[HoneyBadger]

Endoperez: "and instead of chain mail, Pale Ones use inferior scale mail."

I think it's hilarious how scale mail is so often interpreted as having been somehow inferior to chainmail. It wasn't-infact it was a good deal better, since you've got overlapping *plates* of metal protecting your vitals, instead of a fine metal mesh.

Chain was cheaper to produce and repair-especially poor quality chain, but the only type that was as good as scalemail, protection-wise, was high quality double-chain, which put two layers of chainmail on you, which ofcourse was nice and heavy.

And in any case, scalemail of comparable quality would have distributed it's weight across the body more comfortably, and it simply was easier to create lighter versions of scalemail than it was chainmail, because the quality of steel could be regularly higher in a plate than a wire, in a midieval forge. The only real advantage a suit of chain armor has over scale is a slight increase to flexibility, but their are ways around this, and the factor would still be small.

If I were re-doing the armor in the game, I'd assign a base Protection for each type of armor, and then increase or decrease it based on the Nation at hand (different technologies, different methods/preferences, etc) and the materials used. Making armour was a highly individualistic artform, much more so than any industrial science of today. Two different suits of full armour-look at a collection of platemail in a museum sometime-are never going to be identical, unless they're identically poorly made.

To conclude-and not go completely OT-Agarthans would have to be ridiculously mindless to use bucklers over large shields, and to use spears-because spears require *PRECISION* to use (I know, I've trained with them for years, and they're my personal favorite melee weapon) and if they're using scalemail-especially bronze, which was actually better than iron/steel for armor, at the technological level we're talking-they should get a very decent bonus to their Protection.

Agarthans should lose the spears and glaives and whatnot and start using very long-handled obsidian-spiked or bronze morningstars.

And, I don't know if this is programmed in, but bronze armor should be immune to several spells, since it doesn't rust and isn't magnetizeable.