How to not die

[Baalz]

A recent discussion about some of the non-intuitive aspects of an earth blessing suggested to me that it would be helpful to consider the mechanics of survivability. I’m going to be using very specific examples to illustrate how the gameplay works, and what the implications are of the behind the scenes math. I really don’t expect to bring up anything anyone well familiar with the game doesn’t know, but hopefully this will be helpful to the newer players trying to get a handle on the game. This also overlaps part of what I discussed in my thug guide, but it’s quite useful to engage in the same thought process for all your units, and there are very different things you need to consider when deploying your less configurable line troops.

Protection vs defense. For thugs, defense often takes a back seat to protection because thugs are generally swarmed by lots of enemies, and your defense drops very rapidly as the number of enemies attacking you rises. When you’re fighting with buddies to your left and right though, defense is often the gold standard for melee. Your defense score in and of itself doesn’t matter though, what matters is the difference between your defense and your opponents attack. A 20 defense vs an 18 attack is exactly the same as a 12 defense vs a 10 attack. This is on the face of it obvious, but is something many people fail to consider – high defense is *always* a situational advantage, so you need to evaluate what your opponent is fielding to decide if you’ve actually got a good defense or not. I’m writing most of this from the perspective of defense but keep in mind there is a direct give and take – increasing your attack is the same as decreasing your opponent’s defense and vice versa, so attack score is intimately tied to this discussion.

So, with that in mind, what is a good defense? Well, obviously this varies a lot, but to set up a general ballpark consider that most battles last somewhere between 4-8 rounds of melee. Sure, you’re not going to have to look too hard to find a battle that falls outside of that, and you’ll maybe want to pick some different numbers depending on what specifically you’re fielding, but in very broad terms the majority of fights are decided in about that timeframe. If your assumption is that your guys will be attacked 1-2 times per round then this gives us a useful yardstick of expecting 8-16 attacks in a given combat. You can adjust this figuring if your situation makes other assumptions make more sense.

Consulting the handy little chart on page 5 of your manual will tell you what percentage of attacks you can expect to land based on your relative defense. If your defense, relative to your enemies attack is +6, 11% of attacks will land. This is a very useful exercise to assess what you need to do to win a battle with minimum losses.

Now, this is a good time to briefly talk about an important difference between groups of troops fighting and thugs. When you’re looking at groups of troops, the chances of statistical outliers don’t matter near so much. An 11% chance of something happening means most of your troops will escape it. A 1% chance of something happening means it’s effectively not a consideration. For a thug a 1% chance of something happening is a certainty that it will happen. It’s not just the fact that your thug is getting attacked so much more, it’s that a single (un)lucky open ended die roll will occasionally come up with a 30+. Doesn’t matter if one of your 40 troops gets very unlucky, but those are the things that bring down thugs/SCs.

Personally, I don’t find it useful to consider the difference between an 11% chance of something happening and an 8%...particularly as there’s a lot of noise with some units even in a formation getting attacked more than once in a turn, experience stars scattered around, and afflictions. I tend to very roughly clump stuff at more intuitive levels of likely (75%), 50/50 (50%), uncommon (25%), rare (10%), very rare (5%), insignificant (1%).

So, with that to frame our discussion, you can see that a relative defense of 0 will put you at roughly expecting to take 4-8 hits in an average fight. If your relative defense is +4 you’ll expect 2-4 hits, while a difference of +8 will mean plenty of your troops will not be hit in a usual fight, and those that do will generally have just 1 hit to worry about. Clearly, a few points of defense go a long way.

*note: I do gloss over the fact that extra attacks in a round of combat drop your defense, so a second attack is more likely to land. The math gets a lot more complicated…and doesn’t invalidate what you’re doing if “mostly” your units are matched up 1:1 with an enemy. It’s not too hard to adjust the math we’re talking about if you’re fighting a bunch of guys who all have 2 attacks, or are a different size than you. Also, without going into detail repelling is often a considerable factor for line troops. It’s like the poor man’s awe, and most people already realize how effective even awe-0 can be against many troops - so don’t forget to consider weapon length!

Now, obviously it’s not real useful to consider how many times you get hit in a vacuum…its only useful when you consider it relative to how many times you can take a hit. This is where protection comes in. See my thug guide for a detailed discussion of how protection, hitpoints, regeneration, life draining, etc. all interact, but for the purposes of this discussing I’m going to keep it simple (as most line troops are): look at the difference between the average damage a hit from a specific opponent will cause and your protection to get an idea of how many hits you can take. The damage is going to vary too much for very precise math here, but again it’s useful to clump stuff into more intuitive levels like: I’ll die the first time I get hit, I can’t take many hits, I can take a few hits, I can take a lot of hits, and it’s a rare hit that draws blood. Once you have stuff at an intuitive level like that it makes a lot more sense to consider what getting hit 1-2 times means in the general terms you need to think about troop combat in. Remember also that there’s the same tug of war with damage and protection, and extra +2 damage from a minor blood bless will often move you across one of those categories and significantly increasing mortality.

It’s been covered in detail elsewhere so I don’t want to go into it, but remember that your protection score is more complicated than it appears at first glance. You’ve got natural protection, body protection and head protection which all may be buffed independently in different ways. Without being able to equip items on line troops there’s a limited amount you can do to modify this, but its worth considering when you’re planning that 1/5th of attacks will land on your head and whether your troops will benefit much (or at all) from the wooden warriors your mages can cast.

Now, on to the fun stuff.

A lot of times, people can overlook optimizing their troops. Thugs, SCs & artillery mages are often tweaked, polished and meticulously optimized, but when you think about your line troops the same way wonderful nasty options begin to open up. Don’t let the fact that you can’t put equipment on them stop you from thinking about the ways you can turn your good troops into great ones.

