The mechanics of warfare: Armour

To ensure that we can at least use common terminology I will detail some of the concepts that make armour function. Im going to try not to be so long winded this time around, we'll see how that works out. There are 3 main concepts to keep in mind when dealing with armour: protection, coverage and balance.

Protection is the collective ability for armour to absorb, disperse and redirect energy.

• All armour absorbs at least some energy. When an outside force hits the armour, the armour then hits you. Some energy is "lost" during this process because it goes towards accelerating the mass of your armour which was previously at rest. This concept is universal, even if your armour is made of paper.
  
• Most armour functions by dispersing energy before it hits us. Sharp impacts become blunt impacts and no longer have enough force to break the skin. For armour to do this it must be resilient enough to withstand weapon impacts without breaking.
  
• Deflection or redirection of energy is the best method armour can use to protect us. The concept is easy to demonstrate, simply drop an object onto an inclined surface. Instead of dropping to the ground and expending all of its energy straight down, the object hits the incline and begins to slide or roll to the side. A portion of the downward force is changed into sideways momentum.

These three properties are things we can translate into accurate statistics. Any armour you can mention can be given a score in these three areas, even if that score is zero. Of course it gets a lot more detailed than that. But I can explain specific concepts when we run into them.

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Next up is coverage. The body can be divided into many parts, but the detail you add here can rapidly spiral out of control. To keep things simple we can divide the body into distinct parts based on exterior features. The list seems complex but is simple enough:

• Head and neck
• Upper and lower torso
  
• Pelvis and upper leg.
  
• Lower leg and knee
  
• Shoulders
  
• Upper arms and elbow joint
  
• Lower arm and wrist
  
• Hands
  
• Feet and ankle.
  

Each of these zones can be further divided. The head for example can be attacked from all 4 sides as well as from above. Most of these can be ignored, tracking hits from the front and back is usually complex enough. In the case of the head you can divide it into 3 zones, front, back and top. Some helmets are open faced. Some things like masks protect the face but not the top and back and so forth.

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Balance in regards to armour is very complex. Perhaps too complex for a computer game. All you really need to know is that wearing armour moves your center of gravity. The heavier you get the lower your center of gravity and the harder it is to knock you over. In addition it is very important how armour is attached to you. Is it strapped to your body or do you simply "wear" it? These two concepts will become important as soon as we start talking about the heavier armours.

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As far as dividing armour into categories, most of you would give me 3. Light, Medium and Heavy. Personally I would do one better and divide the selection into 6: Natural Armour, Unarmoured, Light Armour, Medium Armour, Heavy Armour and Plate armour. These seem rather complicated, but they are just part of a selection of categories we can mix and match to give the user some idea of what an armour is and how protective it will be when worn.

• Natural armour is whatever protection nature gifted you with at birth. Skin/scale/fur etc. Natural armour is seperate from any added protection and can't be combined with anthing else, only layered.
• Unarmoured means that whatever you are wearing has no specific armour component to it or is not designed with protection in mind. Padded clothing could be considered armour, simple cloth robes would just be unarmoured clothing.
• Light armour is any armour that the user can bear which does not take up a significant amount of his weight tolerance. Furthermore it must allow complete freedom of movement to the parts of the body it covers.
• Medium armour is the grey area between light and heavy. It is somewhat hard to define, but anything that doesn't fit in the light or heavy category ends up here.
  
• Heavy armours are those composed mostly of some sort of hard inflexible component. Scale armour, brigandine etc.
  
• Plate armour is a subtype composed entirely of hard or semi-rigid plates that articulate around the user. It is not neccesarily heavy armour.
  

The point of these categories is to avoid pigeonholing armour into one class or another. If heavy armour means armours that are heavy, instead of heavy armour the class we are free to add as much detail as we can within those boundaries.

So keeping all that in mind, what would you like to see in an armour system. And more importantly, what would make your preference unique?

I hope armour is linked with a fatigue system. And that heavy armour slows whoever wears it.

We should also talk about the damage system and health. Armour is linked to them : will it absorb damage? Prevent damage? Both?

One thing I like in Fall From Heaven 2 is that bronze armors are weak against lightning

Pity that so few things in FfH2 have damage of any given element, rendering such weaknesses and strengths largely moot.

