Bannerlord Armor System as a bottleneck for tactical gameplay

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Does anybody know if they have implemented Armour reduction based on the material of the worn armor? I mean I know the code well regarding this aspect but I don't understand why they doesn't include it ( for your information the code in the xmls has tags for the Armour like "mail" or "leather" but it has no effect). In the end the armor with the highest stats are the best, but as i mentioned I would couple it with the type of the armor.
 
I think it affects stuff like hit sound and production from workshops and town. For example all cloth_civilian are produced by wool weavery (it is called garments in the workshop xml).
 
Regardless of whether Bannerlord is in the 11th century and armor is obviously not the same as it was in the High and Late Middle Ages, troops such as the Imperial Legionnaires are insanely well-armored. They are encased in steel and mail.

Realistically, you are not going to penetrate that with any melee weapon on foot, even a lance from a horse at full gallop probably wouldn't do it. Arrows would not be a reliable weapon, they could theoretically penetrate but it's a big maybe dependant on multiple factors. The way they are armored, the only vulnerabilities are the unexposed face and possible blunt force trauma to the helmet.

I do not think that it would be balanced if the armor protected you quite this well, but clearly, the armor is far, far weaker than it should be. A hundred Legionnaires should cream a pure army of recruits 5 times their size.
 
@hruza
how about this?

t5 died while dueling the second recruit. if we consider the pilum thrown at the start a kill, t5 can kill 2 recruits before getting killed.

i used enhanced battle test for this.

i did the test 10 times.
the average is 2.5. the numbers are without the pilum kill. with it, the average would be 3.5. it's too low.
test number...... .........number of t5 unit kills
t10
t21
t34
t42
t54
t63
t74
t82
t90
t105
Nice. I think that an ideal to work for is "Tier represents how many T1 recruits you can take on average." For example, 1 T6 banner knight can kill 6 T1 recruits, but no more than that. To me that seems nice and easy to remember, and reasonably realistic.
Regardless of whether Bannerlord is in the 11th century and armor is obviously not the same as it was in the High and Late Middle Ages, troops such as the Imperial Legionnaires are insanely well-armored. They are encased in steel and mail.

Realistically, you are not going to penetrate that with any melee weapon on foot, even a lance from a horse at full gallop probably wouldn't do it. Arrows would not be a reliable weapon, they could theoretically penetrate but it's a big maybe dependant on multiple factors. The way they are armored, the only vulnerabilities are the unexposed face and possible blunt force trauma to the helmet.

I do not think that it would be balanced if the armor protected you quite this well, but clearly, the armor is far, far weaker than it should be. A hundred Legionnaires should cream a pure army of recruits 5 times their size.
Yeah, this. I don't know much about lamellar or scale, but when it comes to mail, I know that the highest quality double mail with padding beneath was almost completely arrow-proof and totally cut-proof. You could only pierce it with a very powerful piercing thrust, or a hard blunt impact to break bones and cause internal bleeding (or many blunt hits, like bashing away with a sword; the sword wouldn't cut through mail but you might break a joint eventually).

 
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@Dejan can you ask if the material flag (Cloth, Leather, Chainmail, Plate) for armor is supposed to be used in armor calculations? It occurs to me that if it is meant to apply an additional bonus for the more protective types, then we might just be victims of an unfortunate and longstanding bug.
 
Nice. I think that an ideal to work for is "Tier represents how many T1 recruits you can take on average." For example, 1 T6 banner knight can kill 6 T1 recruits, but no more than that. To me that seems nice and easy to remember, and reasonably realistic.
Since I have nothing better to do, let's analyze this statement and why it's not a good idea.

To simplify things, let's assume the TN troop is standing and surrounded by N T1 troops hitting him, while TN is hitting one T1 at a time until the T1 killed.
Let's say S is the number of seconds TN needs to kill a T1, and D is the damage per second a T1 inflicts on TN.
So for one on one combat, TN will kill T1 in S seconds, and receive S*D damage in return.
You with me still? Then let's see how much damage TN receives as the number of T1s grows.
1 T1: S*D damage
2 T1: S*D (from the first T1 to be killed) + 2*S*D (from the second)
3 T1: S*D + 2*S*D + 3*S*D = (1+2+3)*S*D
N T1: (1+2+...+N)*S*D = N*(N+1)*S*D/2

So you can see that the combat skill (weapons, armor, skills) of TN as N grows needs to grow at a square rate. That means T3 (N^2=9) needs to be at least twice as good at combat than T2 (N^2=4). T6 is nine times better at combat than T2, etc. That''s a pretty steep rate.
A more conventional tiering system would be a linear one, where T6 is only three times better at combat than T2.

