I don't think the problem is with monster or AI player armor being too high. Rather, the problem is the player having too much armor on his units and champions. This can create invincible units that can steamroll anything.

If I were you, I would hard-cap the mitigation of armor at 80%, 75% being the marker for armor equal to damage, and 80% being mitigation where armor*2 = damage.

In addition, currently the AI never uses shields or helms. As a player, I can get above 40 defense using a shield. So there is an overlap of problems here, where - if the AI starts using shields in the future - you could end up in a potentially devastating situation for players.

It's both.  We can adjust the formula to make it so we dont get in invulnerable situations.  But we also want to make sure the defense values are reasonable.  If the info we get back is all normal/expected defense values then the formula tweak is all we need.  If we get data back with soem huge defense values thats coming from a place we aren't expecting then we may need to adjust those as well.

Health increase would be good, I don't like one shot kills (even late game). Though if it were done I'd like to see it as an increase to base health with no change to health gained per level. It's personal preference but I prefer experienced units to have an edge rather than dominate.

If we can suggest pie in the sky changes then I'd like to see health split into lethal and stun damage. If a weapon is not strong enough to bypass armour to do lethal damage then it does stun damage instead. Where stun damage can incapacitate units which can later be ransomed/indentured/etc. Doesn't even need to be two discreet bars of "health", it can be last damage type results in either death or unconsciousness. Where all stun damage it temporary and regained after the fight. That way you can have units that are hard to kill, but can still be removed from the fight.

Here is an idea: 

You can have you're heavy, light, medium armor and what have you but what if we included a new attribute: SIZE.

• If  a small being is trying to hit something larger, the small being gets a bonus to hit.
• If a big being is trying to hit something smaller, the bigger being gets a penalty to hit.

Real world example: an elephant would have a pretty hard time stepping on a mouse but a mouse would have a pretty easy time biting an elephant.

Back to topic:

Haven't seen any invulnerable units (besides my own champions ofc) yet, but will keep an eye out.

Back to derailment:

I still don't think that's a good design, to have weapons that can do triple the damage of a regular units hp, armour or not. It will always force you to make armour very powerful, to avoid fights only to be about oneshots.

So, while a cap on damage absorption may help to make units not invulnerable anymore, as long as an unit can oneshot another unit without enough armour there won't be any fun balance imo.

Monsters. AI will have the same gear as players. The idea is that they want to see if there are any 80 armor monsters leftover.

I dont see a problem with armor really, just the ease of getting legendary armor.

I have very early on had units that mobs don't have much if any chance of killing. This may be partly a tech tree issue as decent armour seems to be available very quickly.

I think the key thing that should come out of this is a robust formula to prevent the possibilities of becoming invulnerable. A well balanced set of armour values is desirable but not necessarily essential. So long as all the modding tools are there so the Modding comunity can rectify any perceved imbalances, or alter the ballance entirely.

and more hp for eveyone

Anyway, Kael, as far as I can see, it looks like there aren't any monsters with excessive (50+) armor.

As other people have said it's high armor units and champions that are the problem. Just race up the tech tree to equipment and then armor. It's easy to build high armor units and champions that are basically immune to attack from monsters and badly designed AI units. I mean even half a suit of padded armor makes you practically immune to spiders and other tier one and two monsters.

Armor is just to good. It constantly sits around the same value as dmg. Since there is so little difference between the two even 2-3 armor makes a huge diffrence in a fight. This makes makes weapons that do even 1 less dmg much worse even if they grant another attack. It also makes dodge useless. 1 dodge will make you 1% more likely to dodge but 1 armor always reduces the dmg you take substantially or makes you invincible because the difference between dmg and defense is usaully very small.

I know that it would be difficult to reduce armor any more without going into fractions because armor is divided into so many parts, and most of those parts already only have a 1 point difference over their older versions. Heavenfall suggested capping dmg but I disagree, thats a artificial solution. I think just reducing the effectiveness of armor to dmg from a 1:1 ratio to .5:1 or something would be better. That way armor still works the same but 2-3 armor wouldn't make the difference between weakness and total invincibility. Health could also to be increased to compensate for the reduced survivability of units.

None of the armor / defense / dodge really bother me that much.

What armor defends against the vastly over-powered Out-Of-Memory-Error ?

In the last fight of the quest of mastery you have to fight a guy with 100!!! defense. He is immune to almost anything except for magic. Even my sovereign with his sword of wrath couldnt hit him.