Militia Changes Between TSK, and TPR

[Yeti]

I recently obtained a copy of TPR, having previously just played TSK. One of the first things I noticed was the Militia have now been given an additional attack point, the difference between Axe Fighters and Militia now being a single defence point. Things are worse for the Lance Carrier, who transfers an attack point to a defence point.

Given the amount of labour required to produce the leather armour and shields required for the Axe Fighters' additional attack and defence point in TSK it seemed to balance out. Now I question the worth of producing Axe Fighters short of not having a particularly large supply of gold.

Am I mistaken in this belief, or is it not right for Militia to have two attack points?

[Siegfried]

That's indeed correct.

The militia was originally planned to have only one attack point (25%). But Joymania discovered that the militia was too weak then, so they gave it a second attack point (35%).

But the picture was already made and they forgot to change it. This means, that in TSK, the militia already had 35%. The picture is wrong.

They corrected the picture for TPR (I think it was corrected in the community SR-releases, not in vanilla TPR?). The militia is equally strong in both games, 35% each.

But that is a good notice that you made

[Yeti]

Ah, well that's very reassuring. Thanks for the information. There remains something quite unsatisfactory about leather armour and a shield providing so little though.

[Ben]

Oh but it does make a big difference. Test it (especially against archers) and you will see.

[Yeti]

Yet a Lance Carrier has exactly the same level of defence and they don't even have a shield.

In practical terms wearing leather armour reduces your attack by 10% to obtain defence, and the shield then grants you 10% extra attack again.

It just seems.. odd.

[Lewin]

Can I just say that the little icons on the parchment are really quite meaningless compared to the actual unit statistics.
A militia does not have "2 attack points", he has 35 attack points. The axefighter also has 35 attack points, they are the same.

An axefighter has 2 defence, militia only has 1. This means that an axefighters will be twice as hard to injure as a militia which is a huge advantage.

Lance carriers only have 25 attack points, but still 2 defence.
Please read Humbelum's post here where he described the fighting system:
http://www.atfreeforum.com/knights/viewtopic.php?t=493

P.S. There is no doubt about the correctness of these values because they are loaded from the data\defines\units.dat file, so they match what is in KaM exactly. The Remake loads units.dat directly so it is also the same.

[H.A.H.]

This was touched on earlier in the thread. So far as I can tell attack points only become skewed when you put archers and new units into the mix. For all the rest:

1 point: 25%
2 points: 35%
3 points: 55%
4 points 100%

Defence points have managed to stay the same throughout it seems, which is nice as it avoids exception.

1 point: 25%
2 points: 50%
3 points 70%

So although the points are not evenly weighted as they accummulate I'm not sure it's fair to write them off as being entirely meaningless. In fact so long as archers are counted as having their attack points having different values, the only issue is the Warrior.

That said I'm very interested in reading the thread, but the link is broken.

[Yeti]

Oops, didn't mean to post as guest. Consider this an edit to the above:

In fact, if Barbarians are reclassified as having 5 attack points then the system can stand.

[Lewin]

Defence points have managed to stay the same throughout it seems, which is nice as it avoids exception.

1 point: 25%
2 points: 50%
3 points 70%

Where did you get that from? I've never seen those values before. Units do not have a percentage value for defence, they have 1 for no armour, 2 for leather and 3 for iron. Then the combat is calculated as if (attack/defence) > Random (100) then reduce hit point.

Yes you're right, they're not entirely meaningless but they are not a good description of the way the fighting system works. I fixed the link.

[Yeti]

I was taking the values from Wikipedia, seeing that the attack values seemed to be correct as far as I could tell. Thanks for fixing the link and the combat formula.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_and_Merchants:_The_Peasants_Rebellion

[Siegfried]

Where did you get that from? I've never seen those values before. Units do not have a percentage value for defence, they have 1 for no armour, 2 for leather and 3 for iron. Then the combat is calculated as if (attack/defence) > Random (100) then reduce hit point.

Yes you're right, they're not entirely meaningless but they are not a good description of the way the fighting system works. I fixed the link.

They are presented in the manual in this way, at least in the german manual.