Anyway. I don't want armor classifications such as light, heavy, plate, etc. Armors should be differentiable from other armors based on their stats alone. A chainmail might have good protection vs. slash and thrust damage types, shit protection vs. crushing blows, average encumbrance and production cost (at least for the period of the game before enchanted items become a norm, if there's such a stretch of the game at all.) No need to call it a medium or heavy armor; what would that accomplish?

Training and experience should probably govern how much encumbrance a soldier could handle before keeling over from exhaustion, meaning that if you want a soldier that can strap on a suit of full plate and be effective right out of the gate, a high training time will be a mecessity for him. You should be allowed to design a conscript unit with heavy armor, just expect him to drag ass and not accomplish anything unless he manages to get fed a few kills and gain some experience.

Armor should have at least the three stats :

1. Encumbrance which would slow the user and raise fatigue when the unit does anything in battle.
2. Evade that let's you escape hits
3. Absorb that lessens damage done.

Oh! And one thing about dice thrown : there should be an "no cap" throw. For instance you throw one D10. If you made 9 then you throw it again and add the new number. If you redo 9 then again you throw. So you have an endless value. But high value are very very very rare. So a weak soldier has always a chance of hiting or critical hiting, even the best defended soldier.

I prefer variance to be much smaller than that. 1d10 by itself is bigger than I'd like, even without factoring stuff like critical hits, critical misses, and no-cap throws. Figures like 1d6+2 sit better with me.

I don't want a chance, however small, of a scrub grunt scoring a lucky hit on an elite soldier and one shotting him. To me, that defeats the point of a tactical combat system: to give you control over how the battle plays out, giving you an advantage if you're skilled or a disadvantage if you're not, instead of placing the control in the hands of an RNG.

To this end, I'd also use subtraction-based damage reduction, so that someone wearing sufficiently strong armor flat out cannot be hurt by weapons that are too weak. Even an exhausted, defenseless soldier is going to be impervious to attacks by dulled, low quality swords if he's wearing some form of enchanted plate, after all.

I'd tie evasion to encumbrance. A unit would have some baseline evasion and carry values depending on how experienced and well trained he is, and wearing armor would reduce his evasion, with the size of the penalty depending on a comparison between the armor's encumbrance and the wearer's carry value. If he's strong enough, or the armor's light enough, or some combination of the two, he loses no evade at all.

If a scrub grunt can never hit an elite soldier then that's no more a battle system but a "chess" one. If there's no chance then why fighting? An elite soldier should be overwhelmed by a lot of scubs grunt. But if a unit can never hit then it's all over. Your elite soldier is untouchable.

There should always have some sort of "I can get killed" in every battle. Morevoer did you calculate the percentage to get a 15+ score with the open D10 (where 0 means 0)? Or a 30+ score?

Yes, the elite soldier should be overwhelmed by multiple scrub grunts.  But he shouldn't go down to just one, even if he is exhausted and unable to fight, assuming he's wearing decent armor.

I have to say I wouldn't care for an open D10 either.

Ah, I've been waiting for the armor thread

On the "invincible-elite" issue, it's both yes and no:

N) Assuming it's just a crack veteran soldier in high-quality full-coverage plate armor, he's probably very difficult to damage for that scrub grunt.  But assuming there are enough grunts that don't panic, they could accept high losses in exchange for simply surrounding the elite, tackling him to the ground, and hacking at the now-mostly-stationary hunk of metal that has to have some weakpoints.  Or they could start tearing off the armor.  As I said, enough grunts and high losses

Y) Take the same elite guy, and throw up a magic deflection shield around him that repels any significant kinetic force directed against him.  Those grunts are now up a creek, sans paddle.  It would be even worse if the elite had some sort of immolation fire wall around him (assuming it doesn't heat up his armor).  The elite could still be taken out by comparable power, but those grunts may as well go home.

