The Shield Problem(s)

[Musashi]

Like I said, a lot of the comments in the files are outdated :)

And I knew I was right all along

*gloats*

[Ulstan]

I dont think shields are bugged. They are working ok against missiles,bigger is the shield - bigger is the drawback to have it in melee.

Also, the better your armor, the bigger drawback to have it in melee. Those stupid, stupid romans and their big clumsy shields! What idiots! If only they were as smart as JaM and realized that the most effective way to fight in melee was butt naked.


Oh wait. The barbarians that fought the romans tried that. And got slaughtered.


Shields should absolutely help you in melee. A *lot*. A shield that prevents the blow from even landing on your torso or arm is in many ways more effective than armor in a melee combat. A shield can be used as an additional weapon in melee combat, and it often was.


It doesn't currently. And since we know the CA devs are not a bunch of bleeding idiots, we can determine that it's a bug.

[Foz]

I'm a little confused about something - if AP halves the shield value which it seems is currently being subtracted from the total defence, does that mean that AP is now a bad thing, as it halves the amount subtracted from defence, leading to a higher defence vs AP than vs non-AP for shield-bearing units?

I've not been following this thread overly closely (but it does interest me), so sorry if I've just not understood something!

Actually this question is substantially different and more thought-provoking than the initial response to it would indicate. I believe what he is getting at is that since the shield works backwards, AP may in fact be causing the target unit's shield melee penalty to be reduced, thus helping the target in fact resist resist the attack. I would surmise that this is probably the case. What net effect the AP stat has in vanilla, then, is entirely dependent on whether the target unit's shield stat is in fact bigger than its armor stat. If the shield is bigger, AP will be halving more shield penalty than it will armor bonus, and therefore helping the target unit resist the attack. If they are the same AP does nothing at all. OTOH if the unit's armor stat is bigger, more armor bonus is removed than shield penalty, and the result is a slight gain in attack effectiveness, though not nearly what would be gained if the shield was working correctly (in that case, though, the shield would be giving a correct bonus in melee, and consequently the unit would still have a higher resistance to the attack than the borked shield/AP combo could possibly give it). Needless to say, that AP could actually help the opposing unit resist the attack is a strange oddity caused by the shield bug, and in general AP will make a far lower difference in combat in the vanilla game that it does with a fix in place. I'm not saying it's the case, just that I suspect it probably is.

Great, thanks.

How will you deal with those units that have an odd number for shield bonus?

Well, there are 3 types of shields: +3, +4 and +6.

Using half of these values, it looks fair a +1 for the smallest shield creating logic steps, so:

+1 bonus for small
+2 for medium
+3 for big

Sounds good to me. For what it's worth, I was planning on truncating even before I realized it would make the bonuses so nicely tiered! :smiles: