>>528060717
Yeah it seems to be Tang era stuff, that's where you really start to notice the armors that envelop the neck particularly. In the Three Kingdoms era Chinese metallurgy was very primitive compared to more efficiently militarized societies like Rome, and the emphasis was(and has since been, pretty much) fielding larger and larger armies as the scale of warfare involved to encompass the whole country(things like the Yellow Turban Rebellion, despite their absolute lack of military prowess grew out of hand due to not enough troops able to cover all the land). Some smaller pseudo-states had emphasis on really good equipment and specialties but stuff like pic rel would have been considered prohibitively expensive and basically ceremonial, and it's still decades behind basic Roman metallurgists. Most Han dynasty/warlord troops would have had a breastplate of some sort of wood and a jī as their equipment if they were lucky(sharpened bamboo if not). Obviously it doesn't sell and looks kind of lame to have hordes of peasants in robes with looted breastplates stab at each other before a chariot runs them through so Romance depictions typically have them just use Tang or later era armors.

Rimworld