SP - General Armour. Why it doesn't work and how to make it work

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Stellar post!

Am in favor of the small but potential chance a Peasant/Looter does score a critical hit as all combat situations have the potential to be lethal. A guy on the street will little training does have the small chance of knocking down a trained boxer or MMA fighter and it happens more than you might think. I get that we want a level of disparity in that looter dont level up with us which is an awful idea- but so is walking amongst 30 armed men in Full Plate thinking nothing can hurt us like a Terminator. I like the feeling that ALL encounters CAN be lethal.
 
Probably lot of mistakes here but this is what I think.
All weapons should deal blunt damage depending on weapon speed, weight and balancing. If transfered energy is not fully absorbed by armor it should do damage to the body.
Besides, those weapons that penetrate armor should do cut damage on top of blunt damage. Just because it penetrated it doesn't mean it didn't transfer energy to the body.
Only high velocity projectiles could be piercing, but they would deal blunt damage and cut damage if penetrating.
The formula for penetration should be based on impact area, speed and resistance of material.

In short, the idea of different damage for different weapons is meh, but it works ok. However I really don't understand those damages and prices based on weapon tiers. And the differences based on weapon types doesn't make sense either. As someone pointed out, some polearms, 2H weapons, maces... are way too easy to handle.
 
But they werent. They were self defense weapon and side arms. Swords were not battlefield weapons. Polearms always were go to weapon for poopy pesants and noble warriors.
Spears, lances, poleaxes, polehammers, halberds, pikes

But i like the idea of swords to be really popular in game, becouse they look cool and very fun to play with and against. So i am totaly fine with popular swords in the game.



Cuts can be good against lots of lightly armored opponents, becouse cuts can be much faster.


I dont like current system, becouse it makes any weapon exept swingeble polearm or swords kinda useless. Why do i need mace if i can oneshot everything with sword?

Well like I said multiple times, go do the arena and try and beat a noble's head in with the sword (do Imperial arenas). It takes a long long time. The reason you'd want a mace, is because mace works on nobles and peasants, whereas swords only really work on peasants.

Swords were first of all very very expensive and thus a symbol of status and position. They were of course useful to some degree, especially against not so strongly armoured targets, mainly because of their good handling and balancing compared to the cheaper weapons of the normal soldier. For a plate armour you'd probably have chosen a war hammer with a piercing end, or a pointy spear for the weak spots.

For me there is no reason to depart from that in Bannerlord. If you give swords those advantages and make them expensive, you would introduce a balance that gets near to history without sacrificing the fun part. You could also introduce some kind of fame or renown for carrying an expensive sword, for example.

Well there's different points in history and different armies. At some points swords were status symbols, and at some points they were standard issue.

You answered your own question, they were popular because they were easy to carry and draw when your main weapon was unavailable. Swords were, as a battlefield weapon, nothing more than a backup in the vast majority of cases, and they were only used when things went wrong in some way.
There are, as always, exceptions to that, but that's the general rule you see in history. It's not that swords were just so good that they were common, they were just easy to wear and handy for self defense.

I think people misunderstood the context of "good" I never said swords were good against heavy armour. I meant good as in useful. I want swords to have a use in this game, but people are proposing damage models that'll just make them worse than they are already.
 
Well like I said multiple times, go do the arena and try and beat a noble's head in with the sword (do Imperial arenas). It takes a long long time. The reason you'd want a mace, is because mace works on nobles and peasants, whereas swords only really work on peasants.
In the arena there are some garbage swords, even spear in the face does almost no damage.
My 1h sword can oneshot everyone in the head, and my 2h sword can oneshot everyone in the body.
So what is the reason to pick mace?
 
In the arena there are some garbage swords, even spear in the face does almost no damage.
My 1h sword can oneshot everyone in the head, and my 2h sword can oneshot everyone in the body.
So what is the reason to pick mace?

I switched out my knightly arming sword (T6) for a fullered mace (T5) to test this in the field, and the mace is doing more damage to nobles than the sword did, so it's working correctly despite being a tier lower. If you're going to complain about maces, complain about their length because the damage is fine.

Have you tested maces or are you just looking at the damage on the tooltip? The tooltip damage numbers are pretty unreliable.
 
the mace is doing more damage to nobles than the sword did,

This is not the point he made. You see on the current armour balance if you can doo less damage but still 1shot with headshot using sword or do more damage but still 1shot using mace there is no point using mace.