The conclusion is that the number of T1 killed is not a useful standard for determining what a tiered troop should do. Stick with linear increases in weapon/armor stats and skills or something.
Or you could turn this around and say let's adopt a linear system, but still use how many T1 a troop can kill - use square roots.
For example, a T2 should be able to kill 1.4 T1 troops, a T4 should be able to kill 2 T1 troops, etc. or in general a TN should be able to kill sqrt(N) T1 troops.

Hope that helps! :iamamoron:
 
@Dejan can you ask if the material flag (Cloth, Leather, Chainmail, Plate) for armor is supposed to be used in armor calculations? It occurs to me that if it is meant to apply an additional bonus for the more protective types, then we might just be victims of an unfortunate and longstanding bug.

There is no mention of material type in calculation of damage and armor penetration whatsoever. It is used for physics of visuals (cloth behaves different then "plate") and for sound unit makes when they run and when the armor is hit be wood / metal etc. Its not bug. Armor is determined only by armor value nothing else, I know because we wanted to implement angle based bouncing for leather and plate.
 
@Dejan can you ask if the material flag (Cloth, Leather, Chainmail, Plate) for armor is supposed to be used in armor calculations? It occurs to me that if it is meant to apply an additional bonus for the more protective types, then we might just be victims of an unfortunate and longstanding bug.
Apologies for the late reply. The material flag is used for sound only, nothing else.
 
Yeah so unfortunately the problem with using IRL to base game balance off of is that IRL combat isn't usually decided by destroying the enemy but by destroying the morale and causing them to flee. This is the major problem in balancing archers in the game, they have to be able to do enough damage to justify their existence, if they don't they run into problems of running out of ammo and becoming essentially useless, especially in larger battles. (OFC you can always do the retreat cheese)

OP is right that ****ty armor is bad for tactical gameplay, once two lines meet the fighting is often over in less than a minute. I've had battles with lords that ended in less than a minute. Opposing forces annihilate each other too fast due to ****ty armor and that means no time to really use tactics. This becomes a much bigger problem late game when attrition means that AI lords have mostly peasant armies which die stupid quick to arrows. I use a mod that replaces T1 troops with T2 troops as recruits and it makes for a way better experience just in that regard alone.

The balancing of Archers is I think a separate issue to armor, I think that the actual damage archers do relatively should remain the same. However, the dpm should be greatly reduced. They should also suffer severe morale penalty from engaging in melee, to the point that if they get charged by a decent sized body of Cav or Infantry they should route. This still preserves their damage potential while also allowing for a force to close with and destroy them.

The RTS mods ability to have formations target other formations needs to be implemented and also include ranged targeting. This allows archers to be used to suppress other archers instead of wasting arrows on shield walls, and allows cav to charge archers instead of dense bodies of infantry.

Fixing cavs targeting will also greatly improve their effectiveness against archers, right now one of the biggest problems is that when they charge they take losses which would be acceptable if they actually did damage, but they don't.

All armor needs to be greatly improved to the point that high armor takes so little damage from one handed cutting weapons they don't get staggered, this should be balanced by two handed and polearms being doing enough damage to still be effective.

Throwing weapons need to absolutely wreck both shields and armor, they are balanced by low ammo count already. They do good damage against armor but recently I think shields were buffed so that they basically cant be destroyed. While I guess thats to counter arrows it is really bad for throwing. Thrown can easily be given a respective shield damage buff to compensate. ideally makeshift shields should be destroyed by a single hit, mid tier shields 2, and high tier 3-4.

Spears need to be fixed so infantry in shield wall can use them as main weapon. Currently low damage but high reach and pierce are good, but the problem is collision with friendlies preventing them from being used. The idea is to make spears good in formation but meh in isolation like they were in VC, which solved that problem by chopping off back end of spear which was effective enough even if it looked weird. They need to remove back end collision while keeping the model.
 
Yeah so unfortunately the problem with using IRL to base game balance off of is that IRL combat isn't usually decided by destroying the enemy but by destroying the morale and causing them to flee. This is the major problem in balancing archers in the game, they have to be able to do enough damage to justify their existence, if they don't they run into problems of running out of ammo and becoming essentially useless, especially in larger battles. (OFC you can always do the retreat cheese)

OP is right that ****ty armor is bad for tactical gameplay, once two lines meet the fighting is often over in less than a minute. I've had battles with lords that ended in less than a minute. Opposing forces annihilate each other too fast due to ****ty armor and that means no time to really use tactics. This becomes a much bigger problem late game when attrition means that AI lords have mostly peasant armies which die stupid quick to arrows. I use a mod that replaces T1 troops with T2 troops as recruits and it makes for a way better experience just in that regard alone.

The balancing of Archers is I think a separate issue to armor, I think that the actual damage archers do relatively should remain the same. However, the dpm should be greatly reduced. They should also suffer severe morale penalty from engaging in melee, to the point that if they get charged by a decent sized body of Cav or Infantry they should route. This still preserves their damage potential while also allowing for a force to close with and destroy them.

The RTS mods ability to have formations target other formations needs to be implemented and also include ranged targeting. This allows archers to be used to suppress other archers instead of wasting arrows on shield walls, and allows cav to charge archers instead of dense bodies of infantry.

Fixing cavs targeting will also greatly improve their effectiveness against archers, right now one of the biggest problems is that when they charge they take losses which would be acceptable if they actually did damage, but they don't.

All armor needs to be greatly improved to the point that high armor takes so little damage from one handed cutting weapons they don't get staggered, this should be balanced by two handed and polearms being doing enough damage to still be effective.

Throwing weapons need to absolutely wreck both shields and armor, they are balanced by low ammo count already. They do good damage against armor but recently I think shields were buffed so that they basically cant be destroyed. While I guess thats to counter arrows it is really bad for throwing. Thrown can easily be given a respective shield damage buff to compensate. ideally makeshift shields should be destroyed by a single hit, mid tier shields 2, and high tier 3-4.

Spears need to be fixed so infantry in shield wall can use them as main weapon. Currently low damage but high reach and pierce are good, but the problem is collision with friendlies preventing them from being used. The idea is to make spears good in formation but meh in isolation like they were in VC, which solved that problem by chopping off back end of spear which was effective enough even if it looked weird. They need to remove back end collision while keeping the model.
Lot of this is doable by literally tweaking values in xmls (spear and lance stuff for example). I think spears being good clash with their design (they stated in one of the older patchlogs that they are reducing amount of spears on units because they were too good at stopping cav, so apparently only some units are supposed to be able to stop cav and spear is supposed to do this job - thats it).
 
@Dejan can you ask if the material flag (Cloth, Leather, Chainmail, Plate) for armor is supposed to be used in armor calculations? It occurs to me that if it is meant to apply an additional bonus for the more protective types, then we might just be victims of an unfortunate and longstanding bug.

You would think that. I mean...that's logically sound.

But nope. Suede boots > Lamellar plate boots.
 
There are too many factors in play to just straight up Nerf Ranged or Buff Armor.

if you just nerf ranged damage. then eventually archers will be underwhelming, defending sieges would be difficult and they'd fade out of play, people would be complaining to buff them, and fielding pure infantry/melee cav armies
if you just buff armor. then only 2h weapons would be viable and still 1 or 2 shot people while 1h attacks would be chicken scratchers needing 10+ attacks to take someone down.
while it's realistic for weak attacks to do no damage at all against strong armor. there has to be a balance between weapons and armor instead of just damage values compared to hp, otherwise some weapons would be obsolete. the speed boost for damage is great for melee but i think they need to change the speed multiplier for ranged attacks that travel fast inherently, if done properly this alone should solve the ranged being op problem. (in addition, tweak bow/crossbow skill to affect missile speed and therefore dmg multiplier, or make lower tier bowmen use cut type of arrow that does less to armor)
anyways, check out drastic battle mod. https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/2188 it unlocks the code and lets you change interactions between damage type, weapon type, armor type, body part etc. it's probably the best thing for now.

there's a lot of issues with low tier troops vs higher tier troops etc... weapon skill does little to increase someone's fighting prowess in terms of damage, the tier is almost only equipment, with slight movement speed boost.
i suggest adding a defensive skill based on tier level. and it runs a skill check for incoming attacks. a tier 1 attack vs tier 5 defense would do a fraction of the damage. scaling up to tier 5 damage doing full and tier 6 doing extra etc.
this shouldn't be too extreme as it would compound the other way with higher tier damage vs lower tier defense. but maybe 10% per tier.
this way, higher tier troops have an inherent advantage over lower tier troops, shown in both their defense and offensive poweress. this multiplyer should apply after armor reduction, not before
 
Lot of this is doable by literally tweaking values in xmls (spear and lance stuff for example). I think spears being good clash with their design (they stated in one of the older patchlogs that they are reducing amount of spears on units because they were too good at stopping cav, so apparently only some units are supposed to be able to stop cav and spear is supposed to do this job - thats it).
I get that and i'm not that opposed to it. I'd also just like them to be decent against infantry as long as they are in formation. They should have spears with a weak sidearm that way if they get isolated they are vulnerable to non-spear troops but in formation multiple overlapping spear threats prevent them from being overwhelmed by infantry closing. VC did this well.
 
VC did this well.
Indeed it did, i just loved spearwall combat in viking conquest, troops kept good distance if you ordered them to attack a formation and just mowed the enemy with their spear thrusts (with armor that actually worked too instead of being made of wet paper)
 
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