Took a short break from this as I was getting frustrated but its till moving forward, just not as fast as before.  I have a solid path again (well as solid as mostly dry mud) to work from.  So I am implementing this a little at a time because last time I rushed it and got the sorry mess in the end because of rushing.  While I would like to tie buying armor and weapons only from cities with certain improvements and potentially do what Heavenfall suggested about making a local resource so that armors can only be produced at a certain city that is down the road once more unit_stat tags are implemented.  For now I will make the basic armors and weapons and then add the rest of the features after they are working properly with the game in later patches.

I like most of the thoughts around this mod. It seems to me that the game could be significantly improved with more and better armors and weapons rebalanced. Mostly I think it should undo some of the stranger ideas that have crept into the core game design.

The weapons should be 'balanced' in the sense that they all have a place to counter certain other 'defences' (whether that be armor, mobility, monsters, etc). 

What can't be easily changed of course is the basic combat mechanics around accuracy vs dodge, attack vs defence, hp, etc. 

If they are to be tied to a tech tree, it seems to me that there were not that many different 'eras' to represent.

1. Early weapons prior to metal technology (clubs, spears, poles, etc)

2. Metal weapons (blades of all lengths, hammers and axes, etc)

3. Anti-armour weapons (hammers, polearms, maces, etc). These were brought in as a response to the heavier armors developed in Era 2.

The idea that long swords are better than short swords (for example) and that later weapons in the tech tree are better than earlier weapons in the tech tree is a flawed concept, and we should fix that. If anything, we could have better quality weapons later in the tech tree, but length of blade is a choice, and longer isn't necessarily better.

What I'd like to see happen with armour

No reason why we can't represent the main kinds of ancient armour. Loosely speaking, and divided into 'eras' (tech tree levels):

Padded

Leather

---

Scale

Lamellar

Heavy Plate (an early kind of plate, very heavy but crudely effective)

---

Chainmail

Laminar (such as Lorica Segmentata)

---

Splinted Mail (maybe)

Brigandine

Plate Mail

---

Steel Plate

Each has strengths and weaknesses, and their costs in weight, metal and so on means that the tech tree should be de-emphasised (but not gotten rid of entirely). 

The trick here is (imho) that all weapons can kill a man, no matter what armor they are wearing, and we should be fundamentally rebalancing the armor so that all weapons are affected by all armours (more or less depending on their strengths), without the need to research 'killer' weapons at the end of the tech tree in order to affect an armoured man (for example). 

What I'd like to see happen with weapons

Clubs and staves are fine early weapons but not that flash when armor kicks in. The first armies should be spear based, since that only requires wood and basic tools. The spear survived for millenia as a weapon type, and only went out of fashion a few hundred years after firearms were developed. Once you know how to make spears, you can make short spears, long spears, pikes (although only if you have the right trees). The real strength of spears is against mounted units, which they should have a bonus against (preferably getting their retaliation in first!). 

Once metal weapons start, you get blades. In game, daggers, short swords, long swords, etc. The difference is in weight, speed and attack. I would be happy to see something like:

Weapon Attack Weight Initiative

Dagger   6      1            +6 

Short      8      3            +3

Long       10      5            +0

(the numbers need trialling for balance, but you get the idea)

We can do some modelling to see the overall effectiveness of different weapons vs different armor combinations, in order that they all have an appropriate use.

I would like to see up to two retaliations for every weapon. That means to get a 'free hit' against a unit, you would need to be flanking or outnumbering them. 

Bash and backswing are a bit silly, and can be removed. The main point is to have the right combination of cutting (the basic best weapons), piercing (spears and arrows) and blunt (specialist weapons for tackling heavy armour).

What I'd like to see happen to the tech tree

There are really only 3 or 4 basic developments in arms, and the same in armour. Levels beyond that could be introduced only to add 'masterwork' type bonuses, i.e. better quality weapons. My idea would be to allow a great range of weapons quite early, and I think that would be more fun and more 'realistic'. 

Alright that is getting a bit long. The main point is I think your idea is well worth exploring and trialling, to try and bring additional balance (and fun!) to the game.

An even better example of how to achieve 'balance' in weapons.

Using bows as an example, we can see how to give the player (and AI) a range of interesting choices, without the effect of research just making everything better. Short bows versus Long bows should not be simply 'Long bows are better'. 

