Siege mechanics in manual wrong?

[Xietor]

I did a test with Call of the Winds. It summons 1 str 11 leader and 20 str 5 hawks. The manual says flying units get a plus 1 added to their siege total. Yet the 21 flying units only do a total of 6 siege power to an empty castle each turn.

The bare min. 21 flying units could possibly do if the formula is correct is 21(and that is if they are str 0).

1 hawk should do: 5 x 5 = 25/100 =.25 add the flying bonus of 1 =1.25

1.25 x 20= 25

great hawk str 11

11x11 =121/100=1.21 plus flying bonus=2.21

Call of winds correct siege bonus under the manual formula is
27.21 not 6.

Any ideas why it is only doing 6 siege damage per turn rather than 27.21?

Edited for math error pointed out below(thx).

[ano]

Don't know the answer, but a hawk should do 1.25 damage, not 1.4

[Xietor]

yep my math was bad. but my point remains. They should be doing 1 plus the .25. It should be a value over 1.

It is as if there is no bonus for flying units.

[johan osterman]

Animals have reduced siege effectivenes.

[Xietor]

Oh thanks for the answer. and i have seen so many people use hundreds of birds most likely thinking they were great at sieges.

[ano]

How big is the siege reduction for an animal? (it would be really useful to know)

[chrispedersen]

Well,

If you guestimate that the animal tag is worth -1.. this means that 20 hawks *.25 = 4.

Plus the greathawk 2.21 = 6. Round down. Seems to fit the data point.

But I'm too lazy to test it with 10 elephants.

[archaeolept]

current tests (by crecerelle) indicate that animals do not have any penalty to siege. this is confirmed by lch's examination of the animal flag and the sieging mechanic. i'm unsure why the results for the sieging hawks were so poor.

correct formula for sieging, as per lch: (str^2 / 10) + (10 if flying) + 10*(siege value); but this still does not jibe w/ Xietor's results, afaict.

double edit: call of the wind having siege value of 6 confirmed.

[lch]

Well, the formulas in the manual are almost correct. Sieging works by building the sums over the following:

• For every sieging unit: (str^2 / 10) + (10 if flying) + 10*(siege skill)
• For every non-mindless defending unit: (str^2 / 10) + (10 if flying) + 10*(guard skill)
• For every mindless defending unit: 1 + 10*(guard skill)

Remainders in the divisions are being rounded down. Those two values, the siege and the "desiege" strength, are then again in a final step being divided by 10, rounded down, which results in the formulas that are in the manual, except for mindless units.

Regarding the Black and Great Hawks:

A Black Hawk has strength 5, thus every Black Hawk should contribute (5²/10)+10 = 12 to the siege counter, before division by 10.
A Great Hawk has strength 11, thus every Great Hawk should contribute (11²/10)+10 = 22 to the siege counter, before division by 10.

What happens in reality is that every Black Hawk only adds 2 to the siege counter, while the Great Hawk adds 22 to the siege counter, so 20 Black Hawks and a Great Hawk add up to 20*2+22 = 62, thus resulting in the siege strength of 6.

Why is that? I wasted a good amount of time debugging this, while I should just have looked in my unit data files... The code works exactly like given above. Black Hawks have a siege strength of -1. Thus effectively their flying attribute is discarded regarding fort sieges. In defense, they don't suffer any penalty, though. The only other unit that suffers from the same penalty is the Shikigami (2092).

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by lch

For every sieging unit: (str^2 / 10) + (10 if flying) + 10*(siege skill)

Shouldn't that be [str^2 + 10 if flying + (10* siege bonus)]/10

Otherwise the other 2 factors never get divided by 10, which would sure be a bit imbalanced.