Question regarding effects of Disorder

[Temple]

So I'm setting up a custom battle and finding out that some of my heavy foot is deploying in terrain that will cause them to be disordered. Now, I have an idea of what being disordered is, but not what it affects or what is affected by it. I did a keyword search of the PDF manual and found that in the POA tables, being severely disordered is mentioned several times, but being only plain disordered only affected Pike units. The same is also true in the Cohesion Test table. I couldn't find a mention elsewhere of what the effect is on a unit that is just plain disordered (which I guess is the same as moderately disordered?) except back in the hints and tips:

24.9.6. Terrain
Some terrain disorders troops, especially mounted troops and heavy foot. The worse the disorder, the more the fighting ability of the unit is affected. Troops charging enemy who are in disordering terrain are disordered as if they were in the terrain themselves. However, troops in open terrain that are attacked by troops in disordering terrain are not disordered by the terrain.

Is there some quantification of the effect of this phase "The worse the disorder, the more the fighting ability of the unit is affected" somewhere?

[MikeC_81]

Disorder carries a 22% penalty to combat post PoA summation and severely disordered carries a 44% penalty. The exact effect on win loss draw results is not precisely known, that is another one of those black box mechanics in the game that is deemed to be not required to know.

But the effect is very close to cohesion loss. Disorder is about the same as disrupted and severely disordered is about the same as fragmentation.

[rbodleyscott]

You can see the numbers that Mike refers to by turning on detailed tooltips in the game. You can turn them on all the time in the Settings menu, or you can turn them on temporarily by holding down the CTRL key.

Then when you look at the charge tooltip you will see the relevant numbers.

[rbodleyscott]

Disorder carries a 22% penalty to combat post PoA summation and severely disordered carries a 44% penalty. The exact effect on win loss draw results is not precisely known, that is another one of those black box mechanics in the game that is deemed to be not required to know.

Well +100 POA = +33% on the same scale, so that should give you some idea of the relative effect.

But you can't simply add all the % modifiers together, as they are applied at different stages in the process, which distorts such simple maths.

It is all very complicated, which is why we estimate the win:draw:loss chances by running the random part of the calculation 1000 times and dividing the results by 10. Note that the results of combat are not calculated using the win:draw:lose chances - it is the other way round.

If anyone thinks they know a better way of doing this, we challenge them to do so. We can use the current method to test whether their method works! Although the results of the current method do vary by a few % because of the relatively low sample size, we can guarantee that (within quite tight statistical limits) it accurately reflects the chances in the forthcoming combat. Any attempt to work out the odds mathematically from the combat algorithms would be prone to error caused by any bugs, logical errors or rounding errors in the algorithm used to calculate the odds - this method isn't. It is a bit brute force, but we know the results are (within tight statistical limits) accurate.

For the same reason we can't tell you in the manual exactly what effect these various modifiers will have on the result of the combat. It is simply far too complicated to express in the form of a chart.

The main thing is that plusses are good and minuses are bad, and the more minuses there are the worse bet the combat is!

Don't forget that historical commanders would never be able to calculate the odds with the amount of accuracy the current system allows the player.

Fighting while disordered means that your troops will not be fighting to their full potential, which is something to be avoided whatever the exact effect of the modifier.

[Temple]

rbodleyscott, thanks for taking the time to do a length reply. I quite agree with you that it shouldn't be cut and dried that condition X give percentage Y in any absolute sense.

I know it might be weird, but I try, when lining up a combat, to visualize what my attacking unit actually would look like in real life and how it would fight that opponent. It's why I altered the tilt and zoom limits in the game, so I can look at a prospective fight like this where my cataphract is lining up a flank attack on that nomad light horse archer.

halfsize.jpg (137.96 KiB) Viewed 2610 times

And now I have a better idea about how much I need to be concerned about disorder.

[MikeC_81]

To Temple: One thing to note is that disorder takes away the Deep Pike keyword and it screws pikes over! Also severely disordered starts robbing a whole bunch of units of their PoA abilities. So just keep that in mind.

To RBS: Let me preface all of what follows as not an attack on your design choice. I respect and enjoy what you have created here or I wouldn't have spent money on it and its DLC. Just more of a commentary on the challenges a new player faces and the barriers of entry with respect to making intelligent choices in your game.

My black box comment was more of a statement of fact rather than a criticism of the mechanic in that I could tell him that it was a 22% modifier but that doesn't mean much in and of itself. My answer could have been 'its kinda bad' and really that was no different of an answer really since he did ask specifically for quantification. I was pointing out that the quantification of 22% is not something he can directly apply to some known aspect and get a good idea how that will tweak the win/draw/loss numbers.

