I love Under Armor in this game; it is definitely worth crafting for later game runs (or even modded) because it closes the gap between you and the heavy hitters of some factions. Personally, I do the same with crafting chainmail for heavies and super heavies, while my rangers and scouts get the leather turtleneck. Also, I love your content, man. You're doing wonders for the Kenshi community. Keep up the great work! ;)
I personally respect chainmail a lot. My early (relatively) game recepie - chainmail + heart protector (less debuffs and weight than most heavy armors) or very recently - chainmail + assasins rags + polearm weapon like staff (with high attack bonus). Everything else it depends on a race. Samurai clothpants are quite useless for hivers, since additional stomach protection is irrelevant for them. My personal universal favorite - sneaky chain + armored longboots.
Usually my armor smith process is to start training the armorer by turning skins into leather. Surplus leather can be sold, fabric will be needed to craft leather gears as well but I can make some green grade or higher armor by this point for the combatants. Once I get the tech for armor plate production I can continue training armorers to convert ore into armor plate. Once I can reliably make specialist grade and the team all have their gear, the last one to make are turtlenecks due to their long craft time. Eventually I'll phase the leather turtlenecks for blackened chainmail.
Your Armor Guides are indispensable! I've been stubbornly using Ninja rags because I don't want to use armor that has debuffs, but, thanks to your explanations and comparisons, you've shown me that some debuffs aren't that bad. I found the entire Debuff nomenclature of things like "0.85x" confusing anyway, so thanks for clearing that up.
Deym you're probably one of the best if not the best youtuber in kenshi that i ever found, most are just spewing bad tier list. Thank you for these armor series, i learned quite a lot! 😎💯✨
Medieval societies irl struggled with that as well. Forming all of those little links by hand is insanely time consuming. Thankfully while chainmail is still in use in niche forms (sharkproof diving suits being one of the big ones) we have machines that can do all that fine motor skill requiring work for us.
Chainmail has been both a blessing and a curse in Kenshi. The use of Chainmail and Blackened variant over Leather Turtlenecks often involve that 10% coverage difference in addition to damage reduction. Beyond that the use of normal and blackened variants of the full mail are anticipating the foes a Tank or Medium fighter would face. Blackened squeezes more blunt and harpoon protection at the expense of effective cut protection but keeps arrows away and bludgeoning enemy from slapping them silly with clubs, cleavers, and fish fists. Regular can be a lifesaver in the face of high cut opposition, particularly all spiders, beak things, crabs, and people brandishing Falling Suns. On the other hand, Mediums may opt for chain shirts to reduce the dexterity penalty or switch to leather turtlenecks or dark leather shirt to avoid the penalty altogether. Sneaky chain cargo pants also fall the same niche when trying to balance weight limit and protection: banking on consistent leg protection from enemies that emphasize cut damage. Samurai clothpants better fit the generalist situations, and the Legplate variant for tanks.
Fantastic breakdown as always Paul. Glad to see you still feeding us content. Have you considered doing the weapons of the game, breaking down the various grades and usefulness of them, and so on?
I usually only put chain shirts on my main tank unit(s) where dealing dmg is less imporant, so for example the taunter among a group of soldiers, cause that dexterity hit on chainmail is too much for me in general. Any explorer types / balanced types / soldier types, basically anyone else than the designated tanker, will get a masterwork turtleneck instead, 0 downsides to dmg output and stealth and block more often, so blocking more often entirely instead of taking blunt damage as well. Plus at masterwork a shirt provides the same blunt protection as chainmail, albeit with 25% lower (33,5% total) cut resistance and 10-20% lower cut resistance efficiency. I view those as "getting most of the benefit, without any of the downsides". My explorers get Darkened Leather shirts. Almost everyone else gets Turtlenecks. Warriors get blackend chain shirts once I can afford it.
You should do a Mod recommendation video. I want to get back into Kenshi but I don't want to play it completely bare bones. Map mods, some QoL, recruiting captured enemies, etc. Things that get early game moving a bit faster. Some early, midgame mods and late game mods.
was hoping to hear your thoughts on the dex and combat speed penalties on gear(such as the chainmail which comes with a rather chunky 15% reduction to dex? I actually downgraded from chain to turtlenecks just so I could get the faster block and attack rates from dex/speed, I'm not entirely sure how the numbers work out(I suspect it also varies depending on relative skill difference), but if you can't block/attack you're taking extra damage and fights take longer?
