The Complete EDU Guide - Discussion

[Aradan]

You're very welcome Mak!

Well the melee formula gives a number, which in turn is presumably compared to random generated number that's up to 100, to see if the hit is going to kill. Without the constant, the max number one can get is 2*1.1^63, assuming Very Hard difficulty, which roughly equals 810. So you need to multiply that with a constant to make it smaller than 100, but still close to it, to make sure that the chances of spilling blood remain big. A number that could well do that is 0.095 (=0.19/2), which gives max chance to kill 77%. On the other hand, there might be no constant and the number generated is directly compared to number up to 1000, which would give a max chance to kill of 81%. Not much difference and common sense says that the second way is better, but we're talking about CA coding here and they have used the constant before in the formula for MTW.
A similar thing applies for the missile formula, but since the two are different, it's only reasonable to assume that another constant is used there, hence const2.

EDIT: Since const1, const2 are fixed, direct multiplieres and unmoddable, it really doesn't matter what their value is, they are just there to make the formula accurate.