RS 2 battle stats

[tone]

I thought I'd just show some screenshots of how the RS2 EDU has been put together. Basically I'm using a spreadsheet that I first put together in about June 2009 to try and make easier the process of changing unit stats in response to beta testing feedback. Rather than going through a whole text file line by line, I find things presented graphically much easier to work with.

Two people had a kep part to play in the early stages of developing the EDU - the first was Aradan, who provided first of all the fantastic EDU tutorial in the Rome workshop and did some excellent research into auto resolve and so on. He then answered a load of questions by PM and helped out on our developers forum too, as well as providing some cost analysis formulae that had been used in FATW. Secondly, Faridus did some early work on unit skeleton balancing and providing some ball park figures for unit types.

The processes involved were as follows:

1) assign each unit a category (skirmisher, elite slinger, light spearman, veteran spearman, medium infantry, cataphract, heavy horse archer, etc, etc), which provides basic attack, defence and charge stats.

2) give each unit an armour value depending on percentage coverage of each body part and type of armour covering, e.g. chainmail, leather, reinforced leather, etc.

3) assign each weapon e.g. celtic longsword, mace, double handed axe, gladius its own attack values

4) give each unit a shield value dependent largely on shield size

5) "cultural" factors (either multipliers or straight bonues/penalties) which can effect attack, charge, defence, morale, armour strength - e.g. Romans have high defence skill, morale, better armour; Celts have higher charge and attack, but lower morale and defence overall. Cultural effects can also affect heat exhaustion (e.g. African units better in heat than Celts) and performance in snowy terrain / forest / desert, etc.

6) other factors: heavier armour leads to higher degrees of exhaustion and slightly reduced performance in difficult terrain like snow or desert.

Here are some screenshots of the spreadsheet reference page (includes all the variables - e.g. weapon values, armour factors etc):






This is the units page - each unit has a line which gives each of the variable attached to it as well as the culture, etc adjustments:




Cost calculation section:




EDU output page which uses CONCATENATE and VLOOKUP functions to allow cross referencing to other pages of the spreadsheet:



The result is a set of battle stats that are pretty consistent, allow some cultural variations in stats and prices, and are easy to adjust in response to feedback.

[HUN_antonius]

rep+ great work I can imagine how hard work was this...

[Taelok]

This is an great insight into how you're managing to handle the stats tone. For those of use not in the know, could you give us a comparison of the kill rates compared with RS 1.6? Particularly that of missile units?

[tone]

Difficult to say for sure as I've not played RS1.5 /1.6 for so long, but definitely less kills. Your average pila volley will probably kill about 20 enemy or so, I think. I'd say that all missiles are somewhat less effective.

[Faxas]

It's a good thing Tone! But the problem of unprotected horses that have the armor value of horsemen, remain a problem. An average value between the armor (fictitious) of the horse and the rider might be better.

I say may be a big mistake.

Have you established armor values exactly by armor type, eg chainmail = 5; armor = 8 ...?

In any case it should not be easy to balance it all!