Quote Originally Posted by PwnageBot2000
According to an old guide for the first medieval total war. it's true that shields only protect against missile fire, and infact, some are just for show (as discovered by testers).
That is not entirelly true.

In MTW, shields worked in H2H combat, it is sure thing.

Some shields did not work in H2H, there was an option for it in units datafile (Varangian guard, huscarles etc.)

And there was attribute for shield in unit´s text datafile, where was value for particular shield in particular unit. Some shields had wery low attribute.

But this is entirelly different thing, no such attributes in MTW2export_descr_units.txt.