Effects of Attack Value

[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 ?

[FactionHeir]

The 25 delay thing doesn't seem to do anything from my tests that I ran a few days back. Had DEK vs DFrK with DEK having a delay of 1 for both primary and secondary and the results were fairly even (well, the DFrK always won by a small margin actually)

Death anims. I don't really think so. With the spearman bash face/stab back anim, he only needs to start that animation and you can move him away and the enemy who was supposed to be hit/was just hit starts crawling on the floor anyway and completes his death anim without the actual jab in the back.

You still did not explain my findings above

[Kobal2fr]

The 25 delay thing doesn't seem to do anything from my tests that I ran a few days back. Had DEK vs DFrK with DEK having a delay of 1 for both primary and secondary and the results were fairly even (well, the DFrK always won by a small margin actually)

Yup, I think 25 is the fastest you can hope combat cycles to be, but I suppose one could set them to 50 to pace down combat, maybe ? So much to test...

Death anims. I don't really think so. With the spearman bash face/stab back anim, he only needs to start that animation and you can move him away and the enemy who was supposed to be hit/was just hit starts crawling on the floor anyway and completes his death anim without the actual jab in the back.

Well yes, because his death anim actually started with the bashed face. The engine tells the attacker to do anim A and the defender to do the corresponding death anim, and if anim A is interrupted somehow, the death anim will go on as ordered "in synch", only not anymore. It's not the same as anim A not happening at all.

You still did not explain my findings above

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.

From what I've witnessed, pathing on top of walls is frankly screwy. You can have a whole unit all bunched up as if in schiltron, every man trying to get some space so that the whole unit looks like it's pulsating, and have only one of the bunch actually fight. Or the opposite, men strung along two sets of walls and only two guys duking it out somewhere. Considering that the pathing for chasing routers is screwy enough on flat ground already...

Or, another possible explanation would be that there are bonuses to unit defense when they're defending their walls, and the swords actually get some hits in (without triggering anims, see answer to Didz above) but not enough to go through the upped defense. That may well be the case, because two similar units facing each other on top of a wall will usually result in the attackers getting trashed, and I don't think tower fire alone accounts for that (as towers shooting in melee kill a lot of defenders too). That's another test to set up : disable towers, give the AI one siege tower, defend, watch results.

Could be both too, of course.

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.

Like I said to Didz, I think units chasing routers are considered to be perma-charging, and charges don't always seem to trigger animations. There's mebbe some 2D collision detection going on in there as well, I think.

[FactionHeir]

For 1: The amount of units escaping does not semm too linked to unit type. DFK and Peasants escape at about the same rate on the walls.

For 2: Note my wording. The non routing unit (infantry) is not chasing the routers, it is walking in a direction only. The routers just bump into those guy's backs and die.

[Husar]

For 2: Note my wording. The non routing unit (infantry) is not chasing the routers, it is walking in a direction only. The routers just bump into those guy's backs and die.

I think that's because routers get the pansy trait which makes them give up as soon as they bump into an enemy soldier who is in pursuit mode. Try running your cavalry through some routers without being in pursuit mode, just run through, hardly anything will happen, I think that's what usually happens on the walls as well, no pursuit mode = noone gives up.

[Kobal2fr]

1.) Meh :/ That probably rules out defense factors then, but mebbe not screwy pathfinding.

2.) Then I suppose/conjecture there's an "attack of opportunity" system in place - units bumping into routers getting one or more "free strikes" against them, yet not triggering anims because it would disrupt the moving unit too much. If they all stopped and faced inward/sideways to strike at them, they'd present their backs to missiles/charges, need some time to reform properly etc..., making routers exploitable. Send a peasant unit in their back, make them withdraw through the enemy ranks, exploit the following chaos, sort of thing.
Remember back in STW/MTW when routing units utterly destroyed anything what got in the way of their mad dash to the edge of the map ? They probably learned from that mistake.

But "bumping" doesn't mean there's a real 3D collision model going on, a mere 2D circle around each individual soldiers is enough and easier to compute. TBH I'd be surprised if soldiers were more than 2D circles on the terrain for most if not all behind the scenes numbercrunching.

But... attacks of opportunity would conflict with point 1.) wouldn't they ? . I REALLY hate it when facts get in the way of perfectly sound theories .
Maybe said AoPs are disabled when units are too blobbed ? Or the routines forcing individual soldiers to get some personnal spacing conflict with/override them ? I also remember reading something about blobbed units getting huge stat penalties (mind you that was in early press releases and so on, might not have made it in for real)... Lots of conjectures, very little definite answers.