Archers, Wizards and Armour

This sounds good in realistic terms, and also implemented in many fantasy games, but I don't think it's a good idea for Elemental.

The major advantage of the game is to give the user flexibility in unit design. Limit the options and you hurt that advantage.

If I have limited resources and I want to create a balanced army, it is reasonable anyway that I give the better armor to the front line soldiers and save the iron by giving weaker armor to the archers. But if I have enough to spend and I want an armored archer, why limit the option?

Maybe deciding that heavy armor reduces either attack or moves in a more significant way will encourage me to have archers with lower armor rating.

But I think this should be encouraged, but not forced.

I see no reason to do that. It is old and unflexible approach.

Reduced attack or combat movement would work. Allow them to have the protection but at a cost to effectiveness.

I would not restrict Armour from any unit however there should be penalties for heavy armor like movement (to prevent PlateMail scouts from running around) and attack (but not damage) penalties when using bows.  Now I would like to see a penalty in the number of attacks if wearing medium to heavy armor. This I would prefer more than a to hit penalty.

Now magic I would say that iron Armor would make spells cost twice as much to cast. But other armors like leather or Silver, Mitheral, and or Magic Armor would not penilize magic.

I feel strongly that unit types need to have strengths AND weakness.  This creates opportunities for choices:  tactics, strategy, best use of resources, etc.  I feel strongly that archers should be restricted to leather armor, at best, no shields. Intelligent use of them requires a combined arms approach.  Different types of units designed/trained to fight in different ways.  This opens a whole area of tactical decisions. Interesting choices (as Sid Meier relentlessly chants..).

BTW, the game needs to add: A 'charge' effect (attack) for massed mounted troops.  And pole weapons for foot soldiers who are designed to face off with mounted troops.  And, perhaps, caster specific weapons, like staves.

Magic casters typically need a hand free to cast.  So, any outfit that takes both hands stops casting: two handed weapon, or one handed weapon with shield.  Regarding the dagger comment, Gandalf used a full (one handed) sword, along with his staff, at the bridge in Kaza dum(spelling?).  Also, for casters, deduct armor rating from damage done by cast. Interesting decisions, tradeoffs.  

Finally, comment about armor on units that typically (traditionally?) don't have heavy armor. Have heavier armors deduct from movement points (big map) and Action points (tactical display).  Remember, in medieval Europe, a fully armored knight could NOT get up from the ground when he fell, unless he had help from someone else (A squire, etc.) who was not decked out in full armor.  Hence the use of mounts.  Scout (sans armor) on mount, fast, enduring.  Knight on mount slows horse, and exhausts them quickly. 

More trade offs....

IMO the armour is already restricted for our heroes, IMO the cost of the items is so insane that to fully deck out one hero you could train TWO squads of mace men (the 8 pack unit). that is just plain stupid. Combine that with the fact that there is no reasonable way to increase the HPs of a hero to survivable levels (when catapaults do 100 points of damage x2, or their squads of infantry can do 20hps x3,  then your hero having 30 or 40 HPs is laughable). So you are left hiding your heros in the back of the lines and hoping the AI doesn't see them. And onc they go OOM they are COMPLETELY useless for between 20 and 40 game turns.

At this point my heros serve as naked summoners that tag along with my "mega stack" and soak up XPs so I can level them up to increase their mana. Even casting Deflect will cause them 3 turns of down time PER time I cast Deflect.

So instead of them being the champions of your civilization they are the cowering, sniveling, little hangers on, that hide at the back of the battle and that bail out at the first time of an enemy coming near them.

We can all see what the absence of choice did to the current tactical battles.  Say no more. =P

I have been musing about this and that...

With the current system, movement reductions from armor would hardly phase archers.  It has to be something tangible.
Armor should reduce the accuracy of archers so you could have armored close range fire support which wouldn't hit all that much at range.
And at short range they'd be increasingly vulnerable to melee attacks so the armor wouldn't be completely overpowered.