Any system of encumberance should be directly tied into your system for agility. How much weight are you carrying and where? How far can you bend your joints? The latter point might seem irrelevant in most situations but if you can't lift your arms above your head, don't expect to be able to climb a ladder with anything approaching speed. Its the age old argument, mobility over firepower. Outside of static defensive situations mobility will probably win. Past a certain point the protection you carry will result in you taking more hits, not less. If you are facing an enemy who can kill you in one hit then it can sometimes be worth it to wear no armour at all.

All practical armour has at least one weakness. No matter what kind of plate armour you can find from history to fantasy, they all have something in common. First, the user needs to be able to see, the sight arpeture is never going to be as protected as the armour around it. Secondly the user needs to breathe, either there is an air hole of some sort or the user has a finite supply of air and must take the armour off at some point.

Its possible that one elite swordsman in impenetrable armour could fend off 50 untrained people. But not if one of those people throws sand in his eyes. And even if his armour is so good that they can't hurt him, well 50 people is more than enough to suffocate that guy in a dogpile. Heck you could make do with 4.

10, yes.  4, no, not really.

See: (American) Football, rugby, etc.  (For football at least, everyone's pretty much "armored", so take that into account when comparing it to x amount of untrained guys vs. someone wearing "impenetrable" armor.)

Sand in the eyes point is relevant, though.

What I think I'm proposing is to have defense depreciate/deteriorate as more sources of firepower are focused on it, but this would have to be done in such a way that 2x1 attack is not innately superior to 1x2 attack, for instance.  I have no problem with 50x1 attack being superior to 1x50 attack; I just think it would need some modification on the lower end.

Completely agree on agility/defense, though.

And one cannot always assume that those Scrub Grunts are stupid in there own right. As an example, in a pitched battle, 5 scrubs surround the Elite, not to attack him. that would simply be foolish, and they know this, but to distract him. Then from his Blind side, a 5th, mounted Scrub swoops in, lasso's the Elite's hiney and drives off with said Elite in tow back to a place behind the main battle lines, where he can be disposed of with relative ease.  

Scrubs do a Rinse and Repeat. So armor is all well and good but if the enemy Scrub has a tactical leader, then armor strenghts can be negated.

Far fetched, sure. Out of the realm of possibilty in reality, not at all. So if the scrubs could "throw sand" then almost any practical tactic becomes possible. It then becomes just how much TACTICS can be had in a Fantasy based quasi TBS game.

Also, to stay with the theme here.

Armor, Fatigue and Movement/Agility, (Backwards or Lateral), should all be connected AND or LINKED. As noted, Heavily Armored Knights rarely ran or moved either backwards or sideways with alot of agility. Of course that was mainly due to very poor visibility. Once unmounted, most would shed their helmets to gain better sight vs being near blind to the immediate dangers they would face.

The effect tactics used in a fight have on the result depends entirely on how many people are involved. If you have a massive battle with 1000 vs 1000 what does it matter if one guy out of 1000 has sand in his eyes? Not much.

But then, if you have 1000 men fighting a dragon and one of them manages to hurt the dragons eyes and blind it, thats a HUGE deal.

In Rugby and Football, the tacklers usually come from the front and the would-be tackled tries to rush forward. In rugby, when you can get at someone from behind, you tackle him all the time if you're fater, 1 vs. 1. And in both games, you can't kick your opponent, you must use hands. In a real fight, you'd use feet, poles, sticks, to hit the opponent's legs so he couldn't run, and someone from behind could hold him. Could be a bit harder if he's using a shield, as it makes arms more difficult to pin, but 4 vs. 1 does seem very feasible to fell someone down. Don't forget sports have rules to prevent wounds. War doesn't.

However, a bunch of elite fighters wouldn't isolate themselves, so they should never be outnumbered more than about 2 to 1 at a time on the frontline (regroup in circle for instance, if shaped as a line, you can have one opponent ahead, one behind, ans on each side you have a friend except for the poor guys directly on the flanks).

@LDiCesare

I was speaking merely from the suffocation point of view that Tamren referenced.

Sorry for the lackof updates on both threads but I recently got my hands on Left 4 Dead. That should explain everything.

One important characteristic about plate armour is that it has a modular design. You can wear just the gloves, just the upper arm or any combination of components from a single plate to a full set. This makes it incredibly useful at armouring people where they are most likely to get hurt. An archer firing over a castle wall is unlikely to get hit in the legs. So you could plate the rest of him while saving weight.

