Arming Swords Skyrim HD 1_15a

WHAT IT DOES

It adds a couple of authentic broadswords from the European High Middle Ages, because, hey, it's medieval out there ;)

The weapons roughly equal Bethesda's similar steel weapons in weight, for balance reasons, and can be crafted and tempered as steel weapons. The single-handers are marginally better in base damage than the Akaviri Katana or the Redguard Fachion. The do double the crit bonus damage, and have double chance to crit. I.e., they ARE powerful for the early point when you can get them, but actually weaker than fairly ordinary stuff you'd find at higher levels. Ebony beats them in base damage, and Daedric beats them in any aspect.

Note that this is NOT some kind of comment on European vs Japanese swords. I like them both, and both did a fine job of killing people. I chose that point based purely on the considerations that (A) I want my weapons to still be at least competitive at the end of the game, but (B) not much more powerful than other weapons made of steel. I.e., I think it's conceivable that you can make a steel weapon a little bit better than other steel weapons, but I didn't want to exceed that so much as to end up in arguments about whether you'd absolutely need fantasy materials for that.

The two handers are balanced basically by scaling the base damage to a little less than a vanilla game two-hander would do, comparable to a single hander of the same material, but making them marginally faster. They also have slightly less reach than the other two handers. The reason is that these are more like early bastard swords (in fact, they would actually be called "bastard sword" at the time, as that was a term for a sword outside of the normal size ranges) than true two handers.

All stated types are the Oakeshott sword types, in as much as I can judge what type a sword is. Bear in mind though that swords were not made identical, and there was no such thing as buying a "Type X" sword at the time. There were thousands of smiths across a whole continent and across several centuries, and pretty much infinite variation in the swords they produced. So if my Type X is half an inch shorter than your Type X, well, please bear with me.

The hilts have dirty-ish black leather on the grip, and either

A) tarnished but shiny yellow metal on the cross and pommel. Take your pick between brass, bronze or gold-plated steel. While we don't have examples of brass hilts from the middle ages (but we do from the Renaissance), there are examples of "fire gilt" gold-plating on the hilts of swords made for nobles and kings. There is also evidence of yellow metal on hilts in contemporary art, but we do not know if it was supposed to be brass, bronze or gold. Or

B) just plain old grey shiny steel or iron.

Just choose in game which of those you want to use or craft. There is no stats difference between variants of the same weapon.