Lethality and Mass

[Ludens]

Lethality is the chance whether a successful hit translates into a kill or a knock-down. High lethality results in more kills, low lethality in more knock-downs.

The exact effect of mass is not known, other than that it determines which unit is pushed back, but it does appear that, all other things being equal, the unit with the highest mass has a slight advantage in combat.

[Miles Sueborum]

And what effects do Dammage and Defense have than? Do they decide wether it was an successful hit?

And is there an important difference between Shield, Skill and Armor?

[Roy1991]

The exact effect of mass is not known, other than that it determines which unit is pushed back, but it does appear that, all other things being equal, the unit with the highest mass has a slight advantage in combat.

Also, units with high mass take less casualties from cavalry charges.

[Ludens]

And what effects do Dammage and Defense have than? Do they decide wether it was an successful hit?

Yes. For more details, have a look at this post by Puzz3D.

And is there an important difference between Shield, Skill and Armor?

Armour protects against attacks from all directions, but this protection is halved in case the attack is made with an AP weapon/projectile. IIRC it also makes a unit suffer more fatigue, especially in hot climates. Defense does not protect against attacks from the back or missile attacks. Shield protects only against attacks from the front and left, but the shield value is dubbled against missile weapons. Also, running (but not walking) units do not get protection from their shields.

[Watchman]

IIRC it also makes a unit suffer more fatigue, especially in hot climates.

Wasn't that determined by the stat_heat line ?

[Ludens]

Wasn't that determined by the stat_heat line ?

It is? Perhaps I am confused with M:TW, then.

[blacksnail]

Defense does not protect against attacks from the back or missile attacks.

Actually Defense protects against attacks from the front and the right, but not the left or back. The only true overlap of all three defense stats occurs in the front.

[Watchman]

I can see where that could cause some odd results with melee flanking, given that the defense skill tends to be rather higher (and go up with exp to boot) than the shield value...

[xerex]

over in fatw forums, we have done some testing in the beta-tester forums.

Armor has NO direct effect on how quickly a unit gets tired or on how quickly it recovers in RTW.

We tested this by taking a unit with 0 armor and running it around on flat ground in hot climate to see how long it takes to go from fresh to exhausted.

We did the same test with a unit with 50 armor. There was no noticable difference in how quickly they get tired or how quickly they recover.

stat_heat must be used to represent the effects of heavy armor in hot weather. We have some tables lying around somewhere that show how quickly units got tired with various settings of stat_heat and hardy/very_hardy attribute at a dead run as well as how long it took for the units to recover with the various settings. I can dig them up if you want them. I couldn't discern a formula from the data, (too many variables, too few independent variables and too little knowledge of the stamina formula) but perhaps someone else can. Just let me know if you want them and I will make the effort to find them.

The basic results though are that stat_heat, as expected, hurts both stamina loss and recovery in all climates, but moreso in hot climates (barely noticeable in heat 1 climate or less). hardy/very_hardy do the same, but in all climates equally.

As for the effect of mass, it definitely affects charge casualties because it stops an enemy charge sooner and allows the unit's charge to go for longer. It also does the pushing thing as has been mentioned, but I don't know if it affects kill rate outside of a charge. I will put it on our to-test list.

As for lethality, Ludens is right I think (though we haven't checked the knockdown rate, we have checked the kill rate, and it is just a multiplier out in front of the kill probability formula).

Feel free to contact either Aradan or myself for further info about combat stuff. We are doing the unit balance for the fatw 2.0 patch and have investigated the effects of many attributes and number in the edu. We only post things we are sure of in public forums, but we are happy to share our preliminary unconfirmed research via pm or private forum.
We live mostly at the offical fatw forums or at chamber-of-records.com.

[Ludens]

That's insteresting stuff, xerex. I've posted a link to this thread in the "Unit stats and attributes thread" in the Ludus Magna forum.