Just how hammer efficient are Praetorians, anyway?

[MilesBeyond]

So out of curiosity, I ran some quick combat tests on the Praetorian to see exactly how they stack up, hammer for hammer, using a combat simulator I made. It creates two stacks of units by finding their hammer costs’ least common multiplier and then pits them against one another, one unit at a time, to the death, and records which stack wins. It does this one hundred thousand times to drown out anomalies.

In this particular instance, it assumes battles on flat plains and no promotions.

I present to you an exhaustive list of units that Praetorians cannot beat hammer-for-hammer in that situation:

Axemen
Landsknecht
Macemen
Conquistadors
Machine Guns
Tanks
Marines
Mobile Artillery
Modern Armour
Mech Infantry
Gunships

That’s it. That’s the whole list (although it is assuming the Praetorians are attacking, i.e. collateral is not a factor at any point). If a unit on that list has UUs, then its UUs are included: there are no instances of a base unit being hammer-efficient against the Praetorian while having a UU that is not hammer-efficient.

I also want to clarify that this is a special Praetorian thing, not just a question of hammer-scaling. Take Swordsmen or War Elephants or Axemen and yes, there will be upsets here and there, but by and large hammer-for-hammer they’re going to do poorly against most units after their era. E.g. Praetorians are one of the only pre-Industrial units that, hammer for hammer, can beat Rifles. And it’s not even close.

There’s three notable “just barely” units:
Praetorians “only” have a ~58% winrate against their weight in Xbows and a ~57% winrate against their weight in Infantry. Conversely, Macemen and Berserkers only have a ~52% winrate against their weight in Praetorians.

You might be thinking I left something out here – that wasn’t an accident. In contrast to their brethren, Samurai have a whopping 93% winrate against their weight in Praetorians thanks to their First Strikes.

Conventional wisdom holds that First Strikes only really matter when units are very close in strength – Macemen have a modified 12 Strength against the Praetorian’s 8 (or, if the Praetorian is defending, it has a modified 5.3 Strength against the Maceman’s 8). Either way, that’s way too big a gap for First Strikes to be decisive. And that’s not wrong. In a single battle, a Maceman’s odds of beating a Praetorian hover around 90%; a Samurai’s odds hover around 95%. Not exactly a massive difference. But that’s in single battle.

In stack to stack battles, things are very different. They’re actually better when there’s a high strength disparity – particularly when the unit in question is outnumbered, like here. It means the Samurai win battles in fewer rounds and therefore have consistently higher remaining HP after a victory, making them more effective the next time they fight. It also means that when they lose a battle, they tend to inflict more HP damage than they would otherwise, making the unit that defeats them less effective for its next battle.

I did some messing around and, sure enough, take away the Machine Gun’s single first strike and it now loses to the Praetorian (hammer for hammer).

Conversely, the Oromo Warrior barely does any better than the standard Musket when it comes to their weight in Praetorians. Small Strength bonuses between units is when first strikes can have the biggest impact in single combat but it has pretty minimal impact on stack combat – the odds of winning a round (i.e. the odds of a first strike actually doing damage) are lower, as is the damage actually inflicted by the first strike.

(Incidentally, the Dog Soldier does have higher odds than the Axeman or Vulture, but the difference is nowhere near as dramatic as with the Samurai).

 

[MilesBeyond]

Ah crap, I forgot Paratroopers. Praetorians also lose to Paratroopers, hammer-for-hammer. So that's, uh, maybe the most useless bit of knowledge out there. But now you know.