Effects of Attack Value

[Kobal2fr]

@Didz : "horseman bumps into foot soldier, footman instantly keels over" happens all the time when horses charge - I call this the Aura of Death. Lots of static electricity in those platemails . It's *very* noticeable in this video (sorry Foz if I'm ruining your bandwidth )

I believe that what happens is that units that are considered to be "charging" don't need their hits to be followed by an animation at all, which kinda makes sense. If it wasn't the case, then a charging cav unit would only kill 20 men tops on the charge (considering a 40-strong unit charging in two rows) instead of ploughing through infantry as they're supposed to. It also happens with charging inf, but since those have a collision mass roughly equivalent to the other inf they're charging, the charge stops as the first ranks clash (and since their charge bonus is weaker, they accrue less killing hits, so the effect is less noticeable).

As to point 2), maybe units are counted as perma-charging when hitting routers, which would explain why routers fall in one brush to cav but can take several hits from lowly (but fast) peasants ?

3) and 4) agreed. In fact, I've seen a lot of melee fighters happily swinging right through their comrades without hurting them. Cue humorous screenshot with charging knights sticking their lances into each other.

I don't suppose we could prevail upon you to test which of those "forgotten" factors was the culprit? Is "delay" the "swing speed" factor? If so, my money is on that as the villain.

Well, delay is commented as being "minimum number of seconds between attacks", but I rechecked and it's 25 tenth of a second for every unit. So it's all in mass (which only affects charges AFAIK) and skeletal thingamajig.

The problem with testing it further is that while I can ascertain wether making it higher or lower is better, it still wouldn't tell me *why* it is so. Or why the hell anyone would need to compensate for his bloody skeleton in the middle of a goddamn battle .
But I will test it some more, yes. I hate stuff I can't figure out.

But one thing I don't get is why 2Hers animations were thought to be the source of their weakness in the infamous 2Her bug? And why switching them to, say, JHI animations, fixed it? How can we reconcile that with your "animations don't matter" conclusion?

I've thought about this, and this is the scenario I came up with :

Billmen and Axemen never tried to hit cavalry units because...

Billmen lacked an animation for "attack someone up there". Say a billman attacks a horseman, does his attack roll, hits, kills. The game engine takes this info in, blows its whistle, turns to the fighters and says : "OK, you swing like *this*, and you, you fall down like *that* when he's n milliseconds into his animation. Make it look good people, we're only doing one take". Only because of the missing "swing like *this*" anim, the horseman was forever waiting for his cue to fall down.

Soldiers are probably not counted as "dead" until they've finished their dying anim, that much can be deduced from a simple missile volley : archers shoot, hit, enemy goes "aaargh, they got me ! tell my wife...", sag, lie down, and only after they've been down for a little time will the unit count actually go down and the dead man's green/red circle will vanish.
So, cav didn't die because they were waiting to start their disabling death anim. In the meantime they weren't dead and could attack.

The JHI animation set didn't lack an anim for "attacking something higher up", so didn't have this problem. 2H swords didn't either, IIRC, only 2H axes (which billmen share).

Sounds plausible ?