MBX

Also in reality not all of the ppl wearing mail would have padded as well, new armours were very expensive and many were passed from generations, so only clothes were used under it often too.

This is completely wrong. Mail was far more expensive than padding, and you would never wear mail without a padded jack underneath. If you had ever tried doing that, you would understand why - it's extraordinarily uncomfortable and obviously nonfunctional without the padded jack. In reality, the soldiers might lack mail but never padding - the soldiers that were too poor for good armor would wear just padding, or padding with something cheap thrown on top of it.

It would be 'wrong' to miss out the racial in terms of 'lore' - this is Middle-earth after all!
The Dunedain (Northern ones mainly) and Eldar are always better.

And this is already reflected with uber equipment and higher level troops...

This sounds like a reasonable baseline, but I would shy away from applying it mechanically as you propose. There should probably be a very high amount of variability off the baseline for immersion purposes, if the values are set so directly by the performance rather than the sorts of things that influence price in reality, it would be 'balanced' from a gameplay perspective but completely immersion breaking.

One factor you dont mention is weight. If you calculate weight in somehow (all other things being equal, the lighter item should be more expensive) that would get it a bit closer but you will still need a lot of fudge factors.

Probably he's hitting well-armored opponents. I know even at a decent tilt on a decent horse with a decent lance it can be hard to penetrate elf/dwarf type armour.

See my point?

I really do, I keep arguing this one back and forth myself.

Think about all those hours of unit vs. unit testing, then even more hours of testing how they all actually work in the game, with formations, party compositions and all. And if that's not done, the whole overhaul becomes just a blind shot.

On the other side... well I was balance/standards immortal for a popular mud for some years. Two different incarnations of the same mud, actually. On the first one, I took the approach you are advocating, for those reasons. But I found myself constantly needing this baseline. I made it on an ad-hoc basis, case by case, by looking at similar items/mobiles and comparing them. This was the way it had always been done and the results were more of the same - particular problems that were more visible got attention at various times and things 'near' to them would get looked over and sometimes tweaked in the process, while other issues of the same sort cruised by un-noticed. Over time the database became less, not more, coherent.

Later, with the benefit of hindsight and a fresh start with a new MUD, I started the task by setting a standards document spelling out the baseline and then auditting our entire starting database for conformance. Things really did go much better the second time, in so many ways... when new stuff was built there was always a 'stock' set of stats that could be slapped on it to start with and tweaked further, without ever letting stuff fall back to the traditional RNG profile.

Let's even look at your archer-infantry example. Why should the archer necessarily have lower melee skills then the infantryman?

All other things being equal he will have less melee skill simply because his training focused elsewhere, if your 'why' is seeking that sort of answer, and because otherwise the infantryman is superfulous, if you are seeking the other kind of answer.

A high level archer with better sword prof than a low level swordsman is ok, but when you are comparing troops at the same tier it doesnt make sense from a realism point of view or a gameplay point of view either. Someone who focuses roughly the same attributes and exertions entirely on melee will be better at it than someone that focuses on archery and uses the sword as a backup. And for gameplay why bother training swordsmen if they arent better at fighting than the archers?

If he were a specialized trained bowman - maybe. But what if he's a member of militia (say, Elven)? He could be equally trained to use both.

But he should still not be as good at one of them as someone that focuses completely on it. The warden line are generalists - their archery skill should be lower than dedicated archers, their sword skill higher, but not higher than that of a dedicated swordsman.

And again, this is all about making allowances off a baseline and you need to have a baseline defined to do that.

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Neither is anybody asking you to make this version compatible with RCM, or something.

I'm sorry, but don't bullshit me, ok? I could pull a dozen quotes where you and others sigh over the fact RCM has not been embraced by the dev team as the native model.
It's getting on my nerves a bit, that's all. I am also not so fond of your condescending remarks towards our balance. Like, come on, dude, we're right bloody here. We read this stuff.

I dont think anyone is trying to hurt your feelings or in any way belittle the work of you or the other dev staff, Merlkir. Are we supposed to guard our tongues so carefully we cant even talk about what we are doing to avoid offending you?

Obviously if we were happy with the standard TLD game balance we wouldnt be doing the sub mod, but if we werent on the whole completely enchanted with the rest of it we wouldnt be bothering to try and fix it either.

I think the arguments are all done and no need to rehash.

As Rohan I noticed that dismount horse archers = dead pikemen. I haven't played Rhun so far, but fighting against them as dwarves can be really hard. Especially the lower tier infantry gets massacred by their horse archers.

As soon as you get infantry that can withstand the hail of arrows you're about to receive it gets to be more in the dwarves' favor, as they will empty their arrows at you and charge in afterwards. The charge part is usually what kills them. I speed this up by mixing archers of my own so they can shoot the horses of Rhun.

As a dwarf I had a ton of fun running a mix of dwarf infantry and elven archers. Utterly devastating against Rhun in particular.  Even with massive numbers, their horse archers cant compete with elves at distance, and if they try to charge those dwarves eat them alive.

The only thing that stays really dangerous is the heavily armored horseman Rhun possesses. It can usually cut through 2 - 3 dwarves before his horse being cut down.

Unfortunately there are never many of those though.