason smiths work things against an anvil. The common weakness in all these armors was one thing: system shock and trauma from sheer force and impact. That explains with perfect logic the arms race that favored longer or heavier weapons with serious impact followed by pin-point thrusting accuracy to the less-armored joints that your disorienting attack hopefully exposed... until gunpowder weaponry improved and literally blew it all away, a feat that none of it's ranged predecessors even remotely managed.
As a side note, one thing that reinforces, in my mind, the fact that vanilla Warband is broken in terms of how good archery works, is the need for making the shield skill a virtual force-field against arrows. This starkly contrasts the reality of this period where shields were on the decline, because good armor was common. This fact only makes sense if you assume that common armor was so good against ranged that shields were not needed.