Effects of Attack Value

[Didz]

It's a pretty easy thing to ascertain : if a missile unit is ordered to shoot at another unit that's on the very edge of its range, and said target moves away before the shooter has finished his animation, the animation will go through and shoot, and hit/miss, even though the target might well be very much out of range by then (it's even easier to see with javelins shooting at cavalry). Same goes for targets who run behind walls/hills between the start of an missile unit's cycle and the time they actually launch the arrows/bolts/bullets/javelins/tallywhackers.

I can see the logic of what you are saying, but I'm not convinced its entirely true.

The reason I have doubts is quite simply the fact that collateral damage is done by missile fire.

Logic would suggest that if hits were determined in advance of the firing animation then they would be calculated on the selected target unit and consequently the missiles that hit would fly straight and true to those men from the target unit which were pre-determined to be hit.

But they don't....

If you happen to be pursuing that unit frequently you see your own men go down because the target unit moved out of the field of fire and your cavalry ran straight into it.

Likewise, frequently you see men falling in other units alongside or behind the target unit which one would not expect to have been included.

Indeed with musketry fire, certainly in STW bridge battles, it was possible to see men drop in units hundreds of yards beyond the target unit, who are presumably being hit by spent balls fired at the unit crossing the bridge.

So, if what you say is true, the calculation of hits from missile fire would have to be pretty sophisticated to work out the odds of collateral damage to units who at the time of firing may not actually be in the field of fire but are predicted to move into it during the flight of the missile.

A classic test for instance would be to target a cannon at a unit and then just before the cannon fires move a friendly unit in front of it. If the hits were determined prior to the cannon firing then the ball ought to fly straight through the intervening unit and hit the target it was destined to hit. On the other hand if the ball ploughs through your hapless test unit it must be doing so because of collision detection as it could not possibly have predicted that you were going to be dumb enough to move that unit prior to you actually moving it.

Again in STW it was actually possible for archers to shoot the archer in front of them in the back if you got the unit badly deployed on a reverse slope, which seems to be a very unlikely scenario if the hits were being precalculated.

As far as melee combat is concerned I'm less certain.

Personally, I watch a lot of close up melee combat as I like looking for the 'funny's' that sometimes occur like the guy getting kicked in the balls.

So, far I've never noticed anyone go down with no logical reason for doing so. What I have noticed is that frequently the blow that kills them doesn't seem to connect perfectly, but I just put this down to the fact that every character in the game must have a collision zone which extends like an aura around the figure itself and that this coupled with animation lag sometimes results in the animation being triggered and not completing before the figures become seperated. Thus a sword strike appears to hit thin air but the target still goes down, that doesn't necessaily mean that the blow was not triggered by a collision, merely that the animation failed to keep pace with the result.