Originally posted by pjcoia:Bills are interesting, I think a lot of the discussion (or anguish) in the forums was driven by their effectiveness in MTW1. This why shield units like the dismounted feudal knight are so insanely strong in all situations and vastly superior to a lot a of other units, they were essentially designed with 13 less melee defense in mind. But when the shield bug was fixed they didn't rebalance the units accordingly (in kingdoms they did but for some reason vanilla never got an update).
![bill units in stainless steel mod medieval 2 bill units in stainless steel mod medieval 2](https://cdn.quotesgram.com/img/33/29/363539064-72575604.jpg)
The shield bug made the defense factor of the shield be substracted from the total defense in melee combat (it did fine against arrows) instead of adding on to it and melee was balanced while the shield bug was in effect. Now from what I've red the reason the vanilla game is balanced as it is is because of the shield bug. Especially pole axes, bills, 2 handed axes and 2 handed clubs suffer a lot, halberds and 2 handed swords not so much but the cost for those units is often very high while their stats are pathetically low for a high tier unit wich is why they actually tend to preform worse than 2 handers who actually suffer more from the 'bug'. It isn't really a bug either, more the way 2 handed weapon animations were designed (wich is why it didn't really get 'fixed' in kingdoms, although the wait time inbetween attacks got reduced). Shield bug was apparantly far worse than the current 2 handed bug is. Its almost like the defence buff to sword units was an attempt to remedy some other issue - I know there was some shield bug in the early releases. Originally posted by pjcoia:That's what I observed, and the result of the mod seems to be what the designers expected. I assessed the stats across all infantry and made a slight modification to rectify the stats and the two-handed weapons now perform as expected against sword and shield units: On top of that, two-handed weapon units do not have an increased defence to represent the increased blocking ability of a longer weapon and as a result are spending most of their time getting blocked and the hit in return. It is possible to see Dismounted Feudal Knights defeat Armoured Sergeants without the loss of a single man because of this situation. Shield or armour defence does not stun the attacker. So in effect, the sword units are not only well defended by the higher defence, but also are more likely to land hits because of the parry-stun.
![bill units in stainless steel mod medieval 2 bill units in stainless steel mod medieval 2](https://cdn.quotesgram.com/img/82/50/32852057-persianvic3.jpg)
the defence skill stops an attack) the attacker is knocked back and stunned which makes them vulnerable to attacks. Most sword units have overly high defence skill values (e.g 8 vs 4 for sword vs axe) and from what I observed, when a unit parries (i.e. I looked into this and came to the conclusion that the animation speed is not the problem.