It would certainly add a lot of fun tactics we could use, but it would also exponentially increase the amount of work that has to be done on art assets and the like. Do you think the effort would be worth it to include such a system in Elemental?

I think that mithrel armor and adamantine armor should of course be better than regular iron or steel.  I also think that things like adamantine should also provide a certain amount of magic resistance as well, just because the magic in the metal is so potent.

I think that it should be kept very simple.   I think over-complicating a mechanic as minor as the armor the troops are wearing would be trouble.  Simply giving them better armor adding +2 to their defence is enough for me.  Like being able to get +5 defense and +2 resistance because they can have plate mail made of adamantine is plenty complex I think. 

I don't think realism should ever be an excuse to remove from fun.   I've said it before and I'll say it again.  I want this game to be about casting magic with some heroes to lead armies while I conquer the world.  Nothing more, and micromanaging the armor on the troops inside the armies that my heroes are leading seems to be that "more" that leads away from my casting spells + leading armies over all concept.   Unless spells would be also very complex and thus balanced in a way that managing armies doesn't become a burden by comparison to managing spells.  But that would just be a really complex game.

The thing I don't like about summing up damage and armour ratings as numbers is that it represents information players should not really have. Better armour performs better in combat because it just does, the material is thicker and stronger than weaker armour. Not because its a +2 instead of a +1. If you provide players with that information you have to dumb it down a lot to get it into a form that they understand. You as a player now have a pile of "dumb" information on hand, and having it makes you want to understand the mechanics that use that information. As a result those mechanics also have to be simplified. Too much and the original information will become redundant. Too little and players will get frustrated because they have no control over the system.

i do not like systems that are too complex for the gamer, the point of a game is to entertain, not to understand the system that operates your entertainment. if a system like this were implemented, i would not expect to be forced to understand it and use the foundation of the feature to develop my tactics. i am not saying i am disregarding this system of advanced(atleast from the standpoint of a game) armor classifications, but im saying, wouldnt basing armor on stats be better? whats the point in giving them classes, it does not effect the rendering of the game engine, just gives you a label to strap on your armor so you can identify if an enemy is too much of a threat or not. The only (class related) aspect i'd like would be the weight of an armor, but this would be unrelated to the quality of the armor. for instance, an armor could be extremely heavy, but could have very poor stats, also an armor could be extremely light with uber stats. i think the weight of an armor should only be a stat, not a classification. So, ignoring the initially stated classes and specifications i'd have to say i'd like to see these attributes in armor from EWOM

-Encumbrance= how much weight(in armor) can a soldier support before he falls to the ground gasping for air. this should be related to training and mount.(say hes on a horse. the horse provides plus 30 encumbrance. well, a dragon would provide much more than that, hence a soldier mounted on a dragon can have much heavier armor than one who is just riding a stout mane.) also, training would be related to discipline and endurance/strength. more training would mean more of those traits, hence heavier armors could be supported.(this would have a sub-fatigue system, in which a unit could go a certain distance until camp would have to be set up, or resting would be in order)

-Speed= this, much like encumbrance, would be related to mounts as well. a ratio would be in order for the weight of armor over the total weight of the unit. this ratio would involve the mount significantly. if the mount has no armor, then the unit, even if in heavy armor, could travel at a fairly fast speed. also, if a rider has no armor, but the mount is loaded up with armor, then it wont go to fast, will it? no, the two would be codependent, and the total weight of the mount AND rider would be added up, then put into the armor over total weight ratio. this would be the most practical way to work out speed, considering mounts are in effect.(this would also be related to ability to flee a battle)

-Agility= much like any customizable system, some components take from others. too much armor, not enough agility. this is a widely understood concept, no? the ratio mentioned above would have to be altered but, would function in the same way. too much armor over the total weight, then the evasion stat is decreased, the unit can no longer evade an attacker effectively. even if you train a unit or hero to have a high evasion chance, if you stock it up with too much heavy armor, then the evasion stat will be damaged significantly. this would also have to go with attack speed for melee units(an altered ratio based off of the above[take training into effect again]) and the chance of combo attacks or critical attacks.

