On the topic of armour piercing chariots

TlaxtlanSoothsayer

Disclaimer: This is not supposed to be a guide how to use chariots, it's mainly a balancing discussion about game mechanics.

Inspired by a wonderful discussion in the Scourgerunner thread I decided to create half a dozen of mods, changed the stats of various units to the extreme, and killed a lot of innocent Chaos followers heretics. I didn't want to further derail the other thread either.


In search for the answer to one simple question:

Does armour piercing damage on chariots matter?

The competitors of today's chariot race are 1 Cold One Chariot with exactly 0 AP damage:



And another Cold One Chariots with 44 AP or 100% AP damage.



These guys were chosen by the dark gods, Tzeentch granted them 300 armour. They literally don't take ANY damage from non-AP weaponry:



The chariot charge sends them flying all over the place. But as you can see the impact damage is neglible:


When you use the chariot for cycle charging you'll inclict some additional damage, but it's not impressive either, our friend Eumaies might call it "largely meaningless":

GG well played dark gods, don't mess with Tzeentch:

An explanation what's going on here:

Impact damage is fixed ratio of regular and AP damage, it doesn't matter that the chariots have 0 AP, it mainly depends on the charge speed and on the mass difference between the charging unit and the unti on the receiving end. Cavalry or monsters inflict damage on impact, too. As you can see the damage is very underwhelmig for various reasons. The Chosen were braced which increases their mass. When you charge them in the back instead you'll maybe manage to deal 100, 200, or 300 impact damage. Once the chariot combat or when moving through the Chaos unit it deals 2 or 3 damage here and there, but it's next to nothing. It's impossible to defeat 300 armour Chosen with a 0 AP chariot, because chariots rely on their charge bonus and collision damage, charge bonus doesn't use a fixed value, it uses the ratio of regular and AP damage of a unit. In this case 0.

For comparison the chariot with 44 AP damage:
As you can see the clever girls with armour piercing damage deal hundreds of damage within the first second of the engagement. It's self-explanatory, of course they deal the same impact damage as the chariots with 0 AP, but their charge bonus and collision attacks pierce the armour:

Additional tests against 120 armour:

As the armour value in the first test is a little bit unrealstic I ran another 20 tests against Chosen with their normal 120 armour. Please don't get me wrong. This not how you use chariots! In this test scenario the chariots charge braced Chosen head on. They immediately pull through the enemy unit (instead of making use of at least a few seconds of their CB). Missile attacks are turned off. 10 tests for each chariot.


Results:
---- 0 AP Cold One Chariot; average damage : 162.
100% AP Cold One Chariot; average damage: 784.

The chariot with AP performs about 4 or 5 times as good against 120 armour.

Conclusions:

Usually you use chariots for rear charging or flanking. It's also important to stay in combat for at least a few seconds, charge bonus fades away over 13 seconds, but the first seconds are the time when it really makes a difference. I ran a lot of additional tests with flank charges, against targets with 80 or 100 armour. I'll spare you and won't post even more screenshots or numbers, I promise. At least for now.



In the end the results are more or less what you would expect:

- Chariots rely a little bit less on AP damage than cavalry or infantry.

- You get impact damage for free, but it's not that impressive. It adds up as long as you cycle charge like a madman.

- Non-AP chariots deal some AP as well, a small amount of AP can already be devasting because of the high CB and collision attacks. Non-AP chariots can work against any infantry, but are way less efficient against armour.

- No Cold Ones were harmed in the making of this movie.

- A little bit off topic, but the ranged DpS of Scourgerunners, Tiranoc and Goblin Wolf Chariots is 2 times as high as the unit card suggests.

- AP damage is king, even for chariots. Mainly because the majority of other game mechanics depends on the ratio of regular and AP damage. For example charge bonus, collision attacks, and bonus vs. infantry.

griffithx#1314

"- AP damage is king, even for chariots. Mainly because the majority of other game mechanics depends on the ratio of regular and AP damage. For example charge bonus, collision attacks, and bonus vs. infantry."

So collision damage is affected by a chariot's Ap ratio?

TlaxtlanSoothsayer

Griffithxi said:

"- AP damage is king, even for chariots. Mainly because the majority of other game mechanics depends on the ratio of regular and AP damage. For example charge bonus, collision attacks, and bonus vs. infantry."

