Bracing bonus for phalanxes and other formations - questions

[citizen-ychoux]

Hello everyone,

Background
While playing and doing some custom battle tests, I noticed that while hoplites and pikemen (both in phalanx mod) get buchered by heavy chariots, legionaries in fulcrum formation (repel cavalry) are able to stop the initial charge and then win.

Problem
I looked into the db and found the file describing the formation impact. It's "special_ability_phase_stat_effect".
And I found something rather odd. Hoplite phalanx and pike phalanx give no bonus to bracing, while the repel cavalry formation add no less than 3000 (!). See attached picture.


I compared it to the initial values and found out that vanilla bonuses are different in both logic and nature.
In vanilla, shield walls do get bonuses for bracing, as other formations, but the bonus is by adding a multiplier rather than just adding a raw value. See attached picture



Questions
1/ Is the fact that phalanxes don't get bracing bonuses an intended thing?
2/ Why does "repel cavalry" (fulcrum) formation get such a high bracing bonus that it could actually stop a train (it does stop like a wall heavy chariots, cataphracts, elephants)

Proposal
I changed the bonuses on the table and tested it, and the behaviour is to my liking. You can find the values below and feedback to me your remarks.



Thank you for amazing work, and for your time reading the post.
ychoux

[JObadiah]

My guess would be that phalanx-mode bracing was part of what was making hoplites/phalangites almost immune to rear charges by cavalry, so they took it out. They don't need it from the front, anyway.