Balancing the blesses

[MaxWilson]

P.S. About the black hunters--I didn't realize the rider stayed dead. I did a quick test game and killed off all of my army except for two spiders with dead riders. My upkeep was 0. I bought two new black hunters and my upkeep went up to 8. Interesting, no? Sacred units with zero upkeep and 55 hit points.

[MaxWilson]

P.P.S. 3 Att12 Hirdmen under Strength of Giants (Str15, Broadsword) would do 1.9755. This requires no bless at all but does as well as F9 on a per-man basis. I think what's happening is that strength of numbers cancels out the high defense, and SoG cancels out high Prot.

[Meglobob]

To MaxWilson:-

Thanks for those tests, they are very interesting. Did you take the +4 to attack into account that F9 gives? Does F9 bless still do more damage overall because it hits more often because of the +4 attack or did your tests include the +4 attack and still find the B9 inflicted more damage?

[MaxWilson]

In the first set of tests I just assumed 2000 hits, so attack didn't come into play. In the second set of tests I included the +4 attack from F9, the +2 from F2, and the -2 to defense from a second attacker. It was the attack bonus that made F9 clearly better than B9 vs. the Wraith Lords. Of course I forgot to take Etherealness into account, too.

-Max

P.S. You can treat the first set of tests as the limiting case vs. swarms of attackers. You can confidently say that +4 Str (from B9 or SoG) is better than an F9 bless against lone SCs of Prot 20, without Etherealness. The second set of tests, assuming one square vs. one square, is for large numbers of units where the battle front is roughly a line, as often happens. This doesn't necessarily mean equal numbers of units on both sides, but both sides have at least 20-30 units.

[Xietor]

The Fire Bless is nice(and imho best) when you have a sacred with multiple attacks, especially against low hp ethereal units with high defense, such as MA Ermor.

Every bless has it uses in certain situations, because the game has almost infinite possibilities. But the Melee based
sacred, especially one with 2 or more attacks, fire just stands out. Hit more, hit for more damage, and you negate ethereal to a large degree.

Water bless is very good also, as is nature. I still think Astral, Death, Air, and Earth, in general, are not as useful.

Earth is obviously great for casters, but the 4 protection does not really help that much on low protection units. I like the theme of Earth, but would 8 protection put Earth on scale with Fire, water, and nature?

[Meglobob]

I take a earth bless purely for the reinvigoration, the protection is just a nice bonus. Astral is a perfectly good bless as it is, twist of fate and +3 magic resistance are always useful. S9 magic path is probably the best path of magic in the game as well, for winning the end game.

Air is definetly the weakest, I like adding +3 precision for A9. The E9/A9 combo bless for strong magic nations would be cool.

[Teraswaerto]

On units with high protection +4 prot can be good, the difference between 4 damage and 0 damage can be huge.

[MaxWilson]

Xietor said:
Earth is obviously great for casters, but the 4 protection does not really help that much on low protection units. I like the theme of Earth, but would 8 protection put Earth on scale with Fire, water, and nature?

Too much, IMHO. 8 Protection would make Earth far and away the best bless for too many units. Take the Niefel Giant, for example. 66 hit points, Prot 14, Def 13. Most units of the era have an Attack of no more than 12 and do not more than 15 points of damage per hit. They'll usually get in 1 or 2 swings because the cold aura freezes them solid. Say there are six of these opponents attacking per Niefel Giant. My Monte Carlo says they'll do about 11 points of damage per turn. A +4 water blessing would cut this to 7.3 points per turn. An E9 blessing as it now stands would cut this to 4.3 points per turn, in addition to keeping fatigue low to avoid crit-hits. An E9 blessing that give Prot +8 would cut this to 1.4 points per turn. It's true that an N9 blessing would also net 1 point per turn after counting 10 points of regeneration, but it wouldn't do anything about fatigue and it wouldn't scale as well. (Give each of those attackers 2 stars and it goes up to 12.75 - 10 = 2.75 points per turn for N9, and 1.5 for E9.)

Obviously this isn't true for low-Protection units. Interestingly enough, E9 appears to add to your armor protection and not to your basic protection, so it doesn't work at all on units without armor (Machakan spiders) and it doesn't completely stack with bonuses from Berserk. I suppose you could make it a natural Barkskin instead of a +4 armor bonus; I don't know exactly what the formula is but it makes Niefel Giants go from Prot 9 (14/8 head/body) to Prot 12 (17/12 head/body), so it would help the unarmored warriors without boosting high-end units much. Stoneskin would actually be more thematic than Barkskin but it might be too much. Either is better than a flat +8 to armor Prot.

-Max

[MaxWilson]

Here's one more thing: a comparison of death and fire weapons. Again ignoring attack/defense rolls, here are the (Monte Carlo) break-even points. That is, in general fire weapons do more damage than death weapons, but for a given Protection there is a certain MR at which death weapons becomes a better bet. Here's the breakdown for Prot 1-20 and how much expected damage is dealt per-hit at each level. (For Prot 9 and below, fire weapons are always better but I show the expected damage for MR 10 for comparison's sake.)

Prot 1 MR 10 Fire dmg 6.40 Death dmg 1.44
Prot 2 MR 10 Fire dmg 5.70 Death dmg 1.46
Prot 3 MR 10 Fire dmg 5.70 Death dmg 1.42
Prot 4 MR 10 Fire dmg 4.70 Death dmg 1.62
Prot 5 MR 10 Fire dmg 4.65 Death dmg 1.48
Prot 6 MR 10 Fire dmg 4.08 Death dmg 1.46
Prot 7 MR 10 Fire dmg 3.81 Death dmg 1.45
Prot 8 MR 10 Fire dmg 3.20 Death dmg 1.41
Prot 9 MR 10 Fire dmg 3.19 Death dmg 1.51
Prot 10 MR 5 Fire dmg 2.68 Death dmg 2.57
Prot 11 MR 6 Fire dmg 2.68 Death dmg 2.38
Prot 12 MR 8 Fire dmg 2.21 Death dmg 2.15
Prot 13 MR 9 Fire dmg 1.99 Death dmg 1.88
Prot 14 MR 10 Fire dmg 1.63 Death dmg 1.54
Prot 15 MR 10 Fire dmg 1.66 Death dmg 1.53
Prot 16 MR 11 Fire dmg 1.44 Death dmg 1.14
Prot 17 MR 11 Fire dmg 1.40 Death dmg 1.15
Prot 18 MR 13 Fire dmg 0.97 Death dmg 0.82
Prot 19 MR 12 Fire dmg 1.06 Death dmg 0.91
Prot 20 MR 14 Fire dmg 0.71 Death dmg 0.66

Again, take these numbers with a grain of salt since they're empirical. Nevertheless, "he who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense," and number-crunching is an old tradition for wargamers. For instance, it's apparent that death weapons are a better bet in LA than in EA.

One thing this doesn't take into account is that it's *possible* that death/fire weapons still take effect on shield-hits. Fire weapons will do negligible damage on a shield-hit, but death weapons are AN, so it's possible that death weapons are a better bet against shielded units. Maybe I'll test this if I learn enough about modding to create a low-def, heavily-shielded unit.

-Max

[Graeme Dice]

MaxWilson said:
Sacred units with zero upkeep and 55 hit points.

Unfortunately they also only have a MR of 5. Don't try and use them against somebody with astral 4 mages and enslave mind researched, as I found out in one game.