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)

[Xietor]

well it is huge. call of winds has a siege power of 6 instead of 27.21.

[llamabeast]

Noooo! No! I don't believe this. I have summoned so very, very many hawks for sieges in so many games. Aaargh!

So they are good at fixing castles but not at damaging them! That is silly! Or maybe they are bad at both.

[Dedas]

Really, how good did you think bird were against stone walls?!

You: Birds, tear that fortress down! It is an order!
Birds: Squawk?

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Dedas]

They are bad at both, as all "animal" tag units. Mindless are pretty bad as well... lol 1/10th of a normal unit.

[ano]

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;)

[Saulot]

*imagines llamabeast pulling his hair at the thousands of birds he's summoned*

*points and laughs at llamabeast*

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[Xietor]

I have seen dozens of players use birds in mp games to siege, so it is not just llamabeast. But I did test them because i was considering using them for the 1st time and i wanted to see what bang i was getting for my buck(not being a trusting guy).

[NTJedi]

When using map edit commands I could not find any logical formula for sieging units verses the defending units.

[Endoperez]

What about the poor monkeys? Why doesn't anyone think of the monkeys!

[Xietor]

Excellent point Endoperez.

One way To help the Monkeys would be to give elephants a siege bonus since they are highly trainable and would likely be good in a siege.

[llamabeast]

I always imagined the birds were dropping rocks, not pecking at the walls!

Saulot: Your post made me laugh. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Sombre]

Yes, let's boost elephants, they aren't good enough already ;]

[Lingchih]

I always imagined the birds were swooping in and pecking the eyes out of the defenders on the walls. Seems logical to me.

[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.

[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).

[JimMorrison]

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. ;)

[lch]

Make sure to read everything I wrote... After adding up the numbers from all the units, it is being divided by 10 again. But not before, because it's an integer division and otherwise units with a strength of less than 10 wouldn't add anything to the siege.

[Agema]

It's been about a year since I last did it and it may have changed in a patch, but last time I used it those hawks were excellent siege *defenders*. It's very satisfying when you're in a pinch to buy time tying down a large enemy army for an extended siege.

When your army is on the outside, you should think about draconians. Just leave the Chief recruiting, and shunt the draconian grunts onto other commanders (ideally a flyer) to ferry where they are needed. They've got about 18Str, so they're worth about 4 each for sieging. If you think it's necessary they can also help storm the castle and make life difficult for the defenders. Although they'll probably take casualties, and that somewhat defeats the purpose of building up a substantial number to take walls down quickly.

Having said that, even cheaper would probably be that wallshaker horn.

[chrispedersen]

pale one soldiers are what 9 gp under cbm and have a siege value of 3 and change... very cost effective siegers.

Shamblers, due to their strength and low resource cost make acceptable siegers.

[Agema]

What's their gold cost per siege worth? You may be better with a load of 10gp humans, which may arguably be more useful otherwise due to better armour and weaponry.

[Gregstrom]

35gp IIRC, and 2.25 (->2) siege strength, which makes them inferior to human troops except for resource cost.

Edit: Except... if you're limited by the number of commanders you have available for shuffling troops around, then you can move twice as much siege strength around *per commander* than you can with humans. Oh, and if you're going to face things like Fires from Afar then they're more likely to survive than cheap human troops.