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.

[Husar]

Well Didz, there is a certain collision detection working of course, but once a decision for an attack is made, the result will be calculated and then the animation will be played. That does not mean that the animation decides whether an attack is calculated or not. Also noone attacks an anemy who is currently doing a finishing move because he is excluded from the routine which determines who to attack next, once he is finished, they will start attacking him. To test this further, giving someone a defense value of 30 might be a good idea to see how often they will defend against a blow, might test that now.

[Kobal2fr]

Yup, I thought about that during a boring (but missile heavy) battle. I think you have noticed as well as I did that archers ordered to fire at a unit behind another unit will often do much more damage to the front unit than to the back one. But if you order them to fire at the front one, they'll do less damage to them than when they were firing at the unit behind them.

So there's probably some form of collision going on after the shot is made, you're right. Just, not between a missile unit and its target, in this case I believe it's all attack rolls.

Or maybe a check is made at the location of a failed arrow's landing point ? In fact, I had dreamed up the exact same test you did : order crossbows to fire, and move knights right in front of them before they actually fire. If the knights get shot to pieces, then there's collision.

Oh, and STW/MTW is not the same engine at all, so what applied may not be valid still.


EDIT : oh, and as to the original issue, I just did a test the results of which... puzzled me. I used billmen (whose animation set is "known" to suck) vs. Noble Swordsmen (the "overpowered" DFK anim). I first gave the billmen enough armor to have the same overall defense as the swords, but kept their attack/charge value which is much higher, even without factoring AP in. The upped billmen promptly trounced the knights, who were reduced to 45 on the charge. During the protracted melee, while the knights attacked on the whole more often, the billmen very often just took the hits, flinched, and attacked right back.
But I figured the result was flawed by the charge. So I did another test, this time putting their armor back to 0, and upping defense all the way to "Noble Swordsmen Total Defense". This time I let the knights charge and the billmen brace. They took a heavy hit on the charge, but then evened the score during the melee, and beat the knights in the end (higher attack and AP, remember ?). Again, the swordsmen attacked more often on the whole, but this time most of their attacks were parried/deflected by the billmen using the butt of their weapon to do so.

OK, I know two tests alone are not conclusive but... I wonder if this whole "some animations are better than others" idea isn't plain ol' wrong. I know it's generally accepted as being true, but it also dates back to the days when the shield bug roamed unknown... Hmmm...Mebbe it's just the big discrepancy in defense values that make 2handers suck this bad in long melees...

[phonicsmonkey]

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.

I am dumb enough. I once charged three units of hospitallers through a line of my own culverins just as they were firing - OUCH

I have also charged my general at an enemy unit just as three volleys of my own javelins were landing - bye bye general

not sure if there's any explanation for friendly fire unless there's a collision model at work for missiles...of course this proves nothing for melee

has anyone ever seen a soldier kill one of his own with a misplaced pike jab or reckless sword swing? I haven't...again however this proves nothing, as collision might only be possible, in melee, with hostiles

[Mad Mac]

[QUOTE][OK, I know two tests alone are not conclusive but... I wonder if this whole "some animations are better than others" idea isn't plain ol' wrong. I know it's generally accepted as being true, but it also dates back to the days when the shield bug roamed unknown... Hmmm...Mebbe it's just the big discrepancy in defense values that make 2handers suck this bad in long melees.../QUOTE]

Those are some veeeeery interesting test results. Especially the idea that blocking animations are possibly tied to defense actually kicking in and parrying attacks. And it does make a fair bit of sense, as even a good two hander typically has less overall defense than a basic armoured sarge with no upgrades. Units like that are going to drop like flies.

Still, two-handers are known to improve in peformance with faster animations, so I think attack speed is going to be an issue, regardless.

[FactionHeir]

Two things that I found peculiar with current animations / hidden rolls.

1. Note that if an AI unit routs on the walls, you can have the entire wall packed with fast swordsmen and hardly any of them will ever hit the routers who run through them.

2. When you walk a unit slowly in one direction and enemy routers run in the same direction against your unit, many of them die even though none of your units are facing them or even making any attempt at an attack animation. They just bump into the back of your unit and perish.

Those two need to be explained before a conclusion can be drawn on animation vs rolls.

[Kobal2fr]

Mwaaahahaha. I love prodding ignorance's fat buttocks. I did another round of tests with billmen vs. noble swords (just in case you wondered why those two : because England vs Scotland is the default custom battle).

This time, I gave the billmen exactly the same attack values as swords, and also exactly the same defense (including shield value, on a lark, wanted to know wether the unit model mattered with it. It doesn't). Fired a couple battles, the billmen got owned. Severely.

I was about to mumble the usual "aaah well, back to the drawing board, swords really *are* overpowered by nature", when I realized I had missed something : their collision mass wasn't equal. Oooh, and I had missed delay and "skeletal compensation factor", whatever this is. And heat values. So, not wanting to completely bork my EDU, I copy/pasted the swordsmen entry, renamed it billmen, gave them billmen models and anims, and commented the original billmen out of the file. And this time around, lo and behold, both units were *exactly* the same in the field. Did 8 tests. Each battle took a *long* time to complete (hey, high morale, high armor, no ap, weakish attack...), there were a lot of parries, dodges and whatnot, but in the end both units were down to single digits when one or the other eventually ran.


So... in short : neener neener ! I was right ! Animations are not really factored in combat ! It's all pure, mathematical and statistical goodness using factors the effect or meaning of which I have ABSOLUTELY no idea and didn't even know existed .. The numbers control the animations, not the other way round !
So, who's buying me the first beer ?

[Mad Mac]

So swords are superior because of their superior bone structure, heat tolerance, and pants budget? You know, it was a lot easier to just blame the animations...

[Husar]

So, who's buying me the first beer ?

I've been agreeing with you but take that beer anyway.

[Didz]

Well I've been paying even more attention to close combat since reading the earlier posts, particularly during pursuits and I've noticed a number of things.

1) Units die without being subject to a hit animation. The most common is the instance where a horseman bumps into a routing unit and one of the routers just drops dead on the spot. There was still a collision but the attacker sometimes didn't go through any animation.

2) Routing units frequently run right through a formed unit whilst only taking a few casualties.

3) I've still not seen anyone die for no apparent reason, there is always at least a bump, even though no sword is swung.

4) I've still not seen anything that looked like a 'friendly fire' event in close combat. Two units of horse archers ordered to pursue the same routed unit sometimes inflict casualties on each other but that is almost certainly due to stray arrows due to their continued use of the bow even when in melee combat.

[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 ?

[econ21]

I was about to mumble the usual "aaah well, back to the drawing board, swords really *are* overpowered by nature", when I realized I had missed something : their collision mass wasn't equal. Oooh, and I had missed delay and "skeletal compensation factor", whatever this is.

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.

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?

[gardibolt]

I am dumb enough. I once charged three units of hospitallers through a line of my own culverins just as they were firing - OUCH

I remember getting impatient with how long it was taking to blow down a tower with a bombard in a siege so I started heading a siege tower towards the wall.

Bad move. The siege tower moved faster than I thought/the bombard took longer than I thought to kill the tower and the siege tower (plus most of the men pushing it) got blown up instead.