There are several problems with spears.
Regarding damage:
- I think the main problem with spears' damage is they balance it the same way for mounted and foot combat, so in order to avoid ridiculous amount of damage with uncouched spears while riding a mule, their damage output have a very low ground. Even in early game, a good spear in a fast riding horse will 1-shot many enemies. Hitting a fast horseman coming your way also does ridiculous damage. Hitting anything stationary does 20ish damage.
Regarding positioning and chance to hit:
- Fix Thrusting. It's impossible to thrust with a character's back to something with both spears and swords. When they pull their elbows backwards before the attack, it cancels the animation if it gets stuck into any object. This makes spears unusable on the front lines.
- Although they have better reach, their handling is horrible and it's much easier to miss a poke than a swing in messy battlefields.
- Their attack animations get caught a lot on allies. I tried making the tallest character possible only to see if I could poke enemies with a pike over friendly lines. Bumping any millimeter in any ally will negate damage COMPLETELY. You have to find a clear gap between your troops, and then we go back to messy battlefields, where that is nearly impossible.
- Pushing isn't implemented properly. The only way to keep opponents at bay is by being faster and running away from them. That works with any other weapon, so it's kinda redundant. It will make any weapon better.
- I did some testing with around 40 vlandian pikemen. Since they have good stats and a good sword, they will get more kills than tier1/2 troops, but still do a lot worse than the same amount of t4 vlandian billmen. If you order a charge, they will draw their swords. If you put them on shield wall formation and order advance, they march forward in a nice phalanx, then proceed to miss the initial attacks, keep trying to poke enemies at dead range while that noise of botched attacks play out, get clubbed and die. It's a hilarious way to suicide them into looters.
Possible ways to fix this:
- Fix thrusting! This should be a priority since it feels more like a bug than a mechanic.
- Better base damage with spears and less scaling with speed, so we could do the same damage we do with other weapons on foot, while mule riding still being bad for combat.
- Pushing back enemies that block spear attacks. I suppose that's on the making.
- It would be nice if spears did a little damage if they got deflected on allies, but still did some damage. Grazing enemies with a spear tip does very little damage. It could apply the same logic for deflected attacks on friendly troops