Did the 1.1 patch fix the shield bug?

[rvg]

Spears seem to work fine against light and medium cavalry, but the heavies of course, still mow down everything other than pikes, provided that the charge is done right...

Is this normal?

[JCoyote]

A proper charge from any cav will nearly wreck spears. What you are seeing is a differential in the post-charge fighting. Heavy cav has armor, spears lacking armor penetrating weapons. Hence while they have an advantage against light/medium cav and can eventually win out, they have too hard a time hurting heavies.

The shield bug has NOT been fixed yet. CA didn't even know about it til long after 1.1 was released.

[Slaists]

no, the shield bug has not been fixed in v 1.1.

with the shield bug in, practically all shielded spears are useless since the defense value is subtracted rather than added to the total defense value. Thus, if a unit has 3 in defense skill and 4 in shield defense, the total defense in the battle is -1... (I might be exaggerating here, since we do not know yet whether all of the shield's value gets subtracted, but it would make sens if the bug is just sign reversal).

this is also the reason why peasants can beat up spears in vanilla. peasants (european) have defense skill of 3 and no shield, whereas all early shielded spears would have effective defense of less than zero (if shield defense is higher than defense skill + armor) if the shield bug means just simple sign reversal.

zeroing out the shield value and adding half of its value to armor, half to defense skill allows even militia spearmen to become effective agains cavalry. and armored spearmen can actually hold the line against a frontal cavalry charge.