The Shield Problem(s)

[Carl]

As a temporary fix I would suggest that adding half the Shield value to Armour and then zero'ing the Shield values is the way to go, rather than adding the whole amount.

That way, you get additional toughness at the front which works for missiles as well as melee, it does not mess up the autoresolve to the same extent that a large defense value would (and the autoresolve correctly matches what happens in battles), and the fact that toughness in the frontal segment is not as high as it should have been given the original stat-balance will be compensated by fewer casualties from rear and flank attacks over the course of the battle.

Increasing armour by too much while removing shields will decrease the influence of the positional play aspects of the game, and devalue fast-moving units, so you'd want to avoid that.

You could then also add a further half-shield-value to defense, which would bring frontal melee strength up to the intended value, but you'd probably want to test the half-shield add to armour by itself first to see exactly how much difference the added armour makes against rear and flank attacks in a variety of battles. Adding further defense just for melee attacks might not be justified.

Hopefully that helps some.

Indeed, many thanks, I’ll probably include this in my 1.02 bug fixer. Would it be possible for you to settle an argument between me and Musashi and tell us weather shields should be having their defence value halved by AP missile fire?

I'd also like to make the point that Carl is entirely speculating, and more than anything probably venting his frustrations at HA types.

You've mostly hit the nail on the head Foz. I'm not so much frustrated as alarmed by my own experiences in vanilla and reports I’ve heard from time to time. But I am ONLY speculating with that statement.

I'll go into what’s alarming me in a separate thread, but my point is that with fixed spears against any decent opponent (i.e. someone who holds formation and does his best to keep units facing you at all times without exposing his flank/rear to cav charges). You will find that mostly foot archer/armoured sergeant quality spears will be able to give you serious problems as even Generals Bodyguard cav will lose a lot of men charging braced spears of that quality (they will win, it's just going to be expensive).

Lets also not forget that the Turks at least have excellent composite infantry and spears, (fix the shield bug), early on and the best muskets and 2-handers in the game late on. It isn't like your infantry is as bad as you'd have some people believe, no offence BTW. (The other eastern factions are another matter of course).