Metal armor

Can confirm. I've never found plate mail made of a useful material. Copper, bronze, and iron plate are all worse than useless. (Meteoric) Steel plate is just normal-level useless. Plate armor literally does not spawn with any higher-level metals. You can get ommel bone/tooth armor sometimes, but the combined spawn rate for them is 0.16%. Even broken plate doesn't spawn high-tier materials - you have a 1.4% chance to get dragon hide, but that's not metal.

And as we've discussed earlier, metal plate of any material earlier than Arcanite is pretty much ineffective. Trying to get Loricatus to turn plate armor into Adamant (which I still feel is of dubious value considering adamant is the fourth-densest material in the game, behind gold, lead, and silver) takes a lot of time, patience, and lugging around a 14-kg meteoric plate which you may or may not be using anyways.

I think I'm beating a dead horse here. The point is that plate is a non-option until midgame at the earliest, and is very questionable even then.

After several hours of considering this problem instead of doing my homework, I've got another solution proposal. Pros: It will probably solve the problem without the need to add new mechanics. Cons: It involves a new item, likely some new art, and possibly a little code.

The new item would be plate mail. It would have two material types (a metal primary and hardened leather as a secondary). The total volume might be comparable to current body armor, but a smaller proportion of it (perhaps as small as half) would be made of metal. The result would be an overall reduction in mass. It would still rely on the primary material to derive it's AV; I would recommend not futzing with the actual armor values (i.e. a new-style meteoric plate armor would still have AV 9, just like the current meteoric plate). A new item built in this manner would have the advantage of being mostly immune to SoCM abuse - if you turned it into a soft material, you should just end up with a heavier version of normal soft armor, since part of it would still be made of relatively dense hardened leather. The only exceptions would be troll hide and dragon hide, but we can probably find a way around that, if we so desire. (However, dragon-hide plate armor actually sounds kinda cool.)

The current body armor item would have it's material spawn chances modified to only spawn with soft materials. We would also want to adjust the Possibility factor for both old body armor and new plate armor; probably the sum of the two should be the same 250 that existing plate armor has.

Also, for reference: If I did my math right, a new-style meteoric plate would weigh only 8200 g, compared to it's current 14000 g, if it were made of 50% hardened leather.

Thoughts?

This is actually another pro, IMO!

It's a great idea, which we can easily try

We could implement my stone armor to replace the plate mail as "most useless and cumbersome" armor.

I really like this!


I also like this idea! In all seriousness, how cool would it be to walk around in glowing light crystal armor?

So basically what you're proposing, Izzy, is that we rework plate to have two materials, and the current armours no longer spawn in metal, essentially getting rid of the old plate mails?

Implementing stone armour to be "useless and cumbersome" means we still end up with junk armour that nobody uses.

I think the idea was that it would have sky-high AV, way over current top plate mails, but also high weight and penalties. We could make it work, even if for only some characters.

Red kangaroo has the idea.
The whole point of the stone armor was to have some insanely tough armor that was nigh-impossible for a regular player character to use (and more importantly it was to be used by some NPCs who could wear it with little trouble, who would be the only source of the armor.)

So it's there, and naturally the lower tier ones would be more or less outright bad but then we can have light crystal ones, or quartz ones that absorb lightning etc. and finally something like graviton mail at the top end with insane AV but still very high penalties and weight.

Maybe that'd be worth it in other games, but with IVAN's dismembering system that's just begging to be turned into a nugget.