In fact, we could construct a situation, similar to history, where both have a place, depending on what you need from your troops.

Weapon        Damage      Initiative     Weight

Short Bow     8                -0                5

Long Bow      10              -6                 10

Note that in this construct, the Longbow is SLOWER than the short bow, but does more damage. This means that it will be useful when heavy armour is around, but not as good against non-armoured opponents. This is the opposite of the current situation (where a Longbow is just better, all around).

There is still room to have higher quality weapons along the tech tree, say a Yew Longbow (and a Yew shortbow?), for example, with higher damage, or quicker, or lighter, whatever.

This is the model that most weapons should follow.

You are exactly on track with what I am trying to do with what is available n the game for art assets as I am lacking in graphical design skills for armor and weapon models/skins.

What I have for armors is fairly balanced for progression wise name and type to what you have already listed with a few changes.

Tier 1 (Initial armor to be researched and remember these are fallen societies that are researching lost techs that were once new not learning from scratch.

Light

Gambeson (Padded Armor)

Medium

None

Heavy

None

Tier 2

Light

Leather armor (Branches off of Gambeson)

Medium Armor

Scale armor (Branches off Gambeson)(Also fits for amount of protection offered versus technological advancement

Heavy

None

Tier 3

Light

Reinforced Leather (Brigadine)

Medium

Chain

Heavy

Iron Munition Armor (Plate)

Tier 4

Light

None

Medium

Steel Chain

Heavy

Steel Munition Armor

Tier 5

Light

None

Medium

None

Heavy

Field Plate

After making it to the max type of each armor a magic version unlocks that is called adorned which is built off the charm tech in magic.  I am not 100% sure how much farther to go on magic armors as they scale to overkill unless I make the training time ridiculous effectively making it champion/sov only armors.  If I do this I will make a  spell to create a third resource called blended steel requiring mana, steel, and crystals.  This can be the champions armor but I would make the training time something like 3 or 4 times the initial armor type to prevent super armies unless you are willing to sacrifice some serious time and resources.

I am playing around with weapons in the same respects as what you are suggesting but weapons are a much more difficult nut to crack because weapons were, as you stated, researched to overcome armor.  The problem lies in keeping whats is in the game (mostly) intact to keep it with the feel of the game for races.

Speaking of races I am going to make the ability to get improved leather be its own perk and not tied to wanderlust as the improved leather armor is almost as good as chain with the benefits of leather.  The same follows for improved chain to almost as good as plate but not as close as the leather to chain ratio.  The improved plate will make a improved version of the steel armors and I will call it Gilden Plate similar to Milanese Plate armors which was extremely well made and sought after for its high articulation and excellent protection.

Anyways this is where I am at for now.  School is rough so I am taking my time on this to make sure it is quality and not burn out on it.

So I have run into a rather large game design limitation with the more in depth redux of this mod.  There is a soft cap to the number of techs the game can handle before it starts becoming unstable.  While the engine starts fine it can't handle too many different techs with restrictions based upon choices of available talents based upon racial traits.  I am currently trying to figure out how to overcome this problem.  I originally attempted to do this through a tech only system so the start screen wasn't swamped with equipment that is faction specific.  Now I see that there was a design choice as to why it was done this way.  I will have to ponder on this while I figure out what to do to fix it.

Really happy to see that you're working on this. I had roughly the same idea while I was playing last night. The current situation is really unsatisfying.

For a simpler system (which would require less techs), why not reduce the number of levels for each armor type, and use repeatable techs, +10% to blunt defense, +10% to piercing defense, +10% to slashing defense for continued improvement. 

Trades some complexity and realism for a more gamy rock/paper/scissors, but I'd sort of prefer that, honestly.

The problem with that is that you then have the ability to keep stacking armor and attack infinitely too quickly.  Plus the other reason for making all of those different armor types is to add them to the loot tables for more loot variation within the game.  I think I know how to get around this problem but I will have to experiment around and see what I can do.

Blah the forums ate my post for the morning so here is a short version.

I was looking at why it didn't work and realized that I made a LARGE error when modding the tech tree and the game crashed repeatedly as a result.  Its fixed and seems stable.  Thankfully this taught me some new tricks to use for distributing techs around to make the trees work better.

