Ranged Defense: Is it even working?

from Stardock Forums

Howdy Folks,

I have played the game through a good many times on various setting and I am all but convinced that ranged defense is not working. As often happens, when attacking AI opponents, all of their archers key on a single target, and light it up.

And that would be manageable, if defenses were working, but by late game, the AI has 4-5 archers in each group, and the defenses do not seem to be doing anything.

In my latest game, I had a champion with 36 base armor, plus the ranged def belt (+20 ranged def), on horseback (+25 ranged dodge) and had guardian wind going before the AI had an attack turn (+35 ranged def). That should be plenty of defense, if it were working.

However, every single ranged attack hit the targeted champion, not a single miss or dodge.

So something is not getting calculated correctly. I think this needs to get looked at.

What are other people seeing?

 

9,268 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

I see ranged shots miss quite frequently - note that with archer groups, it will show a hit if any of the archers in the group succeed, you may be dodging most of them.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Defense doesn't affect how easily a unit is hit, it subtracts from the damage taken. Dodge is reduced from accuracy.

Let's say the enemy has a group of archers with accuracy 80. If you are on horseback, they will each have an individual chance of 55% to hit. After that they get a  damage number based on a roll of their attack. Then you roll for defense and deduct that. If total damage done is zero, as is probable in your case, you should see a 'Clink' displayed.

I'm actually not 100% sure that to hit rolls are not group based. I see groups with 70% hit chances miss very often.

Siege of Centauri
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top

I just went back and looked again, and I realized I did not count the added ranged dodge from the shield my champion was using, so it is even "worse".

I just reloaded an autosave and fought 3 different battles and the AI archers did not miss once in 3 fights.

And for clarification, the AI player was hitting 100% with both trained archers and the default defense ones, so it looks an awful lot like a not-quite-working mechanic to me.

 

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Accuracy of group units (multiple units in a stack) is calculated separately. So basically, if you get a group of 7 archers shooting at you, they get to roll hit 7 times, this means you won't see them "miss" very often. However, when those units roll a "miss", they don't contribute their share of the damage.

In example: A group of 7 archers, who would do 10 damage each (to make it simple), 5 of which "misses"... the game will still show a "hit" but they will only do 20 damage instead of 70.

Basically, you are getting the effect of the miss, but you're not "seeing" it. The only time that this is troublesome is with backswing units.

Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting Kalin, reply 5
Accuracy of group units (multiple units in a stack) is calculated separately. So basically, if you get a group of 7 archers shooting at you, they get to roll hit 7 times, this means you won't see them "miss" very often. However, when those units roll a "miss", they don't contribute their share of the damage.

In example: A group of 7 archers, who would do 10 damage each (to make it simple), 5 of which "misses"... the game will still show a "hit" but they will only do 20 damage instead of 70.

Basically, you are getting the effect of the miss, but you're not "seeing" it. The only time that this is troublesome is with backswing units.
End of Kalin's quote

 

What you say might be true, but even the 3 stack archers and bow armed champs were hitting 100% of the time. With as much defense and ranged dodge going on, there should have been some misses, and haven't been.

Now, I looked at the numbers again and I am seeing the damage reduction brought about by the armor score itself, so that appears to be working, but the evasion, not so much.

I suspect that it is something to do with a minimum accuracy variable not working in the "to hit" equation, not being reduced or modified by the ranged evasion value, but I don't really know.

Bottom line is either ranged accuracy is working too well or ranged evasion and/or ranged evasion items are not working as they are supposed to.

Regardless, it would be nice if some of the SD folks took a look at this.

 

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

I also see ranged shots miss frequently. I have no idea if the the dodge mechanics are working correctly, but I do know that I see the shots miss frequently. Also, I notice that you said that this was a late-game scenario. This implies that the units should be relatively high level (which grants an accuracy bonus) or trained in a fortress with troop boosters (some of which grant fairly significant accuracy bonuses, others that boost initial troop level). As I understand it, the dodge mechanic is something along the lines of

          chance_to_hit = attacker_accuracy - defender_dodge

It isn't that hard to boost accuracy to the point where you'd be looking at 90% or better hit chances against most units. It would help a bit if you determined the accuracy rating of the units attacking you and compared it to the dodge rating of your units - if you've only got about 30 dodge (total) and the enemy had somehow achieved trained units with, say, 130 accuracy, a nearly 100% hit rate is entirely reasonable.

Also, champions are very bad things to use as a comparison for accuracy - they get levels much more quickly than anything else in the game, and they have the ability to gain significant boosts to accuracy and dodge. Beyond that, they have some traits that can increase the per-level bonuses to accuracy and dodge.