Statisticians needed

[Swoosh So]

Say you have 60 pav crossbowmen on 1 side no valor or any upgrades ie v0 w0 a0, and on the other side you have 60 pav crossbow men v0 w0 a2, what are the calculatins involved in these shootouts? does the armor upgrade make any real difference (taking into consideration that crossbows are good against armoured units).

[Mithrandir]

yes, it never made sense to me, (the AP bit), but armour upgrades make a world of difference in pav battles.

I always have V1 A3 pavs, the V1 stops them from routing after a cav charge, the a3 is just to kick the other pavs off the map.

[CBR]

Crossbows have an armour multiplier of 0.4 meaning enemy armour is only counted as 40%. I dont know the precise formula for how armour works to reduce losses from missiles but the armour upgrades still helps even against crossbows.

I can give one example. I have played hundreds of 15k 1.1 battles with pav arbs with the "standard" 3 armour upgrades. Last few weeks I have had some 5k battles where I dont have any armour upgrades on them. And there is a big difference as pav arb shootouts is a lot more lethal compared to the 15k game. Arbs have an armour multiplier of 0.3 so they have even better armour penetration than crossbows.


CBR

[Puzz3D]

According to some tests I did, kills vs armor is a linear relationship, so you would have to double the armor rating to cut your losses per 60 man volley in half. However, there is an increasing advantage to a unit that gets even slightly more kills/volley than it looses. The advantage is small in the beginning, but can become very large after a while. I think that's why a relatively small advantage of v0a2 vs v0a0 can make such a big difference, but it does take many volleys to achieve that difference since the kills/volley are relatively low which does give time to react to the situation. In we/mi v102, the muskets had such high kills/volley and such fast reload that one unanswered volley would win the shootout very quickly with little expenditure of ammo which almost guaranteed overall victory since one musket could kill 200+ men. Unlike stw, in mtw/vi a dead man's unused ammo is not available to the remaining men in the unit, so total potential kills is declining as well as kills per volley. Fatigue is also a factor because an exhaused unit gets almost no hits, so it's worth considering resting exhausted shooters.

[Aelwyn]

So in theory if I understand correctly, if your unit is cut down by 1/3 then your kills/volley should be cut by about the same amount in theory. It does make sense though if you think of it in terms of the amount of men you have left firing. If your unit gets depleted quickly then they will be firing less missles at their target, thus less kills.

I use this info to decide when I will rest my missles. If they are being killed very slowly, like maybe 1 kill per volley, I can easily wait 3-4 volleys before wanting to start shooting again. My remaining men will (in effect) have 3-4 more volleys than their target that has been continuously shooting. And when they run out, I can ignore them and look to the more expensive infantry behind them.