So collision damage is affected by a chariot's Ap ratio?

Yes, I think so. At least the results suggest that collision attacks deal next to 0 damage to high armour when the unit in question doesn't have AP damage.

Impact damage, which occurs when units collide with each other, uses a fixed ratio. The ratio might be 70%, but I can't think of any way to test it right now. That's why the chariots with 0 AP still deal damage to 300 armour.

eumaies#1128

Cool, thanks for the thorough testing and explanation - i'm glad whatever chip was on your shoulder from our conversation spurred this great effort. I was unable to test the relative importance of impact damage vs collision damage for chariots, so this is very helpful. I'm glad to see CA isn't in general wrong in how they are pricing AP chariots.

Faster chariots with smaller hit boxes (but still good mass) are probably all around harder to deal with and sufficiently effective (as well as effectively invulnerable) against most infantry. But good to know that if you really want to grind with heavy infantry and take them down faster, there's some value to an AP chariot.

BovineKing#8781

So back to my questions in that discussion how does speed affect charges in the game are we actually getting increased impact damage from it or is it only charge bonus? This is more something I would like to see confirmed as I’ve noticed higher charge bonus seems to amp speed considerably and has had me wondering if speed itself plays a role than.

AENARlON

^ Conventional wisdom says impact damage is a function of speed but CB and collision aren't.

yst#1879

With Info like 0 ap still doing dmg even to 300 armor units

Those frikking non ap chariot r super attractive now. 3 chaos chariots may well outperform 2 gores by the looks of it.

OrkLads

Great job, always good to see testing done like this. Interesting to see from other thread there is a lot of misunderstanding about chariot damage, so be good to find a way to spread this type of info more effectively to player base.

Tennisgolfboll#5877

This shows the problem with how ap and armor works.

To often is armor useless.

To often it is to good.

Disposable Hero

Excellent post!

On the importance of speed, my impression from just playing is that mass > speed based on how little impact tiranocs and ithilmars appear to do compared to gorebeast etc. There is ap advantage of course but speed doesn't seem to make up for it. It may however be that impact is reaching the cap regardless and the perceived difference is only from ap and stats (also when comparing tiranocs to ithilmars). Would be interesting to know for sure.

The collision damage sharing ap ratio, may that be an effect of regular attacks being performed while driving through or Co chariots don't have them?

yst#1879

Why is 0 ap still able to bypass armor?

I mean its always been cap at 90% or anything anyway, why is it here its stronger?

This literally translate to non ap chariot being much, much stronger than they seem to be

AENARlON

yst said:

Why is 0 ap still able to bypass armor?

I mean its always been cap at 90% or anything anyway, why is it here its stronger?

This literally translate to non ap chariot being much, much stronger than they seem to be

From OP:

"Impact damage is fixed ratio of regular and AP damage, it doesn't matter that the chariots have 0 AP, it mainly depends on the charge speed and on the mass difference between the charging unit and the unti on the receiving end."

But as impact damage is only one of three chariot melee attack types, and the other two (regular melee attack and collision) use the unit AP ratio, there is still a major advantage to having AP damage against armoured opponents, as the testing results show.

eumaies#1128

Soothsayer you describe the variation in impact damage of charging chosen in the back with 0 AP vs charging them braced in the front. That begs the question of how much impact damage depends on the effective mass of what you are charging? In other words for a less massive unit, setting aside combat stats, will impact damage be higher for the same charge simply because more models are impacted to a greater degree? or is impact damage a fixed quantity and mass simply determines whether the chariot gets stuck longer?

rymeintrinseca said:

yst said:

Why is 0 ap still able to bypass armor?

I mean its always been cap at 90% or anything anyway, why is it here its stronger?

This literally translate to non ap chariot being much, much stronger than they seem to be

From OP:

"Impact damage is fixed ratio of regular and AP damage, it doesn't matter that the chariots have 0 AP, it mainly depends on the charge speed and on the mass difference between the charging unit and the unti on the receiving end."

But as impact damage is only one of three chariot melee attack types, and the other two (regular melee attack and collision) use the unit AP ratio, there is still a major advantage to having AP damage against armoured opponents, as the testing results show.

That does raise the question of how different the impact damage portion is for units that aren’t high mass chosen being charged while braced and from the front.

