Quote Originally Posted by alpaca
Well I believe it's still a function of attack-defense but the "hidden lethality factor" is probably not so hidden but a result of the animations.
In M2TW, we have a 3d collision model between soldiers which means for example that it's very hard for archers with their small daggers to hit mounted units, and at the same time makes a lot of 2-handed units fare worse than you'd expect against other infantry because they are too close to them to hit them effectively with their large weapons sometimes.
This also applies to shields where the defense value is in fact only applied if the defender actually plays the block animation.
So all in all, it's very complicated and devilish to balance.
I don't think the kill rates are based on a 3d collision model. Soldiers die fairly often because someone swung a sword or a spear 5 inches away from them .

In fact, it's a problem with user movies, sometimes you can witness the moviemaker trying to do a close-up on the more stylish moves (like that quick horizontal slash that brutaly turns the enemy around, then lunge through the back) and come out utterly ridiculous because the models don't actually collide at all, or the lunge hitting thin air.

The animations affect attack speed, but there's more - 2 handers are weak against cav, for example, because in melee knights have a superfast left/right/left downward stroke, while most of the 2h strikes involve a long "arming" process, during which the 2H user is not "invincible". But by comparison, a spearman who does the long "shield to the face, move back, then spear the fallen enemy in the back while he's prone" move is not vulnerable during his finisher, as far as I've seen. Same for swords : I've never seen a DFK die while he was doing the aforementionned slash-then-lunge. So long anims are sometimes good, sometimes bad.

Also, I think you have it backwards : the shield is not "only factored in when the model blocks", I rather think the model blocks *because* a hit roll was parried/blocked/missed