Mod plan: Revising the armour of dom3

[Sombre]

Armour. The more advanced your armour tech and the more resources you put into it, the worse it is. Ok, a little hyperbolic, but this is a pretty well known issue in dom3, which is best represented by the longtime red headed stepchild of dom3, MA Ulm.

The fact of the matter is, the cons outweigh the pros when talking about any armour over medium on infantry.

I could go into great detail here, but since I think you know all of this already, I'll just list the cons without exploring just how bad or good they are.

Cons

High enc
Def penalty
High res cost
Low mapmove

Now to me, three of these same pretty fair in dom3, because they don't erode the point of having the armour in the first place. They make medium, light and heavy infantry very different. But one of them, I'm sure you know which one, makes all that prot kinda pointless. I'm not saying it should be removed entirely as a factor, but right now it is waaaay too bad a con.

So what's the answer? Reduce enc across the board? Well yeah, that isn't a bad idea. Compress the enc difference between armours? Ah yes, that's the ticket. So that's what this mod will do. No messing with units, no tinkering with anything but basegame armour enc values, at least at first.

I'm now going to delve into edi's DB and see what I can see. But my gut feeling is that all (non forged) armour should range from 0 enc to 3 enc and no higher.


Now a disclaimer: I don't care about 'historical accuracy' or 'physical properties of blah blah' or any kind of realism. What I care about is game balance which promotes variety. I'm modifying the world which Illwinter created, so I'm sticking to the basic tech advance set by Illwinter, but compressing the enc values. That said, my starting point is the armour in CBM1.6, where some sensible changes have already been made.

The tech levels:

Leather
Ring
Scale
Chain
Plate
Blacksteel
Other stuff