"Effective Against Armor"

[Knight of the Temple]

For anyone who has any doubts, I just thought I'd share the actual post that I got my information from. This is from the Numerology thread over at the official MTW forum (http://p223.ezboard.com/fshoguntotalwarfrm5), and the information is from a MTW developer, a programmer, as far as I know.

Noticed a question about AP and realized I hadn't posted a dev comment on it.
/START
longjohn2
Programmer
Group: CA
Posts: 263
Joined: Nov. 2000
UK Posted: Sep. 18 2002,19:49
----------------------------------------------------------
Puzz is correct, theoretically units should get a bonus of +1 against units of foot of 4 armour, and against horse units of 5 armour. Sadly I found a bug today, so that you will only start getting bonuses against foot units of 5 armour. For calculating armour piercing bonuses, shields don't count, but horse armour does (as it isn't counted separately ). I've changed this for the patch, so that bonuses will start against foot with 3 armour ( chainmail ) or cavalry with 4 armour ( some of cavalry's armour factor is due to the horse which is soft and squishy).

I reduced the effectiveness of the armour piercing bonus late in the project, as I noticed that all the units Activision complained about as being too powerful had axes or halbards, but in retrospect that was a bad move.

Armour piercing works differently with missiles. Each missile type has an armour penetration rating. The target's armour is multiplied by this, before deciding whether a kill is scored. The factor for bows is 1, and for longbows it's 0.5, so when hit by a longbow, units count half as much armour as they actually have ( can't remember if this includes shields too ). These stats will be in separate file in the patch.
/END


So, the AP forumula is (armor - 1)/2 for foot, and (armor - 2)/2 for horse. And, shields don't count when making this calculation.

note: the patch he's referring to is the 1.1 patch for MTW

That's it.