Reg tiering - it is automatically assigned basing on weapons stats (mostly damage) so its hard to compare them as maces according to games logic would never technically get "t6" assigned
 
All armor should have two ratings: one for its ability to deflect, the other for its ability to absorb. The first, deflection, is mostly important against cutting weapons and to some degree against piercing, where it stops all cutting damage below some threshold, stops piercing damage below some lower threshold, and reduces damage from both cutting and piercing weapons by some percentage rate. The second rating, absorption, is important against blunt weapons, and again stops all blunt damage below its threshold, and reduces blunt and piercing damage by some percentage. Piercing attacks that exceed the threshold would be affected by both armor types, and therefore deal reduced damage (as in half) ABOVE the thresholds, so while it would excel at doing SOME damage in almost any situation, it would potentially do less total damage, particularly against lightly armored targets. A cutting sword is likely to slide across the armor without doing damage, unless it hits with sufficient force to cut the armor, in which case it inflicts serious injury by slicing skin and muscle. A thrown rock is still going to bounce off of a suit of thick plate armor, unless thrown by someone with a lot of strength (using bigger rocks), in which case it dents and crushes the armor into the skin and muscle beneath. An arrow or spear point is more likely than a rock to pierce a suit of armor, but deals further injury only in a single narrow point.

Fighting lightly armored or unarmored bandits and peasants? Use cutting weapons like sabers and rapiers to inflict maximum damage above the low or absent threshold. Fighting heavily armored knights with your strong companions? Switch to maces and hammers, because those sabers won't have nearly as much effect. Spears, short swords, and arrows would be reasonably effective in the hands of the regular troops for damaging heavily armored targets as well as bandits, but not for killing quickly.

There should be a lot more to choosing a suit of armor than just a larger single protection rating. As I noted, having two different effects gives some reason to use different tools and tactics, and having a percentage of coverage (along with less weight for pieces not covering fully) would depict things like open-faced helmets, armored cuirasses without pauldrons, or other "partial armor" situations. As it stands, all armor covers 100% of the upper body (except the head), and the helmet and greaves/boots/smelly socks cover 100% of their respective locations. Real armor COULD cover close to 100% (aside from eye slits), but was too unwieldy, heavy, and expensive for most troops to use. A small reduction in movement speed for higher encumbrance should make lightly armored skirmishers viable, so they can run and maintain their range from heavily armored troops. In M&B, Nord foot troops (and Sea Raiders) with heavy chain mail typically outpaced light troops, and could almost keep up with the slower breeds of horses, which is just silly.

It's undoubtedly too late to change this for Bannerlord, but the ideas for a more realistic and complex armor system should be debated well BEFORE the next installment in the series. Note that "complexity" under the hood can be used to make things more realistic and intuitive, as opposed to being more "complicated" for the player and LESS intuitive, which in my opinion is the worst of both worlds (reality and fantasy). Things that behave as you expect that they would in reality can be "fun", where things that behave other than how one expects (without some reason behind that behavior) often seem unrealistic and just plain stupid. The one exception is "magic", where one obviously does not want it to behave "realistically", but it is not included in the M&B games.

"Fun > Realism" is inaccurate; more like "Realism - Tedium = Fun". Adding in things like bathroom breaks is just "tedium", and does not make "realism" enjoyable. People call for things like dismemberment as an example of "Fun > Realism", yet shooting a bandit with a BB gun in Bethesda's Fallout 3 and having body parts fly off was not "realism" in the least, was so stupid that it ceased to be "funny" after the first time it happened, then became annoyingly immersion-breaking every time it happened from there on. Adding the little nuances that make things behave rationally adds to enjoyment, in my opinion.
 
This is not the point he made. You see on the current armour balance if you can doo less damage but still 1shot with headshot using sword or do more damage but still 1shot using mace there is no point using mace.

Reg tiering - it is automatically assigned basing on weapons stats (mostly damage) so its hard to compare them as maces according to games logic would never technically get "t6" assigned

Do the sword oneshots happen on realistic difficulty?

Also, the speed variable muddies this whole thing. Like for example, if you have perfect conditions for a strike, like your enemy is moving towards you, and you towards him, you'll get that oneshot, but say you're both pushing against each other and overhead chopping, the speed is removed and the sword most probably won't oneshot, but the mace ignores armour and it still might. That would be the advantage for having a mace. I'd really like to test a tier 4 mace out in the arena and see how it works, because I'm pretty familiar with the spatha and noble head armour at this point.

Specifics aside, I've been using exclusively swords as my 1h weapon. Only started using mace to test them out, and I found they're performing better against armour than swords do. So that's working as intended right? If a 1h mace does better body damage, and you need 1-2 strikes. That's better than a sword that might always need 2 strikes.

I don't see a problem with a sword oneshotting someone with the right conditions, but to compare them directly to maces and say they aren't balanced because both are capable of the same thing isn't a proper argument. Most weapons in the game can oneshot people under the right conditions.
 
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Do the sword oneshots happen on realistic difficulty?

Yes, vanilla difficulty only affects your own / your allies damage, not enemies but despite that when i am testing its always realistic

Specifics aside, I've been using exclusively swords as my 1h weapon. Only started using mace to test them out, and I found they're performing better against armour than swords do. So that's working as intended right? If a 1h mace does better body damage, and you need 1-2 strikes. That's better than a sword that might always need 2 strikes.
This depends on the sword. If i compare t5 sword to t4 mace vs armored troop of empire i get the following result:

Sword vs mace test

And i did not pick the strongest sword out there. Test was done on fine steel long kaskana (78 cut 113 range t5) vs steel shestopyor (63 damage mace, best of its tier). 2 damage will never justify loss of 50 range.

Remember that this game has 1h swords that can reach over 100 damage, even more if you craft with smithing. That is the reason we say current balance is all over the place

There might be a difference on extremely armored troops (like Empire leaders ie. Lucon etc) or Legionnaire. But then again having a weapon that is slightly better vs 5% of troop types (in damage because we always suffer on range with maces) hardly justifies usage.

Now i want to stress it out - i want maces to be viable but the game makes it really hard to like them :wink:
 
Fighting lightly armored or unarmored bandits and peasants? Use cutting weapons like sabers and rapiers to inflict maximum damage above the low or absent threshold. Fighting heavily armored knights with your strong companions? Switch to maces and hammers, because those sabers won't have nearly as much effect.

Nobody is going to open their inventory and swap a sword in to fight looters, they're just going to have a mace equipped 24/7 because the mace will work well enough against bandits and peasants, because they're bandits and peasants. You know I'm right.

If you're proposing people carry a sword and a mace at the same time, did that happen at any point in history? I'm no military history expert. Also please don't make swords and maces mandatory.
 
Yes, vanilla difficulty only affects your own / your allies damage, not enemies but despite that when i am testing its always realistic


This depends on the sword. If i compare t5 sword to t4 mace vs armored troop of empire i get the following result:

Sword vs mace test

And i did not pick the strongest sword out there. Test was done on fine steel long kaskana (78 cut 113 range t5) vs steel shestopyor (63 damage mace, best of its tier). 2 damage will never justify loss of 50 range.

Remember that this game has 1h swords that can reach over 100 damage, even more if you craft with smithing. That is the reason we say current balance is all over the place

There might be a difference on extremely armored troops (like Empire leaders ie. Lucon etc) or Legionnaire. But then again having a weapon that is slightly better vs 5% of troop types (in damage because we always suffer on range with maces) hardly justifies usage.

Now i want to stress it out - i want maces to be viable but the game makes it really hard to like them :wink:

Yup, like I said earlier, the problem with maces is the range.

And my whole perspective on this is about the heavily armoured troops, since it's against those guys that you want a good weapon. The rest of the guys your weapon doesn't matter. The sword does drop off heavily against noble head armour, but I haven't found an arena that'll give me a mace in the final round to test them.
 
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Probably lot of mistakes here but this is what I think.
All weapons should deal blunt damage depending on weapon speed, weight and balancing. If transfered energy is not fully absorbed by armor it should do damage to the body.
Besides, those weapons that penetrate armor should do cut damage on top of blunt damage. Just because it penetrated it doesn't mean it didn't transfer energy to the body.
Only high velocity projectiles could be piercing, but they would deal blunt damage and cut damage if penetrating.
The formula for penetration should be based on impact area, speed and resistance of material.

