Everyone wears armour?

Hits on a basic problem throughout the game. Bottom line, its almost always the best idea to just shove the best armor and weapons on someone and shove them out the door. There's no penalty to loading up your archers with plate armor other than some extra resource costs, which given the fact that I'm almost never constrained by resources is not much of a penalty. There's no real trade off in weapons, there almost always a 'right' choice at any tech level. Who's using axes when you can equip someone with a 15 attack war staff?

Other games usually handle this in some sort of rock paper scissors format: build a lot of horsemen with heavy plate armor, well my extremely cheep, rapidly produced pikemen get +100% attack vs. your horsemen, maybe you should use something else. Like pikemen? well watch out for my heavy swordsmen, they may be expensive but they can decimate pikemen in close combat. Like swordsmen? well my crossbowmen can wollup them from afar. Like crossbowmen? watch my horsemen tear them apart, and we circle back... Not saying that Elemental should adopt such a basic balancing strategy, but currently there is almost no strategic differentiation at all. Their almost always a clearly 'best' unit and you'd be a fool to use anything else.

There is a little differentiation put in by shields and one handed weapons vs. two handed, but this is so minor as to be nearly inconsequential. There's also some light regarding the possible changes around initiative based combat so that maybe a 'fast' unit might be better against lightly armored foes, and a 'slow' unit might be better against heave armor. However, none of this in my mind leads to a really interesting parry, counter parry, riposte, strike... back and forth sort of strategic thinking. We generally just get two armored dudes with swords bashing at each other, the one with the lower tech loses. Unless of course one side has arcane arrow, in which case the other side always loses...

Dodge penalties for heavy armor are huge. If you want a dodge-oriented character (can be useful in many instances, like fighting armor-piercing troops), you want to go for leather+the best shield.

Which weapons are armor piercing?

Other games usually handle this in some sort of rock paper scissors format: build a lot of horsemen with heavy plate armor, well my extremely cheep, rapidly produced pikemen get +100% attack vs. your horsemen, maybe you should use something else. Like pikemen? well watch out for my heavy swordsmen, they may be expensive but they can decimate pikemen in close combat. Like swordsmen? well my crossbowmen can wollup them from afar. Like crossbowmen? watch my horsemen tear them apart, and we circle back... Not saying that Elemental should adopt such a basic balancing strategy, but currently there is almost no strategic differentiation at all. Their almost always a clearly 'best' unit and you'd be a fool to use anything else.

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You know, this isn't a bad idea, a simple rock/paper/scissors type deal. There are not classes in this game but classes can be developed from what the unit is using. I was thinking each weapon would be part of a grouping and each group doing maybe 10% extra damage against another an armor weight class. You take all the armor and add its "weight" points to get a class (like 1-10 light, 11-20 medium etc.). Then, I don't know, the horse counts for weight points or something.

Groups of weapons like bows or spears would do more damage against one type of weight class than another and could break up the gameplay. Weaker weapons like daggers would be more useable in the early game, at least, because they'd hurt a certain kind of unit more.

Perhaps even weight class could effect the movement stat or the dodge stat. And weapons groups could effect accuracy, as in units with bows are more likely to have good acc and units with huge two-handed swords would have less.