Lil coment on the sneaky chain cargopants i know they heavy but, if you have the blueprint it can be crafted on the clothing bench for some reason, so its not bad in the early before you have access to the chainmail tech. Sorry for the bad english btw
I noticed that your advanced combat animations mod is bugged by how that guy killed a skimmer without any animation. I suggest reimporting the mod, and checking the mod load order... try reinstalling the latest version too, double check if you're not using custom races because you need to add separate values for them in FCS i can help you if you don't know how to do that
I'm still new to kenshi but I hadn't been thinking about this yet since my squad for combat has been just me and beep. It's nice to know that there is underarmor for hivers I thought it was just kenshi being racist again
If your character if buff af then Falling Sun Compromise would be Heavy Polearm or just a regular Polearm. Sabres don't have much blunt damage but they're lighter and still very good.
To be honest, the only thing you need is indeed the leather turtlenecks for the shirt slot. Best cover and no penalties. i Never use chain shirts. i sometimes use black leather for stealth. btw, please look at the mods that fix the cutting resistance for regular armors. those are basically a must have. Makes the armors work properly. apparently there is a formula logic error in vanilla.
Light pants options are always going to have it rough because of the penalties that heavy pants have are so mild, and for the pre-cyborg portion of the game you can fully overwhelm these penalties to turn all of them into a bonuses by exploiting how strong the heavy pants are to abuse one cheap foot slot item. Heavy leggings + sandals is just a strict upgrade over boots + light leggings. Especially important because the heavy leggings have arranged themselves into the godly option, and a bunch of "OK" options. Sadly, while the game provides a lot of nuance for how your upper body is armored, the lower body slots have 80% of their spectrum of what they are capable of eaten by a single loadout. (With only cyborgs, and the lightest 10% of characters being better off with something different.) So while there is room for boots + drifters plated pants/some sort of cargo pants, 99% of these builds are all stats objectively worse then sandals + samurai legs, with the light pants only shining if for some reason you strictly need a build that's faster then the standard loadout, are a cyborgs/some nonhuman that can't use combat speed bonuses, or where the 40% chance of taking less leg damage is somehow strictly needed to win a fight. (Which, shouldn't be probable enough to consider, given the low chances of leg AND boot hits. Your bottleneck is typically going to be in the left arm or the chest in high protection duels. Or the head for skeletons and hivers.) Still, for the cyborgs with us, high blunt resistance light leggings can make a ton of sense at the very least.
I feel like chainmail is usually not worth it. I used it for big hard battles in my best characters and my conclusion was that aldough they could absorve way more damage, they did less dps and therefore received more hits. I still use it tho, so i can level faster my stats.
As someone with almost 700 hours in Kenshi, I can say with confidence that chain is more than worth it. In fact I'd even say it's crucial. Crucial enough that my pure stealth ninja types have chain, too. The reason why is that for minimal downsides and some weight, you get an insane amount of survivability, the decrease in dps is normal considering the stat debuff, but overall the amount of damage dealt in a full fight is actually increased by enough of a margain to not only offset the lower dps, but actually make it a benefit instead, because you will survive for much longer, which will let you make more attacks and land more hits. The only time this is an exception I'd say is combat stats below 10, maybe 15. It's that useful that quickly, and putting one on for a fighter with only combat stats at 1 isn't detrimental. One other bonus that you might not be aware of, but stat debuffs can actually become desirable, as stats lowered by armour makes that debuffed stat quicker to train.
@@daredeviler2088 only certain debuffs actually improve training, and nothing on Chainmail helps you, it's pure useless penalties that just hurt you. Melee Attack, Melee Defense, Martial Arts, and Dodge (sort of), are the only helpful debuffs. (Dexterity is an SOL skill but doesn't directly compare against anything). Dodge and Dex are the only SOL skills it affects but it barely affects dodge (the rest of your training suit will already reduce it to almost 0 since chainmail is only a ~10% reduction, while a large back-pack is a -75% reduction, +whatever the rest of your kit does). And Dex is special in that it doesn't actually compare against anything, it just adopts whatever SOL modifier your melee attack or martial arts is getting based on whether you have a weapon or not. Chainmail just makes you worse at training due to adding extra combat speed penalties directly AND reducing your combat speed bonus by lowering your dex. Which makes it slower to build your attack/dex stats as you need to attack for those. there's a minor benefit for the first day of training since higher protection results in functionally better melee defense/toughness growth, but since the difference in protection is so tiny between leather turtleneck and Chainmail, it ultimately doesn't make enough difference and ends up making you even slower in combat so it takes longer before your character start fighting back. basically the only time i use chainmail is if I can get it for free and at higher quality than other leather options. I.e. if I'm doing a hub start, I'll use the gauranteed set of High Chainmail you can get for my first combat characters for their intial training, but once I can replace it with Specialist+ leather turtleneck I basically never touch Chainmail again unless I just need to fill the slot with something, in which case the chain-mail will keep getting hand-me-downed until I run out of people that need it.
Too many steps to make chain armor, too many resources, too much time, not worth. I only use the shirts I can "acquire" from the armor king, and they are usually employed for toughness-dodge-martial arts training.
I love Under Armor in this game; it is definitely worth crafting for later game runs (or even modded) because it closes the gap between you and the heavy hitters of some factions. Personally, I do the same with crafting chainmail for heavies and super heavies, while my rangers and scouts get the leather turtleneck.
Also, I love your content, man. You're doing wonders for the Kenshi community. Keep up the great work! ;)
your vids have been carrying my recent playthrough, probably the best kenshi guides ive seen
Happy to help! Kenshi has a huge learning curve.
I personally respect chainmail a lot. My early (relatively) game recepie - chainmail + heart protector (less debuffs and weight than most heavy armors) or very recently - chainmail + assasins rags + polearm weapon like staff (with high attack bonus). Everything else it depends on a race. Samurai clothpants are quite useless for hivers, since additional stomach protection is irrelevant for them. My personal universal favorite - sneaky chain + armored longboots.
Usually my armor smith process is to start training the armorer by turning skins into leather.
Surplus leather can be sold, fabric will be needed to craft leather gears as well but I can make some green grade or higher armor by this point for the combatants.
Once I get the tech for armor plate production I can continue training armorers to convert ore into armor plate.
Once I can reliably make specialist grade and the team all have their gear, the last one to make are turtlenecks due to their long craft time.
Eventually I'll phase the leather turtlenecks for blackened chainmail.
This is the way!
A breakdown of the armour tiers and weapon tiers would be cool. Yes, I could go on the wiki and read. But you make really informative videos.
A big reason why I like making these videos is because it's a pain to tab over to the wiki so much, just to get little pieces of information. 😅
Wear samurai leg plates, assassins rags, dark leather shirt, and crab helmet they are best in slot, no boots because robotics
@@paulrogersgamingif you wear chainmail you don’t know what you are doing 😂
Rip skeletons
Your Armor Guides are indispensable! I've been stubbornly using Ninja rags because I don't want to use armor that has debuffs, but, thanks to your explanations and comparisons, you've shown me that some debuffs aren't that bad. I found the entire Debuff nomenclature of things like "0.85x" confusing anyway, so thanks for clearing that up.
0.85x just means that stat is reduced by 15%
Deym you're probably one of the best if not the best youtuber in kenshi that i ever found, most are just spewing bad tier list. Thank you for these armor series, i learned quite a lot! 😎💯✨
He is wrong about chainmail never wear it, it sucks
The reason why I don’t produce Chainmail to my gang it’s because it takes so long to make just one, and it’s quite expensive to produce.
Medieval societies irl struggled with that as well. Forming all of those little links by hand is insanely time consuming. Thankfully while chainmail is still in use in niche forms (sharkproof diving suits being one of the big ones) we have machines that can do all that fine motor skill requiring work for us.
Well I just watched all your videos, excited for more!
Chainmail has been both a blessing and a curse in Kenshi.