In short, the idea of different damage for different weapons is meh, but it works ok. However I really don't understand those damages and prices based on weapon tiers. And the differences based on weapon types doesn't make sense either. As someone pointed out, some polearms, 2H weapons, maces... are way too easy to handle.
I think I agree. An arrow to the head won't pierce, but it will make your ears ring. A slashed sword won't cut through steel, but it will still hurt. Isn't that what the Armoured Combat League is all about?

So every weapon should have its pierce/cut damage plus blunt damage. Then the armour would soak it accordingly. Cloth would get full damage, a gambesson would absorb some blunt and some cut damage, whereas leather would absorb cut damage but not blunt.

And the rest of the armour will have to be figured out by someone smarter than me.
 
All armor should have two ratings: one for its ability to deflect, the other for its ability to absorb. The first, deflection, is mostly important against cutting weapons and to some degree against piercing, where it stops all cutting damage below some threshold, stops piercing damage below some lower threshold, and reduces damage from both cutting and piercing weapons by some percentage rate. The second rating, absorption, is important against blunt weapons, and again stops all blunt damage below its threshold, and reduces blunt and piercing damage by some percentage. Piercing attacks that exceed the threshold would be affected by both armor types, and therefore deal reduced damage (as in half) ABOVE the thresholds, so while it would excel at doing SOME damage in almost any situation, it would potentially do less total damage, particularly against lightly armored targets. A cutting sword is likely to slide across the armor without doing damage, unless it hits with sufficient force to cut the armor, in which case it inflicts serious injury by slicing skin and muscle. A thrown rock is still going to bounce off of a suit of thick plate armor, unless thrown by someone with a lot of strength (using bigger rocks), in which case it dents and crushes the armor into the skin and muscle beneath. An arrow or spear point is more likely than a rock to pierce a suit of armor, but deals further injury only in a single narrow point.

Fighting lightly armored or unarmored bandits and peasants? Use cutting weapons like sabers and rapiers to inflict maximum damage above the low or absent threshold. Fighting heavily armored knights with your strong companions? Switch to maces and hammers, because those sabers won't have nearly as much effect. Spears, short swords, and arrows would be reasonably effective in the hands of the regular troops for damaging heavily armored targets as well as bandits, but not for killing quickly.

There should be a lot more to choosing a suit of armor than just a larger single protection rating. As I noted, having two different effects gives some reason to use different tools and tactics, and having a percentage of coverage (along with less weight for pieces not covering fully) would depict things like open-faced helmets, armored cuirasses without pauldrons, or other "partial armor" situations. As it stands, all armor covers 100% of the upper body (except the head), and the helmet and greaves/boots/smelly socks cover 100% of their respective locations. Real armor COULD cover close to 100% (aside from eye slits), but was too unwieldy, heavy, and expensive for most troops to use. A small reduction in movement speed for higher encumbrance should make lightly armored skirmishers viable, so they can run and maintain their range from heavily armored troops. In M&B, Nord foot troops (and Sea Raiders) with heavy chain mail typically outpaced light troops, and could almost keep up with the slower breeds of horses, which is just silly.

It's undoubtedly too late to change this for Bannerlord, but the ideas for a more realistic and complex armor system should be debated well BEFORE the next installment in the series. Note that "complexity" under the hood can be used to make things more realistic and intuitive, as opposed to being more "complicated" for the player and LESS intuitive, which in my opinion is the worst of both worlds (reality and fantasy). Things that behave as you expect that they would in reality can be "fun", where things that behave other than how one expects (without some reason behind that behavior) often seem unrealistic and just plain stupid. The one exception is "magic", where one obviously does not want it to behave "realistically", but it is not included in the M&B games.

"Fun > Realism" is inaccurate; more like "Realism - Tedium = Fun". Adding in things like bathroom breaks is just "tedium", and does not make "realism" enjoyable. People call for things like dismemberment as an example of "Fun > Realism", yet shooting a bandit with a BB gun in Bethesda's Fallout 3 and having body parts fly off was not "realism" in the least, was so stupid that it ceased to be "funny" after the first time it happened, then became annoyingly immersion-breaking every time it happened from there on. Adding the little nuances that make things behave rationally adds to enjoyment, in my opinion.

+1
 
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