Units stats explanation, especially shield armour and blocking information

[macabre]

Hello!

I am greatly enjoying Divide et impera, thank you very much for this brillant mod. Cannot even image how much work this has been!

I have some problems interpreting the unit stats. Especially when it comes to details, like:


1. Where can I see information about the shield protection against missiles?
I assume a shield offers protection against missiles - this information I did not find in the unit stats.
Attached is a screenshot - armour always display a 0 value at shield protection.
Probably a shield only helps getting hit, and if hit it does not help anymore, of course. But then you could remove the value for shield in armour completely, right?
Where can I find the information how much the shield helps against missiles?


2. Explanation of stats:
Of course it is better to have a higher value in the stats, but what exactly to these stats mean and how big is the effect of slighty better stats?
- melee attack, armour, etc - the higher, the better, of course!
But is there any short explanation how its calculated then?
In three kingdoms its really nicely described how it works: first is the calculation of beeing hit. If the unit is hit, then the damage is calculated also very simple: basic damage minus the armour protection, and in Armour penetration damage.
Right now I do not really know how much the difference between armour 20 and 25 is - or melee attack 13 and 14.
And lots of units do only have very slight differences - a better understanding for the single stats would help me a lot!


3. Is there a difference in the weapon types?
There are sword units, speer units and so on -> is this important or does it always comes down to the unit stats and the differences between the weapon types are representatet there? (in form of bonus against infantry, cavalry and so on)
Eg. if there is an axemen and a sword unit with exactly the same stats -> are these units equally strong or would there be any difference not representated in the stats?


4. Unit formations:
Some units fight with difference weapons, depending on formation. Phalanx especially.
Can I find the different behaviours and stats somewhere?
E.g. Pikes - are the unit stats for a pike unit in phalanx mode or in standard formation without phalanx? And if they are for pike unit without phalanx, what are the stats in phalanx then (or vice versa?)


Maybe you could add a more detailled explanation for all these (and probably more questions) in the UI. There is so much effort and great work put into the mode, thank you once again!!! - and for me as a not technician it looks like it would be a very little work to add some more text to the unit stats and types.
Newbies could so understand all of this much more easy!

[KAM 2150]

1. Missile block chance can't be displayed in UI in this game due to display bug. In general, the bigger shield is, the bigger protection it has. Shield armour was removed as it created some weird results in the base game and it lowered damage of weapons that already were not blocked by shield. It can't be removed from armour value breakdown.

2. Stats in 3K work on completly different way to any other TW game, for example armour in 3K is % damage decrease while in all other TW games it is just random chance to block damage between 1 to X (which is value of said armour). The more armour there is, the more damage it can block but even 1000 armour has small chance to let some damage in. I also fixed combat calculation of hit chance since melee attack and melee defence often are not used by units in TW games.

3. All weapons are different as they come with different melee attack, melee defence, charge and damage values. In your axe and sword example, you can see it right away in their damage value, since axes will have much higher armour piercing damage tho it is not likely to have exact same stats of axe and sword units, since swordsmen have higher melee attack and defence compared to higher armour piercing and charge values of axemen.

4. Formation stats are only displayed when units enters formation, without it, what you see are their base stats.

[jeanlannes]

Hi, Kam. I would like to use this thread to ask my own question about units stats. It could be a stupid one, but I must confess it's something I've never been sure about along all these years playing Total War games.

When two units engage each in combat how exactly do both their "attack" and "defend" stats work? When did they apply? I'm gonna expound on this:

- My assumption is that if I don´t issue any order to a unit and it's being attacked, only their "defend" stat apply and it is compared to the enemy "attack" stat. Is that correct?

- But what happens when I order a unit to engage that attacking enemy? Are each unit "attack" stat compared with each "defend" stat?

Thank you in advance, not only for your hard work but also for taking the time to ask our (sometimes silly) questions.

[KAM 2150]

Units always use both melee attack and melee defence when in combat.

If you see two models stabbing at eachother, they both calculate their chance based on who initiated the attack. So each time you see someone getting hit, he uses melee defence to calculate if attack actually hits him and if you see someone slashing at someone, he is using his melee attack to land a strike.

If you dont issue attack order, your units is still using both melee attack and melee defence, tho it is better to give one so that your soldiers will seak out to engage enemies more.

[MeiguoJinjang]

KAM,

Combat in DEI looks good. I am using slower combat submod.

How did you get combat to slow without looking really stupid at ground level?

What I mean is: I used to play RTW1/RS3. It also had greatly extended combat, but to do it, they increased some type of hit value. So, you often saw men being knocked to the ground with a blow and then getting backup (like the original Terminator movie were Arnold takes 5 shotgun blasts and then gets back up).

From mid-range the RS3 combat looked fine, but on the ground, it looked very bad.

So, how did you manage to get DEI to be less arcade while keeping the world mechanics not looking ridiculous?

Thanks.

[KAM 2150]

Years or trial and error plus figuring out how and why some calculation was wrong in the base game.

Easy way to slow down melee is to just increase cooldown between attack so for example solder has to wait 5 seconds before he strikes again. Issue with it is that it makes pulling away really easy and makes combat look a bit boring as people just stand around and look at eachother.

I also found out that unit in base game were not even using their melee attack and melee defence properly. It was even increased by one variable that makes sense when you see it but does not work properly. Basically there is a variable that lowers unit melee defence if more than 1 soldier attacks target. This makes sense as it is of course harder to defend from 2 or more people. The issue is that in melee majority of attacks are made by at least 2 soldiers against one, which means unit melee defence was rather fast. I changed it so that if target is attacked by more than 1 soldier, it gets bonus to defence so that 1st attack is treated as normal one and any additional attacks have smaller chance to hit. Due to multiple soldiers attacking one, they are still more likely to deal more hits than regular 1v1.

Ritter and Diego also removed some non kill matched combat animations that caused soldiers to be stuck in back and forth animation for like 5-13 seconds, instead they just attack and parry, which combined with shorter attack cooldown allows for better flow of melee.

[Fredz]

Can I tack on a question here about the Roman Testudo? I've seen for the most part it does the job for a while but I'm finding it breaks down somewhat quickly (maybe in about a minute or less) and the deciding factor seems to be that missiles seem to stagger them even in this formation. I've found in some cases it can increase their casualties because it focuses fire down their ranks and combined with stagger creating holes it wrecks a tonne of guys (therefore ruining the point). I'm wondering if the chance to stagger during testudo needs to be looked at, maybe in particular with arrows and sling shots - javs make more sense to stagger but maybe not the smaller projectiles like arrows and slingers?

Or is there yet another core Rome 2 engine issue that's feeding this problem?