The use of Chainmail and Blackened variant over Leather Turtlenecks often involve that 10% coverage difference in addition to damage reduction. Beyond that the use of normal and blackened variants of the full mail are anticipating the foes a Tank or Medium fighter would face. Blackened squeezes more blunt and harpoon protection at the expense of effective cut protection but keeps arrows away and bludgeoning enemy from slapping them silly with clubs, cleavers, and fish fists. Regular can be a lifesaver in the face of high cut opposition, particularly all spiders, beak things, crabs, and people brandishing Falling Suns. On the other hand, Mediums may opt for chain shirts to reduce the dexterity penalty or switch to leather turtlenecks or dark leather shirt to avoid the penalty altogether.
Sneaky chain cargo pants also fall the same niche when trying to balance weight limit and protection: banking on consistent leg protection from enemies that emphasize cut damage. Samurai clothpants better fit the generalist situations, and the Legplate variant for tanks.
Have been waiting for this, thanks!
Fantastic breakdown as always Paul. Glad to see you still feeding us content. Have you considered doing the weapons of the game, breaking down the various grades and usefulness of them, and so on?
I usually only put chain shirts on my main tank unit(s) where dealing dmg is less imporant, so for example the taunter among a group of soldiers, cause that dexterity hit on chainmail is too much for me in general.
Any explorer types / balanced types / soldier types, basically anyone else than the designated tanker, will get a masterwork turtleneck instead, 0 downsides to dmg output and stealth and block more often, so blocking more often entirely instead of taking blunt damage as well.
Plus at masterwork a shirt provides the same blunt protection as chainmail, albeit with 25% lower (33,5% total) cut resistance and 10-20% lower cut resistance efficiency.
I view those as "getting most of the benefit, without any of the downsides".
My explorers get Darkened Leather shirts.
Almost everyone else gets Turtlenecks.
Warriors get blackend chain shirts once I can afford it.
You should do a Mod recommendation video. I want to get back into Kenshi but I don't want to play it completely bare bones. Map mods, some QoL, recruiting captured enemies, etc. Things that get early game moving a bit faster. Some early, midgame mods and late game mods.
Great guides !
was hoping to hear your thoughts on the dex and combat speed penalties on gear(such as the chainmail which comes with a rather chunky 15% reduction to dex? I actually downgraded from chain to turtlenecks just so I could get the faster block and attack rates from dex/speed, I'm not entirely sure how the numbers work out(I suspect it also varies depending on relative skill difference), but if you can't block/attack you're taking extra damage and fights take longer?
Lil coment on the sneaky chain cargopants i know they heavy but, if you have the blueprint it can be crafted on the clothing bench for some reason, so its not bad in the early before you have access to the chainmail tech. Sorry for the bad english btw
thanks! very informative!
🙌
Still hoping to see a helmet guide!
Please Hamster I'm begging you do the Northern Coast
Hamster lives matter!
I almost always go for martial artist bindings, that 5% bonus damage goes hard
Even if it gives literal 0 protection
I noticed that your advanced combat animations mod is bugged by how that guy killed a skimmer without any animation.
I suggest reimporting the mod, and checking the mod load order... try reinstalling the latest version too, double check if you're not using custom races because you need to add separate values for them in FCS
i can help you if you don't know how to do that
Will do! Thanks for the comment and the assistance
I'm still new to kenshi but I hadn't been thinking about this yet since my squad for combat has been just me and beep. It's nice to know that there is underarmor for hivers I thought it was just kenshi being racist again
What weapon would be good for this armor like would heavy weapons be good?
If your character if buff af then Falling Sun
Compromise would be Heavy Polearm or just a regular Polearm.
Sabres don't have much blunt damage but they're lighter and still very good.
where do u get masterwork chainmail??
To be honest, the only thing you need is indeed the leather turtlenecks for the shirt slot. Best cover and no penalties. i Never use chain shirts. i sometimes use black leather for stealth.
btw, please look at the mods that fix the cutting resistance for regular armors. those are basically a must have. Makes the armors work properly. apparently there is a formula logic error in vanilla.
Chainmail is great but WHY does it reduce crossbow skill? I would use it a hell of a lot more if it didn't.
very good video🥰
When Headgear Vid?
One day... Been taking a break but the headgear video will be up eventually
Light pants options are always going to have it rough because of the penalties that heavy pants have are so mild, and for the pre-cyborg portion of the game you can fully overwhelm these penalties to turn all of them into a bonuses by exploiting how strong the heavy pants are to abuse one cheap foot slot item.
