View Full Version : Creative Assembly Armor Piercing Infantry
Dionysus9
12-10-2002, 00:29
What type of bonus does an armor piercing infantry receive against an armored foe?
Lets say, v0 jannisary heavy infantry vs. abyssinian guard (defense 0, armor 1) as compared to vs. ChivFootKnights (defense 6, armor 5).
Jannisary heavy has attack of 5, plus armor piercing. I dont have the slightest idea how to calculated the df for jannisary heavies.
df = attack - defense + bonuses.
All other things being equal, what is the df for jannisary heavies v. abys guard and v. chivfootknights?
Does the bonus increase as the armor of the opponent increases? Is it a one time bonus regardless of the level of armature? That doesn't make sense because even peasants have armor (1). Is there a threshold before the bonus applies (3 armor?). I don't understand this armor piercing bonus.
I'm sure Puzz3d (Yuuki!http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif can help
The Armour Piercing bonus is calculated as follows:
(Target's armor value - 2 ) / 2
according to strategy guide
In your case it will be (5-2)/2 = 1.5 vs chiv foot knight
IIRC According to my conversation w/ elmo the the bonus only applies to units that has armour value >3. So if this rule is followed there will be no bonus from fighting abyssinian
EDIT : Here's what I want to know, how's the shield and armour added for defensive bonus ? Also the bonus of being mounted.
Yuuki can correct me http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif
Armour piercing bonus is added to the melee point of that unit. An opponent has armour of +7 would have (7-2)/2 = 2.5, (is there a round down to integer?) added to the Heavy Janitor (:)) unit's melee of 5. However, when the Janitors are attacking peasant, there is no bonus added because the peasants have armour of less than 3. So, the heavier the armour, the better the bonus.
Annie
Magyar Khan
12-10-2002, 01:06
*closes eyes and ears*
Shield give bonus to defense side of the equation.
1. There are units that can melee with shield, other cannot. Only the one with melee with shield can have the def. bonus. The bonus is a factor: 1.0 (full shield benefit when melee) 0.5 (half the shield bonus) and 0 no shield in melee.
2. There are two kind of shields: large and small. The large one adds 2 points to the def. while the small one adds 1 point to the def.
Multiply the factor in (1) with the number in (2) and you have the def.bonus. For instance, a small shield with a 0.5 factor would give 0.5 bonus point. A large shield with 1.0 factor (the Byz.Inf. has this) have +2 bonus points.
The kill chance is 0.019 * 1.2 EXP (Melee + attack bonus - Defense of the other side - defense bonus of the other side). You can give 1 blow, but if you are out-numbered, you may receive multiple blows.
Annie
Dionysus9
12-10-2002, 01:52
Thanks for the help, guys....
do you know if the armor piercing bonus doesn't apply if the target's armor is 3, or only if it is 4?
I mean does it apply to armor 3 or greater, or just to armor greater than 3?
Thanks.
Dosn't the manual explain in good detail how armor piercing works? Well, it should anyway.
It sucks when upgrading units online, if you just wanna increase a units defense you gotta upgrade armor, which in return upgrades armor and defense. If you wanna make a unit volar 0, but upgrade his defense and attack so when the unit gets a lot of kills it *if it gets a lot of kills*, it goes up in valor and has the weapon and armor upgrades. So, if you give a +3 to armor, not only will it tire the unit out, but armor piercing units get a bouns on the unit.
I wish you could upgrade defense without having to use armor upgrades.
Nobunaga0611
12-10-2002, 04:17
Yup I agree. I found that the only way to really make Abyssinian Guards effective head to head is to upgrade their armour to about +3 and keeping morale low, in order to keep them cost effective still. Yet, they get tired in the desert, eventhough they're basically wearing nothing but a moo-moo. If you can just upgrade off by upgrading the weapon, you should be able to do the same with armour.
Dionysus9
12-10-2002, 10:08
Yes the defense factor is a pain the rear to increase, and it is equally as important as attack.
So +1 armor upgrade gives +1 defense and +1 armor? hmmm...I thought it just gave armor. Doh, I'm a slow learner.
How bout some defense drills instead of always practicing attack? I will ask the headmaster about this....
Quote[/b] (AMPage @ Dec. 09 2002,15:50)]Dosn't the manual explain in good detail how armor piercing works? Well, it should anyway.
It sucks when upgrading units online, if you just wanna increase a units defense you gotta upgrade armor, which in return upgrades armor and defense. If you wanna make a unit volar 0, but upgrade his defense and attack so when the unit gets a lot of kills it *if it gets a lot of kills*, it goes up in valor and has the weapon and armor upgrades. So, if you give a +3 to armor, not only will it tire the unit out, but armor piercing units get a bouns on the unit.
