Random questions

[MrBiscuits]

Healer works at the end of the turn, not at the end of the battle.

Ah I had not realised that thanks. So by repeatedly webbing the last enemy unit you can completely heal your party in 5 turns.

[Seravy]

No, end of the OVERLAND turn. It's not a combat ability. It's like always carrying a city with you to recover faster :D

[MrBiscuits]

Ah I see now thanks.

Anyway in my latest game Horus got a stack of cockatrices, three with focus magic and managed to clear two towers - one with 7-8 shadow demons and then another with "many death knights" and he managed them both with no losses at all. 

I killed his stack afterwards with three paladins with resist magic and prayer + webs.

[Seravy]

Cockatrices have high strategic combat power (246) : Stoning Touch is valuable and Focus Magic doubles it because it makes it apply to an additional attack type.
Damage is distributed between units - if every unit is the same type, it'll be dealt semi-evenly so dead units are unlikely - if you attack the stack you'll notice the damage they have taken as missing figures on the cockatrices. (unless the stack has time to heal)
Still, "Many" death knights sounds unlikely with that stack. Each Death Knight has 1066 power. Unless, "many" was only 5, then the ranged damage plus the wizard's casting power might have been enough.
But it's weirder that they attacked it - that implies the stack had higher raw total value than the tower. I find it hard to believe that really was "Many" Death Knights, if yes, it might be some bug.

[Nelphine]

9 vs 5 could do it.

[Seravy]

Nah even 9 Focus Magic Cockatrices don't have enough power to attack the 5 Death Knights. Almost but still below. And he said there were only 3 with that.

Maybe it was still "many" Death Knights on the side of the tower he looked at, but fewer in the other side. (that would imply something else attacked and killed some though - also not very likely.)

[MrBiscuits]

Cockatrices have high strategic combat power (246) : Stoning Touch is valuable and Focus Magic doubles it because it makes it apply to an additional attack type.
Damage is distributed between units - if every unit is the same type, it'll be dealt semi-evenly so dead units are unlikely - if you attack the stack you'll notice the damage they have taken as missing figures on the cockatrices. (unless the stack has time to heal)
Still, "Many" death knights sounds unlikely with that stack. Each Death Knight has 1066 power. Unless, "many" was only 5, then the ranged damage plus the wizard's casting power might have been enough.
But it's weirder that they attacked it - that implies the stack had higher raw total value than the tower. I find it hard to believe that really was "Many" Death Knights, if yes, it might be some bug.

Well you were right I went to an earlier save and checked and it was just "Death Knights" rather than "many Death Knights" and it contained 2 Death Knights and 7 Night Stalkers.

Still it is surprising that they beat them with no casualties at all.

[Nelphine]

No, strategic combat is completely different to normal (tactical) combat. Its purely about raw power on both sides - many special abilities, resistances, movement, etc, literally mean nothing. The AI won't attack anything it doesn't at least have parity with. Then if there is a wizard involved (such as the AI) that side gets a boost based on casting skill and books. So against a neutral like a tower, with no wizard, the attacking AI suddenly is actually much stronger, not close to parity.

Then damage is done, and it comes out to ROUGHLY the percentage that the weaker side is. So if the AI is 60% stronger then they'll only take VERY ROUGHLY 60% of their total health as damage. Then that damage is split roughly equally between all units on the AI side, although heroes take less damage than other units; if all the units are the same, that won't be enough to kill a single unit.


This was actively chosen as the damage distribution so that AI fighting other AI would actually end up with a winning side, instead of a long stalemate. This allows ai wars to actually result in a winning aide with a noticeably strengthened AI, so that AI wars actually add to the difficulty of the game instead of encouraging the human to simply sit back, let the AI fight, then kill the weakened remaining AI.

[MrBiscuits]

No, strategic combat is completely different to normal (tactical) combat. Its purely about raw power on both sides - many special abilities, resistances, movement, etc, literally mean nothing. The AI won't attack anything it doesn't at least have parity with. Then if there is a wizard involved (such as the AI) that side gets a boost based on casting skill and books. So against a neutral like a tower, with no wizard, the attacking AI suddenly is actually much stronger, not close to parity.

Then damage is done, and it comes out to ROUGHLY the percentage that the weaker side is. So if the AI is 60% stronger then they'll only take VERY ROUGHLY 60% of their total health as damage. Then that damage is split roughly equally between all units on the AI side, although heroes take less damage than other units; if all the units are the same, that won't be enough to kill a single unit.


This was actively chosen as the damage distribution so that AI fighting other AI would actually end up with a winning side, instead of a long stalemate. This allows ai wars to actually result in a winning aide with a noticeably strengthened AI, so that AI wars actually add to the difficulty of the game instead of encouraging the human to simply sit back, let the AI fight, then kill the weakened remaining AI.

Ah right so it is designed to have a clear winner, I was wondering why AI vs AI battles often didn't result in fewer units for the stronger wizard.

It makes sense, it's just a little annoying sometimes to see a stack beat a tower that I probably couldn't use myself in the same way.

[Nelphine]

To clarify one thing: The damage distribution has little to do with determining the actual winner. The winner is designed to be as close to tactical combat as possible, but due to the number of things it doesn't account for (even number of figures), it can sometimes be fairly far off. (The original had spearmen killing sky drakes, which is far far worse than we have now.) Then after the battle is over, that is when damage is assigned; that's where Seravy made the conscious choice to not kill off individual units as often as he could. I'm inclined to agree with this, for the reasons in my previous post, but it does make it easier for the human to notice that strategic combat doesn't work the same way as tactical.

The reason for this is that strategic combat basically takes the entire army of each side, and turns it into a 1 figure unit with no special abilities (although some special abilities are used in the conversion, such as poison adding some attack strength), and converts all armor into hit points (which isn't all that accurate since it doesn't account for number of times that armor is attacked); then it does the same for the other army; and then they fight, and whichever one dies first is the loser. Then the remaining hit point of this super figure have to be distributed back to the winning army. This is why determining the winner and distributing damage aren't really related in strategic combat.