Quote Originally Posted by Musashi
It's not a gross misunderstanding of the situation. By putting the shield value into armor you create a situation where firing on a unit from the flanks or rear is EXACTLY the same as shooting them in the front. There's no benefit. AT ALL. To me, that's taking an entire aspect of the game out, and is unacceptable.
You've still completely missed the point. I never said it was a good thing to do, or that it didn't remove an aspect of the game. What I said was that the melee shield problem is a far bigger, more prevalent, and important aspect of the game than is the archer flanking fire consideration. An entire aspect is already out of the game in vanilla, that being the melee combat effectiveness of all shield units. That is what is really unacceptable. Anyone should easily be able to see that putting that aspect back in at the expense of the other is about 5 steps forward and one step backward, which is the point I was trying to hammer home, and the reason I say you clearly do not understand the nature of the situation. If you can't bring yourself to fix a greater evil by introducing a lesser one, then so be it, but if you cannot understand why everyone should want to do so, you need to re-evaluate the situation. I don't like the side effects by any means either, but they are a necessary evil to fix a much more horrific problem.

Quote Originally Posted by Garnier
would it be feasible to remove the shield bonus, and add half of it to armour and the other have to defense skill? So archers dont become underpowered, but units still melee good and autocalc isnt messed up? or is that simply a bad idea.
Now that's what I'm talking about... the suggestion shows a lot of good critical thinking. This idea does have the benefit of probably keeping archers at a much more reasonable power level compared to the fixed shield units, and screws up flanking right and rear fire half as much. In return, the archers get an equal bonus against the front and left quadrants. That is, fixing a 6 point shield would now give +3 missile def in rear and right, but -3 def in front and left. I'll have to give this more careful consideration, and figure out what exactly it does to melee.