Some queries regarding EB's units...

[vartan]

I must politely disagree with the EB team. The linenthorax is excellent armour - equal or superior to the bronze muscle cuirass that is replaced - but it is neither as covering nor as effective as chainmail. Unless it is literally immune to sword slashes as chainmail is, highly resistant to thrusts and blunt trauma as well, then it is, put simply, not as good as chainmail. Leather armour isn't even as effective as padded armour (unless reinforced with plates).

Chain mail is highly vulnerable to blunt trauma. Internal bleeding is a big issue.

[Rolling Thunder]

Chain mail is highly vulnerable to blunt trauma. Internal bleeding is a big issue.

Not so much if you consider chain is always worn with padded armour underneath it.

Linothorax has been tested by reenactment and found to be quite resilient to thrusts and blunt trauma. Furthermore, chain mail would actually be weak against a thrust since the rings could split, but it is generally better against a slash - quite good, in fact. Reinforced linothorax is quite excellent armor as well due to the iron banding or scale. As such, reinforced linothorax is equal to chain mail.

The hoplites have helmets (which are Attic, not Corinthian) with cheek-guards, plus two greaves, plus reinforced linothorax and hence the higher value. If anything, it seems we may have made a mistake and that the hoplites armor value should be 12, the triarii 11, and the cohors reformata 10 since they lack greaves.

The linenthorax is excellent armour, no doubt. It's light, cheap to make and resilient, like you said, to thrusts and blunt damage. But the thing is, so is chainmail. Not to the degree it is against slashes, which it's pretty much invincible against, but I would be fairly confident in saying it's generally superior armour by a more significant factor than 1 or 2 AV. The iron or scale banding on reinforced linen armour is only around the belly region in EB, which would offer less protection still than a full haubergon or hauberk. That said, I would agree that it's equal-ish to chainmail armour.

[vartan]

Not so much if you consider chain is always worn with padded armour underneath it.

Whoops. You said always.

[Rolling Thunder]

Whoops. You said always.

Always unless you're a idiot peasant, in which case I'd like to know who gave you expensive, valuable armour before taking it away from said peasant and giving it to someone vaguely qualified and in possession of some padded cloth armour. So, yeah, it's invariably used with padding. Else it doesn't stop shite.

[paullus]

"Padding" may be a strong word. Most likely it's worn with a simple leather hauberk, if that's what we agree the subarmalis was. I'd be willing to consider either a light linen garment (thicker than a tunic though) or a pliable leather. There are several depictions of garments that could fit either material.

[Randal]

I admit I don't know much about practical testing, but from an economics PoV it doesn't really seem logical if mail armour is equal to linthorax.

Surely creating a mail hauberk would cost many, many times the price of a linthorax? Not only does it use far more expensive material, the skilled labour cost for making all those rings and putting them together must have been several times that of the linen armour.

Would anyone, and specifically any empire like Rome have equipped all its soldiers with mail armour if linthorax had been (almost?) equally effective?

I imagine cultural factors and the issue of prestige would sometimes explain the use of poor value-for-money armour (A Gallic chieftain would impress his men more with mail armour than with linen, a Roman aquilifer might wear scale instead of the superior mail because scale can be polished to a wonderful gleam on the parade ground) but when we're talking about outfitting literally hundreds of thousands of legionaries...

Then there's the fact that, as I learned from EB, the Hellenistic kingdoms started to switch to mail armour in their latter days, perhaps in part because they came into contact with the Romans. Thorakitai, reformed Macedonian phalangites... why make this effort unless mail was considered to provide a very significant advantage?

[MisterFred]

Although its easy to make the assumption that mail armor was more expensive than linen armor, I'd caution against relying on this without sources. A linothorax, if made the way modern re-creationists have modeled, is not necessarily very cheap. Cloth requires a lot of work in the ancient world, and a good linothorax requires quite a bit of it, glue, and possibly some specialist knowledge.

Even if mail remained more expensive than leather or linen armor, if it was slightly (or significantly) more effective than other armor types, the cost differential was probably narrowing in our time period as iron-mining, casting, and smithing became more common.

From another perspective, I expect (but this is yet another assumption) that mail armor lent itself more easily to a centralized production model than linen armor, as casting and smithing industries tended to be concentrated near iron deposits. So that even IF mail armor was more expensive than linen or leather armor it would still be (from an organizational stand-point) easier to procure for professional armies whose equipment is procured by the state in bulk (Marian armies, possibly some later Hellenistic elements, possibly some of the Carthaginian armories). There were probably some situations where cost and effectiveness were lesser concerns than the sheer ability to procure sufficient equipment.