First off, hello all, and the usual compliments to the developers on what an excellent game this is.
One of the things that I find most appealing about it is that weapons, armor, and the appearance of characters seem to be relatively consistent with a time-frame of the late 13th/early 14th century, as opposed to the usual fantasy mish-mash. Not only is mixing periods visually jarring, at least to my eyes, it also leads to unrealistic tactics. I don't think you'd ever have, say, a 10th-century Viking with Nordic sword taking on a 15th century knight in Milanese plate armour, because a slashing sword would be thoroughly ineffective against that. Instead, you'd be better off with a heavy bludgeoning weapon to batter him to the ground, or possibly a longsword to polk at cracks in the armour. As I understand it, you'd also rarely find a late European man-at-arms supplementing his plate armour with a colourful heraldric shield, as found in other games, because you'd need both hands to wield those heavy bludgeoning weapons used against other armoured men-at-arms. At the same time, the cavalry charge begins to go out of fashion, as polearms proliferated among infantry and as the weight of armour prevented horses from getting to up to much more than a fast trot.
(Sources on this are mostly the John Keegan and Christopher Hibbert accounts of Agincourt, so if anyone's done more serious research, set me straight).
Frankly, I think that the game's hack, slash, block and gallop style of play is best suited to the earlier periods, and is just more fun to boot. Also, I think that Nordic helmets and chainmail just look cooler than plate and visors. However, there's always going to be players who want to use heavy armour, halberds, primitive handguns, and the like. So maybe one suggestion is to have two or three historical settings, say 11th century, 13th century, 15th century, in which some weapons and armour go out of fashion, and others come in.
One other thing -- I think lances at some point ought to get pulled out of one's hand, or break. Fatigue issues aside, I think it's a little bit unrealistic to be able to gallop about and skewer two dozen bandits with a single lance. Maybe do one or two, gallop back to your inventory/page, grab a new lance, rince and repeat, but as it happens I think your lance would get a bit hard to lift after a while with all the miscreants danging off of it.
One of the things that I find most appealing about it is that weapons, armor, and the appearance of characters seem to be relatively consistent with a time-frame of the late 13th/early 14th century, as opposed to the usual fantasy mish-mash. Not only is mixing periods visually jarring, at least to my eyes, it also leads to unrealistic tactics. I don't think you'd ever have, say, a 10th-century Viking with Nordic sword taking on a 15th century knight in Milanese plate armour, because a slashing sword would be thoroughly ineffective against that. Instead, you'd be better off with a heavy bludgeoning weapon to batter him to the ground, or possibly a longsword to polk at cracks in the armour. As I understand it, you'd also rarely find a late European man-at-arms supplementing his plate armour with a colourful heraldric shield, as found in other games, because you'd need both hands to wield those heavy bludgeoning weapons used against other armoured men-at-arms. At the same time, the cavalry charge begins to go out of fashion, as polearms proliferated among infantry and as the weight of armour prevented horses from getting to up to much more than a fast trot.
(Sources on this are mostly the John Keegan and Christopher Hibbert accounts of Agincourt, so if anyone's done more serious research, set me straight).
Frankly, I think that the game's hack, slash, block and gallop style of play is best suited to the earlier periods, and is just more fun to boot. Also, I think that Nordic helmets and chainmail just look cooler than plate and visors. However, there's always going to be players who want to use heavy armour, halberds, primitive handguns, and the like. So maybe one suggestion is to have two or three historical settings, say 11th century, 13th century, 15th century, in which some weapons and armour go out of fashion, and others come in.
One other thing -- I think lances at some point ought to get pulled out of one's hand, or break. Fatigue issues aside, I think it's a little bit unrealistic to be able to gallop about and skewer two dozen bandits with a single lance. Maybe do one or two, gallop back to your inventory/page, grab a new lance, rince and repeat, but as it happens I think your lance would get a bit hard to lift after a while with all the miscreants danging off of it.
