don't know about you guys but you can make practically any style of combat work in vanilla. as long as you know when to act and how to do so. the low armor on the MC is due to some perks being pretty much bonkers. Athletics number 1, then one in bow. given the right perks and any decently good vanilla weapon you can turn MC into a tanky killer. but maybe it's me who is a nerd and plays way too much vanilla combat to know when to do what and how to build an MC.
If your argument rests on the assumption that you are the only one who is smart enough to think of something, and nobody else has thought of it, consider for just a moment that maybe other people have. Even with perks, the player character in armour is nowhere near as survivable as an armoured character in Warband was. Even with perks and the best armour, the way armour works in the game is just not fun.
If you made my 50+ Body armor MC even tanker by reducing arrow DMG i could easily rack up 100+ kills using nothing but an horse and a lance.
Even tankier, you say? The player is not tanky at all now. 50+ body armour, the very best costing
millions of denars, only lets you take 7 hits from a distant archer, and makes NO difference to the number of arrows it takes to kill you at close range.
You can already easily rack up 300+ kills in a siege with a catapult, but that doesn't mean catapults shouldn't exist. If you are worried about it being too easy for the player to slaughter enemies from horseback, my answer is that
the number of soldiers who use pikes as their main weapon should be increased, that will up the difficulty for riders a little as they have to pick their targets carefully.
In addition, making armour stronger will make it harder for the player to slaughter armoured enemies too! Right now you can easily cheese them with a glaive or crossbow. You're not considering that an armour buff would affect enemies too.
if what you are looking is the feeling of being powerful then RBM might be better for you but not necessarily what everyone is looking for, some people find the more unforgiving vanilla combat more enjoyable.
If you want to know what everyone is looking for, go look at this thread.
https://forums.taleworlds.com/index...n-conception-the-elephant-in-the-room.451273/ Or one of the hundreds of other posts about it.
The vast majority of players want better, more protective armour.
I'll turn your argument back on you - considering you're in the minority here, if you don't like the level of protectiveness realistically protective armour gives you, you can always just not wear it. Or install a mod as you're telling other people to do.
it makes you feel uneasy in an important fight, like a real commander would.
If we're going to use the word "real", multiple real commanders in real life fought on the frontline themselves. Because in real life, quality mail armour made you very well protected.
Richard the 1st of England frequently fought on the frontline of battles from his teenage years to middle age, because of the protection his armour provided him (he finally died to a crossbow bolt because he took off his armour).
Isaac Komnenos, Byzantine Emperor, was once stabbed by two different spears at the same time while wearing mail and was completely uninjured.
This is a fantastic source about mail, anyone who wants to use the word "real" in an armour discussion should read it:
http://myarmoury.com/feature_mail.html
Realism aside, feeling "uneasy" should not be more important than having fun. I want to get in there and crack heads without having to die to random bull**** arrows from the back of the fight I couldn't do anything about.
The current weak state of armour means that the player never has time to use tactics in battles because melee fights never last longer than a minute, and because arrows do so much damage through armour, the obvious best tactic is just to spam archers or horse archers with barely any infantry necessary. It means it isn't worth spending 294749 denars on a helmet that doesn't increase your protection from a headshot at all. It means it isn't worth taking the headshot damage perk because you can one shot everyone without it as their helmets do nothing. It means high tier enemies like Lords, Banner Knights, and Elite Cataphracts don't really feel like a threat to the player when you can one shot them with your glaive or snipe them to death in a few hits. It means the player's high tier troops die easily to looters and so does the player, removing a sense of progression or achievement when you work so hard to get high tier troops or good armour.
Why do you look at all of these downsides and think it is more important for the player to feel uneasy?
Buffing armour to something more similar to Warband (but without 0 damage attacks) is not going to remove all sense of unease from the game or make the player invincible, surely you can admit. In Warband the only time you felt invincible was when you were facing ranged attacks from the
weakest enemies in the game as a
high level player; and that's a good thing.
There are no good reasons at this point not to buff armour, not even personal preference, as the people who prefer weak armour are in the minority.
But we can all agree Cavalry is in a terrible state
For sure.