Going to keep plugging away at this.

I finally figured out what I did that made what I was doing crash the game.  When moving certain techs around I mistakenly made a tech a prereq for itself so the game went into and infinite load loop when starting a new game and caused a crash.  With this solved and lessons learned I am moving onto finishing the techs and then will get back to work on finishing implementing the armors which are also almost done.  I have a major paper and presentation due soon so no work on this for a few days though.

Projects caught up on so I am working on this again.  Still have finals in a week and a half so can't completely concentrate on this yet but making progress again.  I solved the tech issues so I can now place everything into the game the way I want to.  I made some reasonably large changes to the Magic tree for a balance change.  Basically the Decalon ability is gone now and everyone can get all the books, but there is a catch.  To get past level 2 of the magic abilities you have to be path of the mage.  Also all magic abilities; such as air 1, fire 1, and so on, will have a minus 5 to encumbrance to reflect the fact that magic is taxing and also to somewhat prevent mages in plate.  So while 1 magic ability won't hurt you much 2 or 3 or 5 will start knocking down your encumbrance fast.  

All weapon initiatives are going to be modified heavily.  I finally figured out what was bugging me the most about this.  You should not get a bonus to spell casting just because you are holding a dagger.  As such all weapons will start at 0 initiative bonus and go negative from there.  However the minuses won't be as harsh.  So just adjust all stats down from where a dagger started and then reduce the minuses by about half (to be adjusted for balance).  

For weapons I also finally figured out how to make improvements to weapons without making them outrageously overpowered compared to monsters.  Spear will have a bonus damage to mounted unit as well as a revenge damage to mounted units (Thanks to Heavenfall here and his extended tags) be warned do not attack spear equipped units with mounted units you have been warned  I may also add additional tags based upon size factors such as dragons.  Maces and hammers will have an armor pierce factor as this was what they were designed for, look at the spikes on a mace, as well as bash.  Bows will be the same as they were designed to be able to pierce plate, so to chain and leather armors arrows will be deadly.  Swords will have a dodge bonus added to them as they are good for parrying.  Axes will also have armor pierce and also armor sunder effect, borrowing from seanw3 here.  So each weapon has a unique quality and advantage to it.

That is it for now.

hi, ive been adding more armor, varieties, basically the assets that are in the game but giving them unique variations...

i want more customization, for soldier creations, more specializations...

like i added a variety of boots and bracers to the Drills tech, ... so its like u drill soldiers to specialize in a certain way of fighting... (bonus to dodge, bonus to accuracy, bonus to move speed on the map) (you gotta choose one)

also other things, like warg boots, that use warg resource, and give you initiative bonus... and some archery armors for the archery techs... stuff like this is what ive already done... im looking into adding new techs... like i wanted to make the rusty armor be "early iron armor" , i was going to add a tech between blacksmithing and armors for this....

i have studded leather, scalemail and segmented armor and some others (repurposing hero artifact assets already in the game)

also i wanted to make some armors that have disadvantages, but are cheap (metalwise) and quick (less production time) to make.
...

anyway, i think im going to addon to your mod, because your mod is good, i like the extra techs.

... hmm im gonna have to tweak the numbers i already have made... oh well...

oh also, like, gladiator armor from "entertainment" civ tech... bonus to attack and initiative, crap armor..

and some other unit things from the civ techs... like books that increase XP, from education tech... or pick axe from mining

Use it as you wish, I am going to get a version out reasonably soon that shows the architecture of the mod without the balance pass done yet.  So basically all the arms and armors will be there but the numbers will be off.

I would like to parrot what Galactic Hunter has said and even offer my knowledge in the development and effectiveness of classical to industrial era weapons to the process of this mod. I was developing one on my own and encountered serious complications with equipment interacting with each other.

The vs. mounted component has been resolved but I was hoping on giving weapons and armour specific tasks - such as being effective against other weapons.

A prime example being two-handed swords and axes against pikes.

On the topic of pikes and spears they really need to lose their armour penetration bonus.

Which in turn needs to be handed to maces (especially), warhammers and mauls.

Axes need to gain increased effectiveness against shields with slight armour penetration (but nowhere near as much as maces).