-Absorb= last but not least, the ability to save those valued health points. this should be based on both the training of a unit, an the type of armor VS the type of attacking weapon. all of these factors would be related to one another in a non linear tech tree based off of stats and not classifications.

EDIT: i think micro managing is great, but not understanding the system you are using to classify the armors implemented. i want the game to entertain, not confuse or incite a detective mission with the intent of finding the mechanics behind a overly complex system. base it on stats, not classes, that way a player can easily decide what kind of armors he wants, based on what type of unit he wants to use (e.g. a fast, low armor  unit, or a slow, heavy armor unit- or maybe a unit highly resistant to elemental damage versus physical damage) classifying these types of armors is unneccesary.

On the issue of invulnerable soldiers, why not steal a page from TORG?  (Yes, I realize I've just posted my age as OLD.)  You get hit by a pike for 1d6 damage.  Your armor absorbs 8 points of damage.  Instead of just 0, there is a chance for you taking a bruise (temporary/shock damage). 

OR, swipe a page from RoleMaster:  damage has two parts, the shock value (hit points) and the possibility of a 'critical', which is actual damage (temporary stat reduction, bleeding, scaling up to death).  Armor exists primarily to direct the number versus severity of hits.  Anyway, the 'invulnerable' guy dispatches his first squad of ten.  He's essentially unhurt, but took a bruise that lowers his ability to fight versus the next squad of ten.  Eventually, the poor, cut-up, bleeding 'invulnerable' person is just unable to fight, and falls to enemies he would laugh at in his unwounded state.  Especially in quality vs quantity battles (kill the dragon!), I feel this is the way it should work.

All of which becomes moot if we allow for sand in eyes and specific training on how to take out armored people.  Historically, a mounted knight was the terror of peasant levies - and once pulled from his horse, getting mobbed by the same peasant levy was a knight's nightmare. 

All of which blurs as magic enters the picture.  Or, for that matter, heroes.  But THAT is another discussion, for when we have more information on those issues.

It seems that some of you mistook the purpose of classing armour into different categories. These categories are not set in stone, they simply give you an idea of what the armour is and does. The type of an armour is independant of what it is made of and how much it actually protects you.

The way armour effectiveness is measured depends on multiple sliding scales. It looks a lot like this:

• Mobility-Weight (The bigger your weight capacity the more protection you can carry, but the slower you become. This is unavoidable, even if your armour is literally made of paper)
• Flexible-Absorb-Deflect (The more rigid a material is the more force it will absorb and the less it will pass on to you. Sufficiently rigid materials will start to deflect hits instead, but they will no longer absorb force as well.)
  
• Agility-Protection (The more of your body the armour covers the more it will protect you from harm, but after a point the armour will begin to limit your range of motion. There are ways of dealing with this)
• Weak-Strong (This is the measure of the physical strength of the material you make the armour out of. This mostly affects how quickly your armour will break. Weak materials will actually absorb more damage because force spent breaking them will not be passed on to you. At least once anyway.)

Along side these 4 bars there are 4 other factors that stand alone. One of them determined by the person wearing the armour and so is not displayed here. These provide bonuses and penalties to different parts of the scale.

• Articulation (Articulation can be added to any armour rigid enough to support it. It allows for more agility, but adds weight since you are using more material to cover the same area.)
• Distribution (This measures how well the weight is spread around your body. The better distributed the load the more mobile and agile you will be.
• Coverage (How much of each body part your armour actually covers. The less a piece covers the less relevant the attributes become and the less the armour actually protects you. Coverage is basically a percent modifier that affects all other bars.)

While this might look complicated it is rather simple in practice and doesn't involve numbers at all. Examples to follow later.

When an armour is listed by class, "heavy" "medium" and "light are simply there to give you an overall impression of what the armour is. You will not be able to examine the "stats" of your enemies armour until he is dead and you have a chance to examine his equipment. So when you come across a unit on the battlefield and his armour is quoted as being "heavy" then you can reasonably assume that things like arrows will have little effect on him. It doesn't matter whether his armour is made of steel, granite or petrified wood.

