OW Combat Calculator v1.0 - For Public Download

[Stalker0]

All,

Attached I have created an excel spreadsheet that can help you navigate the nuances of Old World Combat. Below I will explain the sheet and provide some examples on how to use it.

There are 3 scenarios:

1) In this example, you are defending against a Unit with X attack strength, and you want to know just how much defender power you need. You plug in the attack and defense base strength, and the combat adjustment for the attacker. The values in the table will show you what combat % your defender needs to be to only take the damage shown.

Example: An Archer (base strength 5) with a 15% attack bonus (Combat I + II) is attacking your axeman (base strength 5). The chart shows that you need at least 16% defense bonus to only take 5 damage a shot, and you need 74% to only take 3.

2) Similar to scenario 1, except now we have a defender we are attacking, and want to know how much attack strength it will take to do a certain amount of damage.

Example: An Archer with Strength 5 is attacking a Warrior (base strength 4) who is fortified on a hill with highlander (so +25% for highlander + 25% fortify = 50%). We want to know what it will take to really bring the pain. In this case a meer 22% is enough to do 7 damage. If you can manage 101%, then you are doing 11 damage a shot! If you could manage to get a full 282% bonus, you can one shot it.

3) Scenario 3 is you just want to know how much damage happens in specific conditions. Put in the base strengths of both attack and defender, as well as their combat %s, and the calculator will tell you how much damage each shot deals.


NOTE: An attack penalty is not the same as a defense bonus! For example if a unit is in the forest, the attack gets a 50% attack penalty if its ranged. It can be tempting to just instead slap on a 50% defense bonus. If the base combat strengths are the same that may work, but if they are different it will give you skewed results.

 

[Stalker0]

So lets walk through an example of how the calculator can help you. Lets say that you have an axeman in a forest fortified near a city. Some archers from the AI are coming your way, it looks like some of them have fierce (+10%) and are a pleased family (5%). You are pondering some defensive promotions for your axeman.... what what do you need to really keep your axeman alive? We will use Scenario 1 in the calculator to help us.

Attacker Strength: 5
Defender Strength: 5
Attacker Combat Bonus: -35% (10 fierce + 5 family -50 forest)

So at the start we have a 25% defense for the fortification. However, we are still taking 3 damage a shot from a point blank archer, not bad but ideally we would like to do better. To get down to 2 a shot, we need a bonus of 33%. We already have a 25% from fortify so we need just 8% more. This is important..... a combat I promotion will not do the job, but a guard I or shieldbearer promotion would!

How about 1? We would need a full 97% bonus. If its on a forest hill, ranger + highlander + fortify gets us to 75%. Add in the family defense bonus of 10% = 85. At this point a pleased family bonus of 5%, and a combat I promotion would be enough to make it happen. Its tough....but doable.

 

[Stalker0]

Here's one more example. If I have an axeman defending against archers, we know that a forest is technically better than a garrison....but how much more?

Lets use our archer from before. Against a garrison it has a +15% strength using our promotions from the previous post. I have a base defense of 70. This means without further promotions or benefits, an archer at point blank is doing 4 damage a shot to me (compared to 3 damage a shot in the forest). That means I'll die in 5 archer shots instead of 7, that's a 28% decrease in the number of shots needed to kill my unit!!

This means it can be very important to give my garrisoned axeman at least some token improvements. If they are the same family as the city, or even a combat I promotion....can make a big difference in this example.

 

[Dale]

This is awesome!