For casters, the amount of (metal?) armor they wear should reduce the spell levels they get access to.
That's a simple mechanism to tell the battlemages / adepts who cast the odd fireball from the wizards who throw tactical nukes and summon greater demons...

That limitation should only affect tactical magic. For strategic spells it's assumed that the caster takes off the armor for that.
 

Urban myth.  Medieval knights were pretty good at warfare and they didn't make dumb mistakes like that. =P
That was only true with some excessively heavy tournament armor, where mobility was considered less important than the noble heir not losing any limbs...

That is something that can (and has to be) changed.
For instance, champions could start with an average 30 DEX and thus get triple the AC from regular armor.  They are just that good. Champion, y'know?

Prices also need to come down a lot. Either that or allow the production of items from raw materials so you'd pay for the sword in the metal and materials and only a little gold.
The item prices are moddable, though.  Just type in a different munber if you don't like them. *shrug*

double post

How about just making full plate expensive, so it's not a good idea to dress scouts or archers in it ? They're not for taking damage.

Frankly, the mechanics of tactical battles are broken in this game with very minor improvements in some patches. I'll hold out for the 1.1 patch before giving my opinion but right now it's weak in a number of ways.

If they increase the movement and speed penalty of the heavier armors  and introduce initiative based on speed, then heavy armors start having a greater drawback. Big problem right now is that all the heavy armors have the exact same penalty for speed.  And you get master heavy armor and master armor at the same time.  It's just a difference in cost, but should be more than that.  Each armor should provide a fairly equal cost/reward benefit.  And I think Scale and Chain shouldn't have speed penalties, they should be the evolution of light armors.  Also, all races should have access to Scale armor, not sure why some dont.

Cost is only a useful balancing factor in simple wargames like Starcraft.
There you have units with pretty much fixed stats and you will take losses so the cost has a meaning.

In WOM you have magic, extreme surviveability from huge stacks, and heavy armor.
You can often avoid complete losses.
You buy the super heavy unit once and it can heal to full 30 times, multiplying it's effectivity by that.
There's no way to balance the cost around that.

Weeeeeell... there might be.
It would add serious micromanagement to game, though, and I don't think that is such a hot idea.
In many wargames your unit's don't just heal to full automatically or magically.  You have to buy troop reinforcements because they also need equipment.
Now if your heavy cavalry company took some heavy losses, you might be broke for a long time, just bringing this one unit back up to regular strength.

The obvious downside:  You'd have to care and feed every stupid peasant unit that took a few blows too many.
That can get old real quicklike in large empires.

Urban myth.  Medieval knights were pretty good at warfare and they didn't make dumb mistakes like that. =P
That was only true with some excessively heavy tournament armor, where mobility was considered less important than the noble heir not losing any limbs...

You mean Monty Python's Holy Grail had historically innacurate bits?  Well.....  (SMILE)

Those ideas are just too complicated.  We need to balance realism, simplicity, and fun factor.  One, I still stand by that soldiers should not gain experience, and should just be stuck at the level they were trained at, as they should be expendable and not so greatly out do champions.  Two, I believe in diminishing returns of stack attack and def skills.  Or at the very minimum, the def skill.  Meaning that if the first unit has a 10 DEF, every unit after that doesn't add an additional 10, it would add 5 or what ever number we come to a balance agreement to.  Third, armor should have more advancing speed and movement penalties, the lowest level of metal armor has the same penalties as the highest level.  This should change. 

With these changes, and the changes to the attack damage and hitting, along with the implimentation of speed based initiative, would make armor choices more interesting than just the obvious get the heaviest possible.  That's my two cents.

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This would cause me to stop playing the game...

