Quote Originally Posted by Jambo
the foz, it's not that it would nerf stats (as seen by the unit scroll). The question was really based on the current two hotly debated hypotheses that 1) armour upgrade adds +1 as the increase to stats suggest or 2) armour upgrades actually mirror what the vanilla armour grades equal in the EDU file, i.e. padded = 4, mail = 5, heavy mail = 7, etc, all the way up to the Gothic armour (advanced plate) at 10.

For example, Italian spear militia start with padded armour and have an armour rating of 4. There next upgrade is mail. Spear militia have 0 armour and their next upgrade is padded. The increase according to the stats is only +1, however, some have shown with tests that the upgraded Spear militia perform very similar to the Italian militia; possibly indicating that the upgrade is really based on the "padded" and battle map appearance rather than the "incorrect" +1 on the stats would imply.

I just wondered how this fitted in with giving units with shields an ungeneric boost to their armour stats which distorts them from the +4, +5, +7, etc associated with the various armour levels?

I know I probably haven't explained it very well, but I hope you understand.
On the contrary, I understand the point in contention very well from your explanation. From my recent test I just mentioned with the 13/21 knights (13/8/0 def stats with fix applied), I can clearly tell that the armor-upgraded knights got some manner of positive change (call it a bonus) to their armor, since they fared a bit better than they typically did with no upgrade. This means that the upgrades do not replace the old armor stat with the one for the appropriate upgrade level (i.e. the knights' upgrade is to half-plate, which I think is 8 point armor - replacement of the old armor stat would've made the unit have 8/8/0 def stats for a loss of 5 defense overall, and they'd get wrecked by their 13/8/0 unupgraded mirror unit).

Another possibility would be that the upgrades applied the correct difference in armor levels, as a bonus. This would probably be accomplished by assigning an armor value to each armor upgrade level, and then simply assuming the unit without any upgrades is at the level directly below its first listed upgrade. Then the upgrade would take its value, subtract it from the value directly below (2 below if it is the second upgrade for the unit) and bonus the unit that amount of armor. This makes sense, because the upgrades seem to progress in order in all cases, never skipping over a level.

Yet another possibility is that each upgrade level has been assigned an armor bonus equal to the difference between it and the level below it. That is to say padded level may be 4 - 0 = +4, mail would be 5 - 4 = +1, heavy mail would be 7 - 5 = +2, etc. As the unit info in the EDU explicitly lists the upgrade levels each unit is given (the line "armour_ug_levels), it would just be a matter of summing the bonus for any upgrade(s) the unit currently has, and applying it to armor.

Note that I'm not saying in the last case that padded level DOES give a +4 bonus in the game, I was just demonstrating the possible math. In reality they could have put any value they wanted (including +1 for all levels) in for any given upgrade level, and that bonus would be conferred to the unit when it got the given upgrade level. Some sort of serious testing would be required to determine what that number is for each upgrade level, though I'm inclined to believe what the in-game unit stat sheet tells me has happened in this case as I haven't noticed myself that any upgrades have had an unusually higher than claimed effect on any units. By the same token it would not surprise me at all if padded upgrade DOES give the +4 bonus, for two reasons:

- It makes sense that if you put on padded armor, which for other units that have it from the start is worth 4 points, it is worth 4 points for you as well.
- the commented out stat_armour_ex line for town militia for instance lists ;stat_armour_ex 0, 4, 5, 0, 1, 6, 6, flesh. The first number is base armor, while the next 3 are for upgrades. Notice the first upgrade has value 4, not 1, which seems to indicate they intended the padded upgrade to have value 4. This is unimplemented and so it really says nothing about what the game is doing, but it does show thinking in the 4-point direction, and so IMO lends credence to that suggestion.