Why is this important? This way the performance of armour is measured by how it performs in combat and what it is made of. If armour "class" was all that mattered then no matter what kind of armour you built it would have to be stuffed into the same mold and homogenized.

Regarding the impenetrable armored soldier being thrown sand at- If we are talking about a game involving magic, I would assume that such a soldier that have spent so much money on his armor (a cheap armor wouldn't be impenetrable) would also have the said armor enchanted by a scrying spell, which allows him to see as if he did not wear a helmet (needless to say that the helmet does not have eye sockets). The same goes for a way to breath and such. I know this took the armor a level up.

The main problem, to my mind, for heavily armored people thro history is A) mobility, and cost.

Heavy plate armor at the middle ages cost quit a lot, thats why only the nobles had the money to aquire them. The problem with mobility is, that it allows your enemies to perform tactics which you could pravent if you were faster. For example, they might try to bring a heavy enough weapon to manage to pierce your armor (throw a boulder off the rooftop on your head, for example).

The problem with fatigue is pretty rare to my mind, out of battle people rarely wore their armors. The only battle I can think of that fatigue lost the battle (I am not an historian, so I might be wrong) was in the 3rd christian's crusade when christians knights fought Salah ad Din, who "kited" the christians knights over a hill with his horsmen untill they were exhausted, and then he slaughtered them with his archers (this tactic is more common in modern games than old times, I suspect).

Tamren, I most of the statistics you named can be changed into a lot more simple statistics, for example:

Full plate armor: grants -1 avoidance, +5 absorb, -2 move. I seggust dropping the Durability statistic since it will require micromanagement, which everyone hates when it's unneeded (asking for a forge in certain range or something similar to pravent a penalty will work better, I think). The reason I think naming the statistics the old fashioned way are: A) people are used to it. easier for the programmers, who doesn't have to make sure that reality goes hand with hand with game's physics and to my simple mind it's easier to see it that way. Over complicating things with extra statistics (agility/deflect/flexibility) might give some players a headache, while not achieving as much as intended.

A side note- is intended to be B ), not the smiley.

You raised some good points, a few that I forgot to include even. Props

However you did miss the main point which I was about to explain. Armour is relative, but what does that mean exactly? Well first of all, armour is worn for protection and protection is very relative. So you wear armour and you are protected. Compared to what?

If you give any armour system some thought you will soon realise something. Comparing the armour worn by different people is an excercise in futility. Person #1 is wearing safety goggles that protects his eyes. Person #2 doesn't even HAVE eyes. So how then can you assign some sort of abstracted score of +1 eye protection to those safety glasses if they are useless to person #2? The important question to ask is not "how protective is my armour". That question can never be answered, instead you must ask "how much does my armour protect me".

When you meet an enemy army in the field, it shouldn't matter one bit that his soldiers are wearing "light armour" or "heavy armour" or "+300 Spartan thong of arrow protection". What matters on that battlefield, at that moment, is "how well does his armour protecting against my weapons".

This is why the armour system must factor in all of these little details. You are not comparing armour to and against some kind of abstracted table of statistics. You are comparing the armour to the users ability to wear it, and his enemies ability to hurt him inside it.

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Earlier when I said that my example system didn't involve numbers, I was talking about the front end. The part that the user sees does not display numbers and can be adequatly represented by a series of coloured bars. The actual mechanics behind the scene of course do involve numbers, percentages in particular. So lets imagine we are firing up the armour editor and want to outfit a human in plate armour.

The starting display will looks something like this: (imagine each line is a coloured bar and we have a "paper doll" diagram of a human)

• Mobility--Weight
• Agility--Protection
• Weak--Strong
• Flexile/Absorb/Deflect
• Distribution
• Articulation
• Coverage
• Tolerance
• Senses
  

There are 3 types of bars here. The first three bars are sliding scales, the closer the bar is towards one side or the other, the more the balance shifts to that attribute. The fourth has 3 parts seperated by / marks. Each armour will have 3 independant ratings in this category. The last five bars are all line gauges, the closer to the right the mark is the more full the bar is and the better this attribute will be, however a full bar here may affect the other stats.

The list you see on the "main" page is the average of all of them and gives an you a general idea of how it performs. Because the set of armour is essentially blank at the moment, some of the bars such as articulation are faded.