Heavy leggings + sandals is just a strict upgrade over boots + light leggings. Especially important because the heavy leggings have arranged themselves into the godly option, and a bunch of "OK" options.
Sadly, while the game provides a lot of nuance for how your upper body is armored, the lower body slots have 80% of their spectrum of what they are capable of eaten by a single loadout. (With only cyborgs, and the lightest 10% of characters being better off with something different.)
So while there is room for boots + drifters plated pants/some sort of cargo pants, 99% of these builds are all stats objectively worse then sandals + samurai legs, with the light pants only shining if for some reason you strictly need a build that's faster then the standard loadout, are a cyborgs/some nonhuman that can't use combat speed bonuses, or where the 40% chance of taking less leg damage is somehow strictly needed to win a fight. (Which, shouldn't be probable enough to consider, given the low chances of leg AND boot hits. Your bottleneck is typically going to be in the left arm or the chest in high protection duels. Or the head for skeletons and hivers.)
Still, for the cyborgs with us, high blunt resistance light leggings can make a ton of sense at the very least.
notifications gang
Bonk
Beep
@@CyberBeep_kenshiBeep put on some clothes.
@@grammaton3773 Beep!
🎉
I feel like chainmail is usually not worth it. I used it for big hard battles in my best characters and my conclusion was that aldough they could absorve way more damage, they did less dps and therefore received more hits. I still use it tho, so i can level faster my stats.
My experience is on the contrary - you cant deal much damage if you are dead or heavily wounded.
As someone with almost 700 hours in Kenshi, I can say with confidence that chain is more than worth it. In fact I'd even say it's crucial. Crucial enough that my pure stealth ninja types have chain, too.
The reason why is that for minimal downsides and some weight, you get an insane amount of survivability, the decrease in dps is normal considering the stat debuff, but overall the amount of damage dealt in a full fight is actually increased by enough of a margain to not only offset the lower dps, but actually make it a benefit instead, because you will survive for much longer, which will let you make more attacks and land more hits. The only time this is an exception I'd say is combat stats below 10, maybe 15. It's that useful that quickly, and putting one on for a fighter with only combat stats at 1 isn't detrimental.
One other bonus that you might not be aware of, but stat debuffs can actually become desirable, as stats lowered by armour makes that debuffed stat quicker to train.
@@daredeviler2088 only certain debuffs actually improve training, and nothing on Chainmail helps you, it's pure useless penalties that just hurt you.
Melee Attack, Melee Defense, Martial Arts, and Dodge (sort of), are the only helpful debuffs. (Dexterity is an SOL skill but doesn't directly compare against anything).
Dodge and Dex are the only SOL skills it affects but it barely affects dodge (the rest of your training suit will already reduce it to almost 0 since chainmail is only a ~10% reduction, while a large back-pack is a -75% reduction, +whatever the rest of your kit does).
And Dex is special in that it doesn't actually compare against anything, it just adopts whatever SOL modifier your melee attack or martial arts is getting based on whether you have a weapon or not.
Chainmail just makes you worse at training due to adding extra combat speed penalties directly AND reducing your combat speed bonus by lowering your dex. Which makes it slower to build your attack/dex stats as you need to attack for those.
there's a minor benefit for the first day of training since higher protection results in functionally better melee defense/toughness growth, but since the difference in protection is so tiny between leather turtleneck and Chainmail, it ultimately doesn't make enough difference and ends up making you even slower in combat so it takes longer before your character start fighting back.
basically the only time i use chainmail is if I can get it for free and at higher quality than other leather options. I.e. if I'm doing a hub start, I'll use the gauranteed set of High Chainmail you can get for my first combat characters for their intial training, but once I can replace it with Specialist+ leather turtleneck I basically never touch Chainmail again unless I just need to fill the slot with something, in which case the chain-mail will keep getting hand-me-downed until I run out of people that need it.
in min max builds, anything that hinders stats taht much is skippable.
For a martial arts build you can get away with using a chainmail shirt
train with loads of penalties till very high, and then light armors and unleash :)
Too many steps to make chain armor, too many resources, too much time, not worth. I only use the shirts I can "acquire" from the armor king, and they are usually employed for toughness-dodge-martial arts training.
Chain mails sucks wear a shirt