Siege mechanics in manual wrong?

[Dedas]

ano said:
Mindless units crack walls really fast. Lankan soulless are the cheapest wall-breakers. I think, they don't really have a penalty for sieging, because Breaking is always easier than building

I think you are wrong. If the soulless has 20 strength its value for tearing down a castle is:
20*20=400
400/100=4 (non mindless value)
4*0.1 (for being mindless 90% off) = 0,4

So 4 for a none mindless and 0.4 for a mindless, both with the strength of 20. I would say mindless pretty much suck at sieges.

[OmikronWarrior]

I'm under the impression the 1/10 mindless penalty only applies to DEFENDING against siege, but get their full strength bonus when on the offense, so they'd be great for a siege as they don't consume supplies.

[Dedas]

Oh sorry, I've looked it up in the manual now and I was wrong. They are good at tearing down but abysmal at defending.

[Sombre]

In a thread about the manual being wrong, you correct yourself based on what the manual says?

The only way to know is to test it. The manual is wrong about 90% of the stuff that actually gets tested.

[Endoperez]

Sombre said:
In a thread about the manual being wrong, you correct yourself based on what the manual says?

The only way to know is to test it. The manual is wrong about 90% of the stuff that actually gets tested.

Things only get tested if someone has a reason to suspect the manual is wrong, but I'd say it isn't higher than 66%. One in three tests not proving the manual false is about right IME, and then there are all the things the manual just doesn't mention at all, like what kinds of quickness stack with each other.

[Dedas]

Yes but we were discussing mindless and not animals. The manual is wrong in not stating that units with animal tag gets a penalty as well.

Just to confirm this I did a small test and it everything seems to work as described above.

[Agema]

I've summoned 80 hawks (plus 4 commanders) whilst defending and turned a deficit or 40 to a plus of about 40, so I'm sure their bonus works in defence.

[Aezeal]

Well seems logical.. if you send say.. tigers against a castle they'd just walk below the walls. If you put hostile tigers ON the walls they I think the attackers would find them pretty annoying (not to say letal) the same as in the field (probably more in the field I could run away .. or hide.. if you get on the walls with pplz behind you pressing in there is nowhere to go)

[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).