I wish you could upgrade defense without having to use armor upgrades.
Manual doesnt say anything about these bonuses, I figure if the manual tells this none would buy the strategy guide don't u think ? hehe...
Each armour upgrade of +1 lessen the attacker kill chance by 1/2 if attacker has armour piercing bonus, so the armour piercing striker is actually disadvantaged by this instead of getting any bonus. Problem still remains with the fatigue though. For tedious proof of the -1/2 read below, of course you can always just take my words http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif.
PROOF:
armour upgrade since it adds +1 defense, and +1 armour, the add-up armour piercing bonus for striker would be at most 1/2 :
Current Upgraded
(n-2)/2 : ((n+1-2)/2
n/2 - 1 : n/2 + 1/2 - 1
n/2 - 1 : n/2 - 1 + 1/2
And since there's a defense bonus +1 to the defender, the kill chance for attacker actually decrease by 1/2
Attacker kill chance before
(a-d+bonus) assume bonus is only armour piercing n/2 - 1
Attacker kill chance after
(a-(d+1)+bonus+1/2)= a-d+bonus-1/2
Any rebuttal is welcome http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif
hmm... http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/idea.gif
If I got it correct.. when defender armour is > 3, attacker get positive bonus from pierce-weapon.
Assuming, that the defender already has armour > 3, a +1 armour upgrade gives +1 def +1 arm, and overall to the attacker with pierce-weapon its net combat factor decrease only by 1/2 pt, instead of 1 pt compared to a non-pierce unit.
So the unit with armour-piercing weapon still gain, as oppose to your statement. The armour-piercing units get maximise in effectiveness if
1. attack against an enemy unit with high base armour rating.
2. when attacking against an enemy with armour upgrades, it only gives the enemy an improvement of 0.5 combat point as compare to 1 pt (provided net armour > 3).
Correct me if wrong.
Bosdur is right, and tootee is right. The problem here is that attack/defend (or melee/defend if you wish) have to be integers. Remember that this number appears in the exponent, and raising a base number to a real exponential is very computationally intensive.
(1 - 2)/2 = -.5 means no bonus.
(2 - 2)/2 = 0.0 means no bonus.
(3 - 2)/2 = 0.5 means no bonus.
(4 - 2)/2 = 1.0 means 1 point bonus.
(5 - 2)/2 = 1.5 means 1 point bonus.
(6 - 2)/2 = 2.0 means 2 point bonus.
(7 - 2)/2 = 2.5 means 2 point bonus.
(8 - 2)/2 = 3.0 means 3 point bonus.
(9 - 2)/2 = 3.5 means 3 point bonus.
So on the even armor upgrade transitions above 3, an armor piercer picks up 1 point of attack, but looses it back to the +1 defense for no net gain. On the odd transitions, an armor piercer looses 1 net combat point like any non-armor piercer.
I am assuming here that LongJohn fixed the way armor piercing works to be consistent with his original intent as described by him here at the org and in the Strategy Guide. In MTW v1.0, armor had to be greater than 5 for armor piercing weapons to get a bonus. That was a late change prior to the original release suggested by Activision, and LongJohn subsequently said that he didn't think the weakening of the armor piercing was a good change.
So which units would u say r best to hit? Ones with armour of 3 or more?
Puzz...
I remember back before the patch I asked how AP worked and longjohn came around and told me it was supposed to work like you put it up (Armour-2)/2, but it worked like armour-3, and that was bug. Also the devs in total felt that AP units were too weak (Activision had lobbied for weakening them before release) and thus the bug was removed as well as the AP was changed to (Armour-1)/2... so AP works from Armour 3.
Longjohn said directly that he would change the AP to work from Armour 3, so I only backteched to the equation.
So the Guide is no longer correct, in fact it has never had the correct numbers for AP because of the bug before the patch.
You can verify this by pinning Gothic Knights against Lancers. The Gothics will defeat the Lancer very easily despite suffering heavy losses in the charge, this can't be done if they only had a +2 to attack, and thus +1 compared to the Lancers.
Tootee, What I aimed to rebut was the assumption that upgrading armour is bad against armour piercing striker because when you get an additional armour, you are actually giving better bonus to the armour piercing striker." Since the armour piercing striker gets -1/2 combat factor or kill chance if defender upgrades it armour, the former assumption isn't true.
Thanks for the clarification yuuki, now it's either no gain of combat factor from armour piercing striker or -1 gain. However, this makes upgrading a little bit tricky (considering armour piercing striker only) suppose at the 1st upgrade we get an odd armour value, striker gets -1 so it serves the purpose, at the 2nd upgrade we will get the striker to have same combat factor as before, so we waste the 35 % upgrade cost for nothing.