The armours also need to reflect their effectiveness against various types of damage while baring in mind the armour penetration statistics of certain weapons. A wooden club would just bounce off plate armour but a mace would piece or dent it so it needs to still have a decent rating against blunt allowing the mace's armour penetration itself to counter it. Don't forget that maces were unlikely to kill an armoured foe in a single swing but a strike from a mace would disorient or wound an armoured man far more than many other conventional weapons. But a strike against an unarmoured foe would likely break ribs, arms or cave in skulls.

It's all very graphic and nasty.

But from reading that you can also see the game needs a serious overhaul when it comes to how weapons, mounts, shields and armour interact with each other. At the moment they're all terribly generic.

I think initiative itself is a bad component as it affects a units mobility as well as its strike rate - when it should just impact just ONE of those, not both at once. A dagger should strike quickly but wielding a dagger doesn't suddenly make my legs move faster. Unfortunately there is no way to make a weapon attack cost more or less initiative than the unit moving - at least that I know of.

Perhaps the best option is to give some weapons a 'second strike' ability or even a 'third strike' ability rather than somehow allowing the unit to move faster.

Either way, I would like to get on board with you here if you'd allow me to help balance stuff.

Almost everything you have suggested here has been thoroughly discussed by many different threads here and I can concur on most of what you have to say.  However, there are some mechanical barriers to setting up some of the things suggested.  Some of the unit_stat tags showing that a unit has a certain weapon type equiped don't work as well as they should even though the one for mounted units does.

For different weapon types I have listed almost all the different effects I plan on having on each type above but I can repost it here for re-evalutation.

This is the basics of how I am attacking weapons.

For staves I figured out a way to eliminate their huge initiative negative while still maintaining their slow casting time.  Remove their ranged attack and make it a standard attack but then give it an unlock ability by equipping skill that gives the ranged attack as a 0 cost spell.  What this does is make it that you can hold a staff and have no init penalty for just holding it to cast spells with but regular units will still use the ability at the same time factor as the original.

Anyways, back to studying for finals.

check out: https://forums.elementalgame.com/438308

 i built this on top of ur mod.... the version of where i last commented on this post of yours...

use it anyway you want, use the ideas i made and make it better, im sorta giving up on it for now, its undone

Heh I understand.  I am not touching unit classes except militia for now as they are semi broken for the AI to use.

Just a quick update for the new version.  I am done with all of the armors in the game.  I have completely updated all values to include robes, leather, chain, and plate.  Hero versions that are looted and items that are technically armor have all been updated as well.

Now working on the weaponry side of the mod.  This is somewhat easier as there is only one weapon for each type as opposed to four different parts to make for each set and then shields.  So in reality I guess you could say that I am more than half done in reality but I was thinking thematically.  Eh oh well, I am getting back to work.

I decided that I am not going to mess with the magic system any more than I already have when I adjusted the techs around.  While I wold love to have death spells be accessible by kingdom (at 50% effectiveness) it is not within the scope of this mod.  Te only thing I might add for spells is a slight re balance of reducing the initial damage on some spells but adding a +1 per level capping at tier*5.  So a tier 1 would cap at +5 and a tier 5 would cap at +25.  Beyond that and numbers get ridiculous and balance is broken.

As was already discussed, I am not touching anything beyond militia units for custom classes.  However, I am going to add the unique ability to have more than 9 units for city defense.  Basically I am going to have a basic militia commander.  At the start of tactical he will auto-summon the appropriate amount of units depending on his type.  The units will have the auto-upgrade function Parrotmath showed me depending on the town type shown.  No cities will have a starting militia; however I will make a cheap to produce militia hall.  The militia hall will add the appropriate commander.  Once the city type is chosen you can then upgrade your militia to a garrison depending on the city type.  If its a town it will be a lightly armed and armored crew of 30 units per squad.  If its a fortress it will be a heavily armored and armed comprised of 9 units per squad.  And finally if its a conclave they will use Guardian statues and mages in squads of 3 as their total power will be scaled up dramatically but their cost will increase as well.

Speaking of number and mages, I will be implementing part of the realism mod for numbers into this mod.  Also I am not sure if I like mages the way they are and might relent and add them as well as a mini class.  But lock it so that they can only have one adept type per mage.  So effectively make 5 mage types per faction depending on what they have access to.

