Quote Originally Posted by Watchman
The better armoured a man was, the less need he had for a shield partly also because good enough arm defenses achieve much the same effect in hand-to-hand - a logic culminating in fully armed starkly shieldless heavy cavalry like cataphracts (who typically at most had a small "buckler" strapped to the arm, and even that was rare), or pretty much all European horse from the Late Middle Ages onwards (although they later lost the armour too...).
I can appreciate that, but in EB even the less armoured and cheap troops generally have armour values that are much higher than their shield values. This seems counter-intuitive since if true it would have almost meant that ancient soldiers would rather be struck in the chest than on their shield.