The first part we will deal with is the torso. You click on the torso section and the interface changes a bit. Instead of the full human paper doll we now have a view of the front and back of the torso. Some of the bars have dissapeared leaving us looking at these:

• Mobility--Weight
• Agility--Protection
• Weak--Strong
• Flexile/Absorb/Deflect
• Distribution
• Coverage
• Tolerance

All of the bars are at the far left, representing zero. The armour has no statistics because there is no armour as of yet. The plan is to arm this guy with plate armour over some maille. Every human soldier comes standard with a plain cloth shirt. This can be upgraded to a padded surcoat without any change other than an increase in cost and a slight raise in tolerance.

The tolerance bar represents the users ability to tolerate wearing the armour for extended periods. The heavier the armour is the shorter the time you have before your soldiers with become exausted. While weight is the biggest factor, heat is another major issue, things like padded surcoats offer good protection but may cause the soldier to overheat over extended periods.

The second thing we do is add a maille shirt over the surcoat. This is a full shirt complete with sleeves and reaches down to the waistline. As far as the torso is concerned this is a full layer of coverage and the bars change to reflect that:

• Mobility-I-Weight
• Agility-I-Protection
• Weak--StrIong
• FlexiIle/Absorb/DeIflect
• DistIribution
• CoverageI
• ToleraInce

For the purpose of demonstation lets say the chain shirt we just added is "average".

• The first bar has changed to the midpoint, having a padded shirt and a chain shirt is a good balance between protection and weight.
• The second bar is similiar to the first. Maille provides good protection but does not significatly limit agility because it can flex.
• The third bar indicates that the maille is made of strong materials. The better the rating here the more damage it can take before it breaks.
• The fourth bar shows us how maille armour can deflect things like sword blades while remaining fairly flexible. It has no absorb rating at all because it does little to impact force other than blunt it.
• The fifth bar shows how the weight distribution is far from ideal. The main problem with maille armour is that all of its weight hangs off the highest point, most often your shoulders.
• The sixth bar is maxed out. This shirt covers the entire torso with no area left bare.
• The last bar shows us how the weight of the armour is starting to affect his performance in combat.

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Now I know this still looks terribly complex but go back and examine the bars and just the bars. Building on what we talked about earlier about damage types, these bars accurately sum up the benefits of the maille shirt you just equipped on this soldier. It is heavy but not too heavy, protects very well against slashing weapons and offers complete coverage to the torso leaving no vulnerable areas. At no point did visible numbers and calculations come into play here. This armour doesn't simply offer "10% protection against slashing damage". It simply offers your soldier good protection against slashing weapons. As it stands now this soldier is now equipped with "medium" armour. Medium is not a class, it simply indicates a good balance between protection and weight.

Hope you understood that . Ill add another example later on what happens once we add plate armour to the mix.

It looks terribly complex because it is terrible complex. Let's say I want my soldier to have a helmet, breastplate and whatever you call leg armor. I'd have to deal with this balancing act 3 times. If I can stack things like maille and plate, it gets even worse. Then there's the question of how they combine. Do the numbers just add up? Do you want combat to take into account what body part is hit? In my opinion, that would be too involved for a 4X game, especially one which is intended to have battles between thousands and thousands of units.

I think this would be a great system for an RPG. But it seems too involved for a 4X strategy game in which you very well might be making dozens of units during a game.

It only looks complex on paper because I am limited to describing it in words.

If I were to demonstrate this in practice it would be no more complicated than a row of cups with varying levels of water. There is no balancing act involved. You have a set amount of water and it is up to you to decide how much of it you will distribute. If you pour water into the cup that represents weight, you are removing water from the cup that represents mobility. The more water you have in the weight cup, the bigger a weight "budget" you have to spend putting armour onto your unit. The cost is speed. If you want to give your unit plate armour, you have to move the slider all the way over to the weight side. If you only move it halfway, the budged will not allow for plate, you would be limited to chain or leather. And so on.