I will try my best to stay on track and finish up the weapons.  I am trying several different methods of how I want the techs to unlock different weapons out and so far it looks like I am sort of settled on a 3 branch system that reintegrates only once with the main tree.  Still this appears to be wrapping up nicely.  

Alright now that I am doing the research phase for the weapons in game I am finding a lot of discrepancies similar to what was pointed out in the bow discussion that happened on the board before.  I am working on cleaning up what goes where in relation to armors.  I might have to redesign how techs unlock as most of the "advanced" weapons were designed to counter "advanced" armors.  

In general it went something like this.  People made chain armor in response to the rise of swords which in turn brought the rise of blunt and piercing weapons.  This was countered somewhat by plate armor.  This was then countered by adding spikes to the blunt weapons to give them an armor piercing effect along with the crush effect.  The piercing weapons became slimmer to get through the cracks in armor not the armor itself.  

Different bows were still used because different materials allowed a greater draw strength allowing for higher armor piercing.  So crude arrows can pierce armor but only minimally whereas stronger bows could pierce better.  This eventually led to crossbows which could pierce even better at short range.  Eventually firearms replaced crossbows in the field which negated for the most parts armor as they could pierce all but the heaviest armors.

Sorry for the lack of updates vacation has had me far busier than I anticipated.  I finished the armor portion but the weapons portion has stalled somewhat because I am combining all the multiple threads of discussion people have had about the different weapon types.  Mostly I have a base  idea for each weapon but I am working on which stats to give them.  I have been experimenting with different numbers and once I find a good balance for the first tier and how to grow them for each tier I will implement the whole system.  What I have learned is you have to balance the bottom to make the top mostly relevant.   

I would really love to see this mod completed.  I would much prefer to play Fallen Enchantress with a more realistic weapon and armour design.

Ciao,

Sword

I know I have not posted on this in a long time, but this idea is not dead.  I am trying to figure out the scope of what I want to do and with the multiple changes that have been coming down 1.1 then 1.2 and finally 1.3.  I have a reasonably good grasp of how to actually balance weapons vs armor along with training.  It boils down to the higher tier armors should not take a lot more resources to make but have a much higher additional training time compared to what they do now, this is the final point that needs to be balanced.

Unit wise it will boil down to certain units will be single unit only such as scouts and mages.  Mages will be able to cast spells the same as henchmen but will be limited to one element.  So you can have casting mages not just staff users.  Staves will have a much higher training cost.  

Speaking of ranged units all bows will have a much higher training cost to represent the actual amount of training a longbow takes to use and master enough for combat.  Also I semi solved the problem of armor penetration and full distance combat for bows.  This problem is the one where in real life a bow can shoot far but have little penetration factor after a certain distance.  To this end I am going to add a secondary combat ability that has a armor penetration factor with limited ranged.  The different tiers of bows will have a longer range to the distance they can use this  special at.  So a Hunting bow would only have the penetrating shot at say 3 tiles whereas a yew longbow would have it at 6 tiles.  The tier also determines the amount of armor penetration which will have a linear scale starting at 40% and going up 10% per tier so for a yew bow it would be 70% armor penetration.  The interesting problem that will have to be addressed will be when crossbows are added to the game as the crossbow has a greatly reduced training time but lower damage and range but has the same penetrating capabilities for almost its whole range.  So it will be a trade off to shoot long distance with expensive archers or short distance to devastating effect from cheap troops.

Thats all I have for now.

There are some good ideas there, and we still remain pretty much on the same page about what has to happen in this mod.

Of course, with LH, I don't see any point in doing the mod without making it for LH. This seems to be the 'live' branch of the game, and the one that will go forward.

I have not looked into detail about what is necessary to change the tech tree, but I will start. It seems that we have most of the game armors we need already in there, including the 'damaged' versions of chainmail and so on, which could be the early and cheap versions.

Let me know when you want to get going on this again?!

Oh its still going but its an evolving thing with constant changes in how LH makes changes to the basic structure of the game and how I have to adapt to it.  Right not I am working on base structural changes to see what works and what does not with the code.  Once I can iron out what works I can get started with the actual code writing for weapon/armor/magic/and stats.  The main thing I have learned is there are certain things that are literally so intertwined that you can't change one thing without altering many others because they are so inter-balanced you have to adapt to all of them.  So I am starting slow this time at the bottom and working up.