My current assumption is this: In order to minimize the bonuses of the armour piercing striker, defender has to upgrade to +2 armour if his current armour has an odd value. and to +1 or +3 only if his current armour has an even value. Is this correct ? Not something that you need to consider greatly since not all striker is armour piercing, but for all those ppl who love being tedious in troop selection I think this is important hehe... .
Fast: Well, since you can't see how many armour upgrade a defender has, my answer to you is dont bother, just like kocmoc or magyar think about it, "FEEL IT" dont be too mechanical http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif. In this case I kinda agree with them.
I too wonder what is the rational that an attacker will have a higher chance to kill a defender when a defender upgrade his armour.. even if the attacker is armour-piercer.. its like its easier to penetrate a fullplate than a chain-mail. The whole armour-piercing bonus formula doesnt look logical.
It is more logical to me that armour-piercer be given a one-time attack bonus vs defender, and is offset by the defender armour rating. Something like
attack bonus from armour piercing weapon = (10 - defender's armour) / 2, with a cap at 3 lets say.
It's equivalent to saying ,e.g. that the axe penerates any armour < 4 with the same ease thus the cap at 3, while defender armour upgrades should logically make it harder for the attacker's axe to strike thru.
Dionysus9
12-11-2002, 09:55
The way I imagine the armor-piercing bonus to make it seem logical is this:
I could run circles around a man in full-plate-mail armor. I could run around behind him and push him over. Aside from wildly swinging his sword, I dont think he'd have much chance to stop me. Once he's down I can pry up his helmet and stab him in the neck. Boom. He's out.
(Correct me if I'm wrong) Heavy armor developed to protect the wearer from ranged attacks--arrows and later musketballs. It was particularly useful for mounted knights who had to run headfirst into a hail of arrows, and had all the maneuverability they needed as long as they stayed on their horse.
Infantry in anything other than chainmail (armor 3?) is going to get outmaneuvered by lightly armored troops. If those troops are skilled at attacking an armored unit (i.e. "armor piercing") they should be able to make use of their manueverability advantage in the form of a bonus.
At least that is one way to "justify" the somewhat whacky armor system.
Kraxis,
The Gothic Knight 4/4/7/9 + armor pierce vs the Lancer 8/5/7/9. The armor pierce bonus would be (9-2)/2 = 3. According to that, the Gothic Knight would have a 2 point (44%) advantage after the charge was over. I believe the 4 point charge advantage of the Lancer is roughly equivalent to 1 point of melee, so the Gothic Knight would still have an advantage using the Strategy Guide formula. Using your formula the Gothic Knight would get an additional point (73%) advantage in melee. I don't remember LongJohn saying that he changed the formula to (armor - 1)/2. I do remember him saying something about armor 3, but was that "from" 3 or "above" 3, and couldn't the "from" mean "above"? This could probably be established with some careful testing.
Hahaha... I calculated wrong here... I will go and test on lower levels. Where we are talking about Armour 3.
Ok...
I tested Vikings vs FMAA, the Vikings got 2 armour to make up for the 2 defensive advantage the FMAA had, the Armour itself is of no consequence in this matter as the FMAA does not have AP. Besides this they are equal with a difference in Morale (4 vs 2) but since both are generals they get +2 making this a smaller issue.
All tests were on flat land (have no better than Agincourt unfortunately), and on Hard setting.
First I was the Vikings attacking. The FMAA did not move until the last 2000 units (engagement range, can be found in the prod files), so my Vikings only fought a few seconds before becoming Quite Fresh. But nevertheless they won in 6 of 7 battles, with kills averaging 46 and losses averaging 34.
When I tried being the FMAA defending, it was a no-contest battle. The Vikings wiped the floor with my men.
After four battles I did not test any more.
The FMAA averaged 16 kills and the Vikings 46 again...
Clearly the Vikings had some other advantage. And since the only difference in combat stats is the AP (Morale does not affect combat directly) I can only conclude that the AP was the difference that won the battle for teh Vikings, and FMAA have Armour 3. longjohn posted that shields don't count towards the AP.
I re-post what LongJohn had posted sometime back *b4 the patch*
Quote[/b] ]For calculating armour piercing bonuses, shields don't count, but horse armour does (as it isn't counted separately
).
I've changed this for the patch, so that bonuses will start against foot with 3 armour ( chainmail ) or cavalry with 4
armour ( some of cavalry's armour factor is due to the horse which is soft and squishy).
