shield bug, what is it?

**Budwise** · 03-06-2007, 08:55

Okay, I don't notice every detail of every battle but what is this dealbreaking Shield Bug that is the rave of the message board? What is it and whats so bad about it?

**sapi** · 03-06-2007, 09:36

The shield bug is a bug which causes units not to use their shields in combat; in fact units with high shield values can actually perform worse than those with low or none at all.

One of the budding modders around here can give you a more technical explanation

**pevergreen** · 03-06-2007, 09:38

It takes the value of the shield away from the actual defense.

11 total
5 armour
2 shield
4 Defence Skill
would turn out to be 7 total.

It negatises it IIRC

**Budwise** · 03-06-2007, 10:51

That would explain how my heavy armed army gets hurt badly when they win against garbage units.

**grinningman** · 03-06-2007, 11:01

And it explains why peasants can defeat town and spear militia. Melee combat works much more how you'd expect from the stats after implementing a shield fix.

**HoreTore** · 03-06-2007, 14:10

Yeah, got to say it, fixing the shields changes the entire game balance drastically. Don't worry about the implications for HA's and enfilading fire, the pros FAR outweigh the cons.

BTW, it doesn't negate the shield value, it subtracts the value instead of adding it in melee...

**NefariousWolf** · 03-06-2007, 17:21

Defense has 3 parts: Armor, Defense Skill, and Shield.

Defense Skill is applied to attacks coming from the weapon side of a character. This represents the 'parry' ability of a unit and is therefore not taken into account against missile fire.

Shield is applied to attacks coming from the shield side of a character and *does* protect from missile fire.

Armor is omnidirectional.

The bug is that the shield strength is subtracted instead of added against attacks on the shield side of a character.

The shield workaround recommended by CA and implemented by various modders around town, such as yakaspat, is to take half the shield strength rounded up and add it to armor, half the shield strength rounded down and apply it to defense skill, and set the shield strength to 0.

The workaround makes the game playable again, but there are tactical subtleties which are invalidated by the workaround.
1. Missiles cause equal damage to the shield and weapon side of the unit instead of doing more damage on the weapon side, as they should.
2. Units are slightly less vulnerable from the rear as they should be since the armor value is increased.
3. Units are slightly less vulnerable from the weapon side in melee than they should be.

**derfinsterling** · 03-06-2007, 17:35

Originally Posted by NefariousWolf

The workaround makes the game playable again, but there are tactical subtleties which are invalidated by the workaround.

Sorry, but I wanted to add that while this certainly is a bug, it doesn't make the game "unplayable".
CTD make a game unplayable, corrupted savegame files do, but not a thing like this.
Yes, you ever have to use a mod or live with it (adjusting your tactics accordingly), but it's not unplayable.

**Foz** · 03-06-2007, 18:18

Originally Posted by derfinsterling

Sorry, but I wanted to add that while this certainly is a bug, it doesn't make the game "unplayable".
CTD make a game unplayable, corrupted savegame files do, but not a thing like this.
Yes, you ever have to use a mod or live with it (adjusting your tactics accordingly), but it's not unplayable.

It does, however, make the game pretty unbalanced. Many people noticed the ability of knights to completely destroy any sort of ground troops - even heavily armored tanks like dismounted feudal knights would simply get bowled over, barely even touching the attacking knights. It turns out that the melee defense of the target unit has a HUGE effect on how much damage a cavalry charge can do to it - hotfixing the shields boosted such units using 6-point shields by a full 12 points of melee defense, which means most notably that they hold much much better against cavalry, though the effects are widely noticeable in general melee of all sorts as well. I remember the first time I pitted cavalry against large shield users after inventing the fix... it's like night and day. Finally I had units that could reasonably take a charge.