The current inclination is more effective armor (which I presume aligns with sentiments here). The discussion is how and how much.
Excellent.
Some feedback I'd really love to see relayed to the roundtable of decision makers if that's ok:
* For real-life context, please pass on this
http://myarmoury.com/feature_mail.html and this video of lamellar and gambeson defeating a crossbow at close range
(skip the breastplate part obviously) with the caveat that while gameplay should take precedence over realism, if you are looking for a balanced game, real life is a good place to start because every weapon was useful in real life (sometimes due to cost or ease of use, things which Bannerlord covers). I don't think most players need hyper-realism or super deep simulations but we do want something that superficially resembles reality, as opposed to a peasant with a scythe murdering a fully lamellared charging cataphract in one or two hits.
* Arrow damage is the most important thing that needs to be fixed about armour. Everything else needs tweaks, but arrow damage to armour needs the BIGGEST changes. To avoid confusion with TW, this is the main thing we are talking about when we say "armour is not good enough." The way it stands, the game's tactics will always be a joke when archers can kill enemies in roughly the same amount of hits as melee fighters
but from a distance. Shields aren't enough to balance that out, as a very small infantry screen in front of your archers forces attacking infantry to drop their shields, allowing the stack of archers to shoot them with impunity. HTK against arrows should increase by nearly double.
* Two handed swinging polearms either need to do less damage or swing slower. As it stands, they have every benefit of other weapons and almost no downside. Despite being cut damage they just dump so much damage they may as well be maces for the purposes of killing armoured units.
* Blunt damage penetrates too much armour. Obviously it should be the strongest damage type against armour, but the way it is now indicates someone at TW has fallen for the meme that blunt trauma makes padded armour functionally irrelevant. It should be dialed back a little bit.
* Swords are in an alright place at the moment. If armour gets made stronger across the board they will become weaker, but perhaps there are ways of compensating for this, such as making a higher proportion of their damage blunt.
* Helmets should be relevant and perks increasing headshot damage should have a reason to exist. If you can often oneshot headshot someone whether or not they're wearing a helmet and whether or not you have increased headshot damage perks, there is probably an issue there.
* As
@0tto said, recruits/peasants/looters use too much blunt damage, I would love to see fewer giant Looney Tunes mallets on Battanian Volunteer loadouts that make them look like a croquet team. Blacksmith Hammers should be less common too.
* It seems like Callum was implying that there won't be a "dramatic" shift in armour because of the impact on campaign length - more effective armour makes battles longer, something which the playerbase definitely wants so they can actually enjoy a battle and use tactics, but I can see how longer battles would have a multiplicative effect on the duration of a campaign, which is already quite long.
This can be compensated for in many ways. Nobles and garrisons currently pretty much never surrender, fixing this and making them willing to give up a siege where they obviously can't win (so you don't have to sit out the whole siege camp construction) would cut a lot of wasted campaign time down. Also, making Engineering skill speed up siege camp construction more would reduce a lot of pointless unfun waiting in the game in addition to helping balance that weak skill. Giving the player some way of remotely contacting people, which you have discussed before, would also speed up campaigns. Changing morale to be more effective so you can force the enemy to flee more before being fully defeated, changing autocalc so high tier units are less likely to randomly die and therefore players are more willing to use it to skip curbstomp battles, making companions finish quests in a reasonable period of time so it's something worth doing, etc; any or all of these will have a reductive effect on excessive campaign length.
In addition, depending on what he means by "dramatic", I don't think copying Warband's core damage model of ~7HTK for armour against same tier archers, and just reducing the extremes a bit, would be
too dramatic. If that's what Callum means by "not a dramatic shift", in the sense that armour changes won't be RBM level but will be Warband level, then I'm actually happy with that.
Thank you for the more positive discussion.