Once you add plate you can ignore the mobility-weight slider. The two that become important now are coverage and articulation. Coverage determines how much of the body the armour will cover. The more you cover the more protection the armour will give. More coverage equates to more weight, if your budget does not allow for full plate coverage you will need to do something less. With plate armour coverage has a limit because solid plate armour can't be used on joints. Without articulation your coverage will be limited to around 75%. Complete articulation will allow for full plate armour, but this eats even more out of your weight budget.

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All of the bars interconnect in this way. Not only do they show you how the armour performs at a glance, they prevent you from making an item that is horribly unbalanced. There is no way to gain protection for free, there is always a cost.

The beauty of this system is that there is little micromanagement involved. Lets say you wanted to give your soldier the toughest chest armour he could possibly have. All you have to do is go to the deflect slider and move it to its maximum limit. The other bars will automatically adjust themselves to allow for a type of armour that has such a degree of deflective strength.

So you want your soldier to have a helmet, breastplate and greaves? Not a problem. This can be done in three steps:

1. Click on the head tab, click on the button for plate, done.
2. Click on the chest tab, click on the button for plate, done.
3. Click on the leg tab, click on the button for plate, done.

The end result would be a soldier armoured with 3 pieces of "average" plate armour. All of the bars such as the weight bar adjust themselves to the optimal setting that allows for plate armour. If you wanted to, you could return and edit a few sliders to give the armour extra properties. For example:

1. Lets say you needed to free up some weight to make this unit faster. Going to the chest section you drag the coverage slider from 100% to 50%. Instead of enclosing the entire torso, the breastplate now only covers the front side. The back is left bare except for the straps that attach the armour.
   
2. The plate helmet worn by your soldier limits his vision a bit too much. So you go to the senses tab and drag the bar up a few notches. The vision holes in the helmets visor get a bit larger and allow the unit to see more. At the same time its protective value automatically decreases a similar amount.

See how it works now?

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As far as combat goes, it would be fantastic to have a damage model that can target parts of the body. Now we already have systems like this, but to apply it on the scale of units versus individual entities would take more computing power than is practical. However if you simplify the system to be complicated where and when it counts, it is still possible to make it work.

Most games handle this kind of targetting with hitboxes, but 100 soldiers worth of hitboxes is a bit much to bear. Especially when those hitboxes are constantly getting showered with 100 arrow volleys. So instead you can just abstract the process. A soldier standing in the front of the formation has about a 50% chance of getting hit in the chest, a 40% chance of getting hit in the legs, and a 10% chance of getting hit in the head. Roll a dice and you get 95, an arrow just hit him in the face.

The only question asked, and the only question that needs to be answered at that moment is "how good is the helmet he is wearing?". Since you gave him a tough plate helmet the answer is "good enough, the arrow is deflected". (the arrow then goes on to hit another soldier in the shin, good thing you included greaves too). Since the arrow is deflected you end up with another question. "did enough force make it through the helmet to hurt the soldier inside?". In this example, yes. The soldier then gets knocked out by the arrow hit and becomes a casualty in this battle.

You do not have to track this data for every single soldier in that unit. The soldiers standing in the center of the tightly packed formation have a much greater chance of getting hit in the head, and no chance at all of getting hit in the legs.

Ah, I misunderstood your post. I got the impression that we would be equipping various armors from a list, and its effect would you be shown on the sliders; but you really meant that we would be moving the sliders around and that would affect the armor. That sounds much better than what I originally thought. However, it makes me afraid that it could end up making things too generic.

I really think that there is absolutely no good reason to simulate where an attack will hit. It adds a lot of depth to small-scale combat where you have some actual involvement in aiming. But in large-scale combat with hundreds, thousands of units it would just be lost. In aggregate you can achieve the exact same effects with much simpler mechanic. In general, actually, I think your system could also stand to have fewer armor stats. Distribution immediately stikes me as unnecessary. Some of the others could be combined without much loss (remember, stats and mechanics that will kind of average out to nothing or be lost on the player in large-scale combat will add little or nothing and just require more computing power).

Oh, and imo there should not be durability (equipment should not break). Breaking equipment is one of the most annoying features in RPGs. The only reason they're even there is as money sinks. In a massive-scale 4X game, it would be completely out of place. It might be realistic but it would just require micromanagement for the sake of micromanagement, and no real reward but frustration.