EDIT: Balance Patch for Medieval Times + CE is published here:

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1662288023

Also fixes a few item stat bugs and oversights from base Medieval Times.

So far the only medieval projectiles that can damage the medieval armor is the flaming ammo.

Confirmed that melee critical hit with sharp weapons do NOT bypass armor. This looks like a bug.

Ok, so here are my observations with suggestions so far.
Big Problem 1 is significantly by critical hits from medieval swords not doing the armor bypass thing they are supposed to in CE

These balance suggestions are not a criticism of the author at all. The imbalanced things mentioned here are all part of the non-CE version of medieval times. However, the way CE makes armor function in a less random way does make the OP armor more noticeable.

It would be great to have balance changes added to this mod, but they could also be added in a separate balance patch mod, which could potentially be made by anyone.



Big Problem 1:
Medieval armor is too strong overall.
Symptoms:
a.) Two medieval knights with normal armor and swords can wail on each other for hours on end without either of them ever getting a scratch (barring a lucky neck-shot). If they have war-hammers, then they will gradually accumulate very small bruises, but the fight can still last until durability loss / exhaustion become potential factors. This is silly.
b.) Well armored knights are not afraid of rifle rounds. Even rifles with AP rounds leave only tiny injuries, while FMJ rounds bounce off. This is silly.
c.) A medieval knight can easily kill even the most powerful animals. Thrumbo vs Knight with "good" royal armor takes a very long time, but in the end the Thrumbo has no chance (barring a lucky neck-shot). This should not be the case.
Recommended Solution
a.) Just reduce armor ratings of medieval armor across the board…maybe by like 30%. Basically for sharp armor, the best medieval stuff (nanite enhanced) should be in the 1.1 range (bolt action rifle still leaves a small bruise) instead of being 1.68 as it is now. (For comparison, masterwork power armor is 0.99. Centipede armor is 1.0) And medium quality medieval armor should not get to the ~0.75 range so easily, where non-blunt weapons are useless against you (0.3 is good penetration on a bladed weapon, at which point you need a critical hit to do any damage at all) and FMJ pistol rounds just bounce off while AP rounds leave tiny bruises.
b.) Another idea is to raise the armor-penetration multiplier for melee critical hits from 2 to 3. This would be a change to base CE, so not as likely, but it would do two things that IMO would be positive changes: make melee skill important, and allow swords to actually be good at killing things, at least in skilled hands.

Big Problem 2:
Medieval pawns have this weird Achilles’ heel in their neck slot…even the fanciest, heaviest medieval armor does not cover it.
Symptoms:
I had to write “(barring a lucky neck-shot)” three times above. Given that the armor itself is currently OP, this weakness actually ends up being a good thing for balance. But in and of itself, this is not good and makes no sense.
Recommended Solution
a.) All medieval armor that covers the torso and is classified as “heavy” should also cover the neck!
b.) This “heavy” armor should be further differentiated from the light armor by having much more serious weight/bulk/movement penalties compared to light armor than it does now. “Light” armor should be lighter than it is, have little/no movement penalty, and not cover the neck.

Small Problem 1
Medieval helmets that protect every part of the head make vanilla helmets that fail to do so completely obsolete.
Recommended Solution
Medieval “Light” helmets, meant to be used by archers/crossbowmen, should cover the ears and nose but not the eyes or jaw. “Heavy” helmets that cover the entire head should have a 25% vision penalty (or other serious vision-related drawback, like the Bascinet added in regular CE).

Update: The melee critical hit from sharp weapon don't penetrate armor bug is also in vanilla+CE.
Tested with a plasteel knife and an escaped prisoner wearing only legendary power armor. Got lots of critical hits with the knife that still did no damage.

Update: The documentation about critical hit effect was out of date - what a critical hit with a sharp melee weapon *actually* does is to double the weapon's armor penetration for that strike.

So, normal quality war knife (0.18 penetration) vs normal quality warbourne chain (0.75 sharp armor) will do zero damage because penetration is less than 1/2 the armor. But on a *critical hit*, the effective pentration would become 0.36, and...still be less than 1/2 of the armor and do zero damage.

Reviewing some more numbers, I'm revising my recommendation from "reduce medieval armor ratings by 20%" to "reduce them by 30%".

Looking through the files...
This compatibility patch doesn't do anything to modify armor stats except for mass, bulk, and equipped bulk.
So modifying all the armor values would be something new, but not a huge undertaking given how the files are structured and the medieval times armor is assigned to categories.

@Bob Figured out how to make a patch for myself doing the things I mentioned/recommended above. Got the body-armor part working; may take a bit longer to do the head, hand, and foot armor. Not planning to publish anywhere unless I talk to N7 first, but if you want me to send it to you when I'm done let me know.

I edited the heavy armors in the medieval times XML files i got on Nexus
I don't know much (any) XML but I'm hoping the values I edited are applied in game... anyways off topic kinda, but anyone know how to make the basic tools required by the medieval workbenches?

Yeah, you can edit xml directly, but that is not transferable to anyone else or to a new version of the mod you are editing.

I'm working with patch operations / xpath so that there is a possibility to give it to others in the future, and it will be resilient to the base mod changing underneath it.

P.S. Hand tools are crafted at a blacksmith. :)

ah, thank you! I'm hoping to get more into modding this game in particular. Editing (or modding) mods seems to have inspired me to get more into game design.

Any other balance suggestions?

Currently I have this:

• Reduce all medieval armor values by 25% (they are still very strong).
  
• Heavy body armor covers the neck and has a heavy movement penalty, while Light body armor has a very light movement penalty and no neck coverage.
  
• Medieval heavy helmets have the same ranged and melee accuracy penalties as the full head bascinet helmet added to the electric forge by CE. Medieval Light helmets do not cover the full head.
  
• Fixed Techno Socks to have the same weight and bulk as other socks, instead of being enormously heavy (2.5kg).

Last thing I want to do is allow the eternity forge to upgrade power armor, because seriously I love not having to worry about durability, but I also love power armor.

I need to test the changes I made first.

I made the heavy armor have a 50% speed penalty, I edited some of the crafting requirements, and I added the neck protection.

I've barely played around with CE and MT yet but the more egregious problems people have with MT prompted me to fix those in advance of experiencing them.

there's a lot of potential functionality I can see for the eternity forge, just hearing your brief description of it and not having played with it yet.

such as Eternity weapons (weapons that heal instead of doing damage)
but that probably goes beyond the scope of a simple mod or patch

fyi, there's no such thing as a "50%" speed penalty. Move speed used to be modified by percentages, which is why medieval times, being a very old mod, describes percent based changes to movement in its item descriptions.

These days adding "-0.50" move speed to an item means it will change speed by a flat -0.5 cells/second. Most pawns have about 4.2 c/s of movement, so that works out to about a 12% penalty for the average pawn.

All the move speed bonuses/penalties in Medieval times I think were originally intended to have about 4x their current effective magnitude because of this.

So I would need to navigate around the programming of the game or change the programming of the game to get the variables I want? that sounds tedious as hell.