One of the things I like about Elemental over Civ is that if you are careful, you can keep your units. THey never really get outdated. It takes 25 turns to create an 8-pack of mace men for instance. That is a significant percentage of the total time the game will take to play. And at 250 or so guildar this is a significant amount of money to build. THe fact that if I am careful with this unit, it will survive to the end game and remain useful is a really nice feature of Elemental. I really like the fact taht there is no real movement through time affect where you have macemen and later attack tank platoons with your macemen...True you advance through tech, but each unit you build remains useful.

There is so many problems with the tactical combat system, it's just not funny. Basically, there's no difference in the way combat works across different type weapons: you hit or you miss, doesn't matter if it's a spell, sword, piercing weapon like a spear, projectile weapon like an arrow, catapult, etc .. they're all just basically equivalent except for attack rating & range.

I could fill 10 pages on this topic, many have been covered in other posts already. I'll just add one: squads with shields should be able to advance with maximal projectile defense (i.e. as in greek phalanyx or roman legion' turtle) from the front. It just doesn't happen in this game, everything is the same except for attack strength and range. There's just no diversity at all on the tactical scale. You might as well just have 4 weapons in this game, all of them are just variations of these: 1) individual target spell 2) area target spell 3) mace 4) arrow, there's no need for spears, swords, heavy maces, short bows, etc

I disagree with the experience comment, both heroes & other units should have the ability to ramp as to veteran status.

One of the traditional benefits of weapons like spears and crossbows over knights, swords, and longbow is training time as well as a greater availability of population. Maintenance and upkeep are others.

I would say, have equipment also increase training time and maintenance as well as cost. Have a increasing penalty with more equipment used (if you use up every possible slot of equipment, that translates into a big increase in time and cost). Require more resources in general as well including (with the update) more specialist slots - a knight (in this context, guy in heavy armor with lots of cool toys) or dragon taking up 3 slots instead of one means that while you could field everyone in heavy armor and swap out weapons, you'd have to field a smaller army. Which itself may not be bad... but it means different strategies over a larger, more diverse army, or simply an army of cannon fodder. 

i think i see what the op is getting at.

i really wish that there was some incentive for channelers not to take armour, but at the moment there really isn't. the best way to do this without ticking people off, would be to simply add some magical robes that improved casting power (INT bonus?) but could not be work with armour.

as for the archers, if people choose to make their archers more flexible by giving them armour then let them, but those of us who want to save the pennies and are capable of planning ahead will not want to giver archers heavy armour anyway.

Casters with armor are very easy to kill with ranged units before they can act. Take away their armor and channelers can't be part of combat at all.  If their armor is removed they need spells that actually protect them.

Throughout history there are examples of heavily armored units with archer capability. The only reason most archers in history are not heavily armored is because of the efficiencies of specialization - expense being the main reason, ease of movement would be another reason also but  certainly not insurmountable not by a long shot!

The reason archers were not heavily armored was because that was costly and provided less gain than giving the armor to additional people on the front line. What is needed is not to make heavily armored archers and casters not work, but rather to make giving all your troops heavy armor more difficult (or make it so variety is good) so that you will not give all of them the best and heaviest stuff around.

There would be a big difference between forces raised for the open field and garrison forces as well.

Yes they did. The only archers to usually not wear armour were the English, and that's because their archers were drawn from the peasantry who could barely afford their bows. Most professionals, such as the Genoese, would indeed wear heavy armour.

Nope. In fact if you look on youtube you'll find videos of people backflipping, rolling and similar acrobatics while wearing full plate. It's actually much more manoeuvrable than chain (due to the weight distribution; chain puts all of the weight on the shoulders while plate distributes it over the body). When it comes to archery the only thing that's going to affect it is the gloves, anything restricting the movement of the fingers is obviously going to cause problems when trying to fire a bow.

The thing to remember is that plate armour, like everything else in warfare, has evolved over time. One of the finest achievements was so-called Maximilian Armour. Good protection, and surprisingly flexible. But it was still expensive. In World War, smaller breastplates were good protection against pistol and submachinegun rounds, but they remained too expensive for mass production.