I reduced the effectiveness of the armour piercing bonus late in the project, as I noticed that all the units
Activision complained about as being too powerful had axes or halbards, but in retrospect that was a bad move.
Armour piercing works differently with missiles. Each missile type has an armour penetration rating. The target's
armour is multiplied by this, before deciding whether a kill is scored.
The factor for bows is 1, and for longbows it's 0.5, so when hit by a longbow, units count half as much armour as
they actually have ( can't remember if this includes shields too ). These stats will be in separate file in the patch.
Not sure whether it is still valid for v1.1
Yes, that was exactly that But I could not find it when I searched... how did you?
Apparently I forgot that AP works from Armour 4 on cav, so clearly we were both right... haha. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/cool.gif
Quote[/b] (Kraxis @ Dec. 11 2002,18:08)]Yes, that was exactly that But I could not find it when I searched... how did you?
I keep an archive on such posts on my hdisk. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smokin.gif
Thanks tootee. Yes that's the post I remember, but it still strikes me as a bit ambiguous. I thought he might have meant 0.5 as the "start" of the bonus, but Kraxis' test does indicate an effect is being felt at armor = 3.
Kraxis,
You could use a "Steppe" map. Those are flat. Remember, LongJohn said that the ai gets a 10% combat advantage on hard difficulty. If the Vikings were picking up a 1 point (20%) armor piercing bonus, that would be enough to retain a 10% advantage over the ai's FMMA. I think it's quite lucky to get 6 out of 7 wins with such a small advantage. The fact that you lost by a bigger margin with the FMAA than the ai did indicates that "hard" is not a balanced setting. The ai would presumably have a 30% advantage with the Vikings, and that is getting into the range where vistory is assured. My own personal rule of thumb here is 2 combat points guarantees a win with all other things being equal.
tootee,
It is counter intuitive that heavier armor alone means less protection from armor piercing weapons. However, if you bring in the concept of momement as Dion does, you could argue that armor piercing weapons, being heavy and cumbersome, have a better chance of striking an accurate lethal blow on slower moving targets. We would have to assume that the weapon has no trouble penetrating the armor if the blow is precise. Armor damage from glancing blows is not modelled in the game. You either kill the target when you strike it or you don't.
longjohn2
12-11-2002, 23:21
I don't quite understand what you find counter intuitive about the armour piercing bonus. The target still gets the full defensive value of his armour, so the bonus just reduces the effect a little bit. You're always better off with more armour, even against units with ap weapons.
The way to think of it is, is that armour only counts as half effect against armour piercing weapons.
Puzz I know very well the AI get an advantage on Hard and we get an advantage on Medium. I just feel it is easier to manage where the AI is slightly stronger.
There were more tests but I removed the ones where the generals died. Or else the FMAA would have won another and the Vikings too. But lets not forget that the Vikings by having a better attack would have a better charge as well and I noted that the FMAA lost 4-7 men every time and the Vikings never above 3 in the charge, so the FMAA were on the defensive from the get go.
Actually since the AP works from Armour 3, the descriptions fits the AP unitss, as it says Bonus vs Armoured opponenets. And Armoured is at Armour 3. I think this is well worth it.
Before the Vikings were overpriced, especially compared to the 150 florin FMAA, now they are fairly equal.
LongJohn,
I didn't elaborate, but I was thinking of the armor itself. Without considering the defense parameter, as armor increases a unit does poorer in hth combat against a unit with an armor piercing weapon. The algorithm itself is a reverse relationship. If you had two different units that had identical att/def stats but one had higher armor, the unit with higher armor would loose faster against an armor piercer than the unit with lower armor. I think this is a result of the fact that armor does not play a direct role in hth combat. For instance, when considering projectiles, the 0.5 modifier on armor for longbows works as you would expect. Higher armor troops still get more protection although at 1/2 the rate. Your system of adding +1 defense with an armor upgrade works well within a single unit type to overcome the reverse trend of the algorithm.
Actually, it just occured to me that, if a fractional modifier was applied to that portion of the defend value that was due to the armor, it would work the same way the armor modifier does with projectile weapons. You could even have different armor modifiers for different types of hth armor piercing weapons.
Puzz most units with good armour has good defense as well.
There are no units that have high armour and low def. Some of the def can be considered to be armour working.
So at all times the armour should be considered part of the def.
Vinsitor
12-14-2002, 00:19
Quote[/b] (Kraxis @ Dec. 11 2002,10:08)]Yes, that was exactly that But I could not find it when I searched... how did you?
Apparently I forgot that AP works from Armour 4 on cav, so clearly we were both right... haha. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/cool.gif
Here you are the link Kraxis http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif
http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/Forum14/HTML/000139.html
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