Shifting fortunes with halbs

[Doug-Thompson]

I was pretty thrilled when some Eastern Halberb Militia beat some Dismounted Feudal Knights, a sword and shield unit, on grassy plains. I had the halbs in open formation and assumed that made the difference.

So I ran some more units into each other in custom battle the next day — and got exactly the opposite results.

All of it was on grassy plains, normal unit sizes and difficulty, Egypt vs. England. I have the numbers for the second set of tests. Battles in which the leader was killed early enough to make a difference were disregarded.

I suspect that the difference was heat, the one variable I can't control. I'm assuming the first batch where the halbs did well was in summer and the knights suffered heat exhaustion. That is only a blind guess on my part, however.

Tabardariya, on the other hand, do well. It's a tough fight. Notably, the English would break away and charge again, as much as three times in one fight. That's four charges once you include the initial charge.

[dopp]

It's interesting how all infantry sword units (including archers armed with swords) get +3 defense skill, leading to heavily armored knights with insane defense skill of 8 or 9 while troops armed with other weapons struggle to get more than 3. Factor in +6 shield, fast attack speed and high attack values, its no wonder that swordsmen are OP since the shield bug was fixed.

[Shahed]

Hi Doug,

Thanks for the testing. Thanks for sharing the results, I was particularly curious about Tabardariyya myself.
I have not yet installed 1.20, I'm just using extrapolation to arrive at a conclusion.

Basically after 1.20, the new "bugged" units will be all or most 2Handers.
Since now the shield bug is fixed but all unit stats have not been rebalanced to reflect this fix.
I suppose the 2Hander animations have been fixed, but in all likelihood, stats plus animations determine the result.
Therefore we still need a stat rebalance. Do you follow ?

As a result 2handers in 1.20 are bound to be of low usefulness prior to a rebalance.

That rebalance will come in 1.3 (+-4 to 6 months) or it will come with Carl's PureFixer 1.14 (about a week or so at most), for those who play vanilla.

I should also mention mods like LTC for 1.20, and others, are already using a stat rebalance as well.

[Doug-Thompson]

You're welcome for the try-out. Sorry the news wasn't better.

I see your point exactly on balance. Frankly, I don't see much point to halbs right now. They might make decent flankers, I guess.

[Shahed]

I remembered something in the meantime..

Designated animations for certain units might also have to be changed (reallocated) to make those units combat effective. Since (for simplicity) it's animation + stat = result, rebalancing stats alone might not be enough. I'm not sure though as I don't know how many animations there are for 2Handers. I wonder which other units share the Halb animations.

[Doug-Thompson]

Bottom line:

Q: What do Egyptian halbs do that Saracen Infantry don't do better?

A: Nothing. Saracens are also a militia unit with free upkeep in cities, and have lower building requirements.

I suspect if you ask that same question about any faction's two-hander except maybe the Turks' best janissaries, you'll get the same answer.

[Husar]

And that's why I decided that it's not fair if one handed swords have a higher attack than many two handed weapons and increased all two handed attacks to values above 13(what dismounted feudal knights have) with some variation on whether the unit is militia/peasant, professional or elite. Let's just say halberdiers with 19 attack will be able to inflict more damage to those heavily armoured shield units.They will still lose a lot of men due to their rather low defense, but being hit by a halberd should hurt, a lot.