Armor system overhaul

[the_mango55]

I like the armorer system in this game a lot, at least in theory.

In practice, aside from the cool looking upgrades, the armorers, especially the higher level ones, are no where near worth the price in florins and time. Also, many units visually wearing heavy armor actually have crap for armor as far as stats go.

The idea is to make it to where the armor the units are wearing gives somewhat more of an effect. I would accomplish this by making upgrades +2 armor instead of +1, if possible. Also, this would lead to crazy amounts of armor on units with 2-3 upgrades, so I would actually reduce armor on units that are wearing leather or light chain and have a lot of armor.

For example, I present this picture:

On the left is plain Italian spear militia, to the right is fully upgraded pike men.

As you can see, the pike men are wearing partial plate, and the Italian spear militia are wearing simple leather armor. If I were to create this mod, I would reduce the armor of the spear militia to 2 (they are pretty overpowered anyway). Then, with the 3 upgrades to pikes they would have an armor of 6, and a fully upgraded italian spears would also have armor of 6 (which is what their fully upgraded stats are anyway).

I would also give units a bonus to defense if I feel they are too weak with original armor downgrades.

So what I need to know, is whether or not it's possible to increase the armor value given per upgrade.

[GiantMonkeyMan]

good ideas... but unfortunately we'll have to wait until the patch is made before we can change anything, you should made your amour classification simple because adding to many alternatives confuses things

[the_mango55]

So I have been poking around in the text files that were just released, and it looks like this is not only possible, but also this has already been done by CA for every armored unit!

It looks like, however, that the changes have been commented out at the last minute.

Here are some explanations, the first part will look familiar to anyone who has modded RTW, but the second part is brand new. Bold parts important to the to the topic.

; stat_pri_armour Details of the man's defences
; armour factor
; defensive skill factor (not used when shot at)
; shield factor (only used for attacks from the front of left)
; sound type when hit = flesh, leather, or metal
; stat_armour_ex Details of the man's defences
; armour factor. 4 values. First for base value, then 3 upgrade levels
; defensive skill factor (not used when shot at)
; shield factors. First for melee, second for missile fire
; sound type when hit = flesh, leather, or metal

And here is an example of a unit's armor, from the generic pike militia unit.

stat_pri_armour 0, 1, 0, flesh
;stat_armour_ex 0, 4, 5, 7, 1, 0, 0, flesh

The bold numbers are (presumably, if my assumpion is correct) what the armor values would be for a pike militia if it weren't for the semicolon in front of the line.

I'm about to test this out after I can figure out the mod switch feature, back soon!

[DavidtheDuke]

Yeah, it's as if they took this obviously good feature out of the game (probably some bug they couldn't kill at the last minute...). I don't understand it as the armor levels jumping various points made sense. I tried removing the semicolon and of course the game crashed immediately upon loading. Kinda frustrating, as it's sitting there staring me in the face

[Derfel von Saljeth]

I would realy like to see this in the game :) I hope someone will be able to fix it or maybe CA will active it

[Sid Arthur]

Has anyone had any luck with this venture yet? I'd tried taking out the comment from every stat_armour_ex line, in case the crash was caused by just having one or two removed. That was a no go, unfortunately.

Perhaps something in another data file needs to be changed accordingly?