I hope you didn’t expect me to start talking about army of lead, fog warriors, darkness, etc. The utilities of these types of spells should be obvious to anybody. What I find much more interesting to discuss is the more subtle ways to leave your opponent wondering what the hell just happened. There are lots of ways which a battle can be turned dramatically where your opponent doesn’t even realize what happened watching the combat replay. One thing I want to keep in mind as we discuss specific maneuvers is how much a shift of just 4 defense points impacted our earlier example: getting hit 1 times can often be shrugged off, getting hit 4 times is usually asking a lot to live through. A shift of 4 in defense is a *lot* when you can apply it across a lot of troops. Keep this in mind as we discuss specific numbers and remember that doing a few different things that each gain you a shift of 2 for your attack/defense can often be as effective as dropping that army of lead.

First, I wanted to consider something people often overlook when thinking about line troops: fatigue. True, fatigue is not as critical a factor for line troops as it is for thugs, but it can still be a considerable tide turner. Once again, what you’re generally concerned with is not your absolute encumbrance, but rather the difference between your encumbrance and your enemies. If you both tire out equally fast it’s a push, but if your opponent is racking up 10 more fatigue than you per turn then it’s like you’re getting +1 to your attack every other round and +1 to your defense each 4th before you even take into account critical hits and passing out Now, a fatigue gap of 10 per turn may seem like a big number, but it’s really not all that uncommon if you leverage what advantages you’ve got available and it’s something you should consider either taking advantage of or minimizing depending on which side of the equation you fall.

Consider the fact that heavy infantry often has an encumbrance around 8-10. Heck, if you’re using 0 encumbrance troops that’s a difference of 10 right there! Remember flying also increases fatigue considerably, so think about leveraging that if you’re facing flying foes. If you’re not lucky enough to be in that situation consider other things which tilt the balance. The most obvious one is temperature scale if appropriate, fighting in extreme heat/cold when it’s in your advantage is a shift of another 2 (winter ward/fire fend can be used to leverage this when you otherwise couldn’t). Fighting in swamps if you’ve got swamp survival (or under quagmire – an undervalued spell!) gives you another shift of 2 (in addition to a 1 shift in attack and defense). Cold/heat auras, heat from hell (etc.), direct fatigue spells (ghost grip, stellar cascades, etc), and the fatigue effects from evocations like fireball or thunderstrike can often be woven together for a devastating effect quite aside from whatever direct damage you’re outlaying. Plenty of people dismiss fatigue until it’s enough to pass you out, but just 10-20 points of extra fatigue spread around can start really having an impact on the way the battle goes.

I did want to give a special mention to one spell in particular which I find extremely underrated: numbness. This spell is extremely easy to research/cast (don’t forget W1 mages can cast it underwater with summon water power, and that the ice pebble staff is at constr-2) and you’ll be amazed at how much area just 2-3 casters can cover. There’s no MR roll, it’s 100 precision, and it hits a whole block of troops, so it’s not all that uncommon to be able to have half or more of the enemy troops numb by the time they close into melee range (well, that is assuming they’re using smaller numbers of elite units…you know, the kind of guys you particularly want an edge with). Numbness gives them an immediate -3 to both attack and defense, so with the immediate fatigue hit it’s basically like you just gave your own troops a level 8 fire/water dual bless. This compounds rapidly with the mounting fatigue so if they can’t kill you fast they’re pretty screwed. Curse of the Desert is another often overlooked spell, but when you consider how easy it is to spam (w1 mage with a water bracelet) and how big its area of effect it’s not hard to see how a small number of cheap mages can have a profound impact on a battle – particularly if you’re using it in conjunction with other strategies to shift the fatigue in your favor. Oh, dehydration and numbness stack…so have fun with those cheap water mages you used to have little use for!

On the flip side of fatigue, consider how to reduce your own. The most obvious way is to consider an earth blessing, even a level 4 one when you’re using holy troops – you don’t have to bring your encumbrance all the way down to a net 0 to make a considerable difference. Relief is usually a tough one to cast, but you’d be remiss not to use it when you can. If you’re lucky enough to have encumbrance-0 or life draining units, actively leverage that fatigue advantage!

And, time for the lightning round. Here’s other things you want to consider which I’m not going to discuss in detail.

Experience stars can make a big difference, so take care of your vets!
Arrows don’t care what your defense is. Shields rule the day against archers, use archer screening tactics.
Immobilization negates good defense, so leverage nets, tangling vines, etc.
Being able to wrap around enemy formations is a significant advantage, so leverage numerical superiority and maneuverability superiority. Flying and haste can be considerable direct military advantages even if there are no real flanking targets.
Likewise, stringing your opponent out can work wonders. Surround that charging cavalry and deal with it before the supporting infantry makes it up.
Quickness (quickening) gives you a bonus to attack, defense, and a second attack (with the associated bonus to hit).
Minor blessings (F/W/B at level 4) can be a cost effective way to get another +2.
Dealing afflictions to the enemy can have a devastating effect on their average attack/defense/encumbrance. Look to death blessings, Doom, bane venom charms, bone grinding, starvation, etc.
Morale can be as important as damage outlay. Consider standards and fear.

So, hopefully you can start to see how, using whatever national advantages you’ve got to pimp out your line troops can be extremely rewarding. Consider this angle when you’re designing your pretender and you can often pick up a +2 here and a +3 there, stacking it on your good troops which will leave you often dominating the battlefield while leaving your opponent scratching his head as to why he’s so regularly getting trounced by troops he should be beating.