I get that its some sort of arcane formula that you don't want to show us but I do find it a strange design decision given that this is supposed to be a table top conversion onto a computer. For all my distaste of DBA's legalese manual, at least we know how to calculate the odds since we have to add and subtract the die rolls on the table. Your manual also seems to indicate or suggest some of the percentages are based on die roll probabilities except they are more granular than just rolling dice (ex cohesion tests where superior units "reroll" 1s). Your manual doesn't go into detail on what if anything is different on the probability curve. Once again this is another black box where I just have to assume that the probabilities are close to what rolling 2 dice are for things like "above average".

I guess now is a good time to ask you whether "Raw" Quality has some adverse effect on cohesion tests or not. I suspect it is halfway between Untrained having to reroll 6s and Average which has no rerolls of any kind? Stuff like this is important to me as a player.

I can't comment on your challenge to a "better method" since we the players, don't know the formula to begin with. Is combat based on a per model basis with PoAs affecting some sort of "die roll" for a chance to kill/wound? And then once the wounds are tallied up the game then checks a threshold to see if someone has "lost" based on the difference in casualties? Or is more of a unit vs unit thing where PoAs are fed into a formula and a die roll occurs and the game decide who wins and loses and then doles out casualties based on the result? I don't even know on a macro level how combat is really resolved so its not possible for anyone outside your studio to comment any further.

Just as an example. 100 PoA is supposed to be ~33% "better" right? But that is kind of a meaningless statement. Well I took the time to set up a scenario where I could do controlled tests and use the combat predictor to tell me the range of results over a whole range of PoA differentials. Here is a small bit of what I found.

With 0 PoA differentials regardless of how the PoAs got to zero, the win/draw/loss column seem to hover around 14/72/14.

With 100 PoA differentials, we are looking at something like 49/50/1. Where is the 33% in all of this? I guess 14+33 is around 49? But why does the other unit get some 1% chance to win?

Further with 200 PoA which the game tells me is a 64% advantage, the w/d/l is around 83/17/0. I don't see any relationship other than that it is not some linear curve though I suspect you are using sort of standard deviation or "bell curve" on this and slicing each part of the curve as a w/d/l outcome? Once again just speculation into what the black box is.

So back to the original point, when a player asks for quantification and we tell him its 22%, we didn't actually really quantify anything for him since we have a black box system. I mean this stuff matters. When you are lining up troops against the other guy, you want to know what the odds are before hand. You want to know if the guys you are sending into hold a position have a good chance to hold for some time even if they lose or whether they are going to get carved up for dinner within 2 or 3 turns. Strategies are built on understanding these things and knowing the likely timing of events that are going to unfold. I played a less experienced player sometime ago and he just had no idea that Raw Pikes were unlikely to even slow down Legionaries backed by a general and his game came to swift and brutal end because of that miscalculation.

The upshot maybe is that I am considering putting up a video or a writing a detailed post somewhere with common PoA differentials and what to expect so that newer players don't have to be put at a needless disadvantage just because they haven't played the game enough to internalize common percentages. For me, it just don't feel its right that a new player could line up his troops and not even know what to expect even if he had sat down and read the manual in its entirety. He could end up getting clobbered and not even know the *why* or where he went wrong other than a vague sense of ' I guess this doesn't work against that'

[rbodleyscott]

I guess now is a good time to ask you whether "Raw" Quality has some adverse effect on cohesion tests or not. I suspect it is halfway between Untrained having to reroll 6s and Average which has no rerolls of any kind? Stuff like this is important to me as a player.

Correct. Essentially Raw troops have to reroll half of their "6s",

I can't comment on your challenge to a "better method" since we the players, don't know the formula to begin with. Is combat based on a per model basis with PoAs affecting some sort of "die roll" for a chance to kill/wound? And then once the wounds are tallied up the game then checks a threshold to see if someone has "lost" based on the difference in casualties? Or is more of a unit vs unit thing where PoAs are fed into a formula and a die roll occurs and the game decide who wins and loses and then doles out casualties based on the result?

Essentially the latter.

It is all visible in the script code, none of it is in the black box (even to me) that is the engine, but is sufficiently complicated as not be to explainable in terms equivalent to a set of tabletop rules. One of the advantages of a computer game is that is not restricted to algorithms simple enough to lay out in a set of readable rules in plain English.

FOG1 slavishly followed the tabletop combat mechanisms, which made it easier to explain, but had several adverse effects on the end results.

The bottom line is that we don't fully quantity the final effects of various factors because we can't. It is just too complex.

However, we do give the win:draw:lose chances, which is more than the tabletop rules do.