Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-32765490-20180430162859

Hello! this is a suggestion to buffer bronze and make it much stronger than it currently is. I'm suggesting increased armor points, better durability, and overall just better effectiveness as armor.

Bronze, in real life, is actually stronger than iron in many aspects. Being less brittle, bronze would bend when iron would break. This makes bronze stronger as armor, but weaker as a weapon or tool.

In ancient times, bronze was one of the first metals used for weapons and armor. The reason it was used over iron was because it had a lower smelting point and was easier to shape and make. However, it had one main drawback: it required two different ores, copper and tin. These were often not found in the same place, and such, using bronze as a material for armies became problematic for conquest, when you might be trying to attack the country that supplied you with tin in the first place.

The solution eventually became to use a more commonly found metal that only required one type of ore: iron. It had already been used in weapons, due to its more brittle form creating a stronger blade, but it could also be used as a metal. Sure, it was weaker, but at least it could be found in abundance to equip entire armies.

Eventually, because of availability and demand of quantity, iron took over bronze as the mainstay for armies, and bronze fell out of use (eventually both were taken over by the much stronger steel, though).

So, my suggestion is that bronze should at least have more durability than iron. It would be nice if it had the same amount of protection as iron, but I don't want it to become super overpowered, or become a better alternative to most faction-specific armor sets. Bronze weapons don't need to change, they're already accurately weak.

Also, it would be nice if ore generation were changed so that only one type of ore (copper or tin) spawned in each biome, if bronze were to become comparable to iron. This would make bronze realisticly hard to acquire, and give it more value than it currently has.

This doesn't really pertain to lotr-based content, it's just a change for realism.

How does this sound? Would it add needed value to bronze so that it's not such a useless metal? 