TlaxtlanSoothsayer

rymeintrinseca said:

^ Conventional wisdom says impact damage is a function of speed but CB and collision aren't.

You're right. Impact damage depends on speed and mass. I wasn't sure about the exact values either, because a lot of things refer to "collision", and I asked myself if it's actually the collision damage or collision attacks, 2 entirely seperate mechanics.



As it turns out there is a formula for impact damage in the database:

- (collision_power^collision_damage_normaliser) * collision_damage_modifier


Collision power is the combined difference between the mass and speed delta's of the units. It's the real movement speed of the units, so let's say a chariot moves at 84 speed the correct value for the calculation is 8.4 . CA just multiplies the movement speed by 10 in the UI, because something like 3.2 movement speed on a unit card would look weird.

The normalizer is basically used to make it a nonlinear growth. Twice the speed doesn't mean twice the damage. But there is also a hard cap of 70, units never deal more than 70 damage when they collide with each other.


The formula and various different variables look like this:


There are also certain thresholds when units get knocked around or sent flying.



Long story, short:

- As explained in detail in my earlier post impact damage, regular attacks, and collision attacks are 3 seperate things.

- Even when you use a really high mass unit against a really low mass unit you'll hit the impact damage cap at some point.

- The majority of damage is the result of attacks. Chariot charges rely on their collision attacks, which depend on CB, MA, regular WS and AP.

TlaxtlanSoothsayer

eumaies said:

Soothsayer you describe the variation in impact damage of charging chosen in the back with 0 AP vs charging them braced in the front. That begs the question of how much impact damage depends on the effective mass of what you are charging?

I asked that myself, too. You can check the formula in the earlier post.

To verify if the forumula and the hardcap are correct I used for example a War Mammoth. It's basically a really thicc chariot. 6500 mass is more than any other chariot in the game.

Again I removed all of the AP damage, so its attacks deal 0 damage. On impact the mammoth deals a few hundred points of damage here and there, because some entities get hit with the max impact damage. But impact damage uses a hard cap, so it's not nearly as devastating as a real mammoth charge. A real charge would deal thousands of damage because mammoths have insane collision attacks, really high weapon strength, decent AP, bonus vs. infantry and whatnot.

Something to keep in mind is that you don't need chariots to inflict impact damage. Any unit can deal impact damage as long as it's larger, faster, and has higher mass. For example Kholek Suneater might not be a chariot, nor does he use collision attacks. Nonetheless, Shaggoths deal max impact damage against infantry more often than not.

mightygloin#2446

yst said:

With Info like 0 ap still doing dmg even to 300 armor units

Those frikking non ap chariot r super attractive now. 3 chaos chariots may well outperform 2 gores by the looks of it.

Gobbo chariots liked this. It's no wonder Da Great Gobbo King used to deploy them regularly against dwarfs.

yst#1879

mightygloin said:

Gobbo chariots liked this. It's no wonder Da Great Gobbo King used to deploy them regularly against dwarfs.

Aye, I mean they r seriously cheap and really expendable yolo-chariots, much like those single use squiqs and razorgors. Pretty good units these chariots, pretty surprising they arent a staple unit that shouldve been meta since 2016, they just arent, weird

zer0i

Well mmm, 2 chariots doing 1k damage each is a lot more than 3 chariots doing 100 damage each. I've run over quite a few dwarfs with both of them and can tell you I'd much rather have a pair of gorebeast at full health in a dwarfen backline than 3 normal ones. The main problem is the dawi can often kill one of the chariots before it can do much and I'd prefer the disruption of two normal ones over the killing power of one gorebeast.

eumaies#1128

zer0 said:

Well mmm, 2 chariots doing 1k damage each is a lot more than 3 chariots doing 100 damage each. I've run over quite a few dwarfs with both of them and can tell you I'd much rather have a pair of gorebeast at full health in a dwarfen backline than 3 normal ones. The main problem is the dawi can often kill one of the chariots before it can do much and I'd prefer the disruption of two normal ones over the killing power of one gorebeast.

Yeah as someone with lots of experience being run over I would fear the 3 much more than the 2.

Also, those two chariots aren't 100 vs 1k damage, that was the extreme of 0 AP vs 100% AP. The spread on a more typical 1/3 AP vs 2/3 AP lite/heavy chariot decision is more on the order of 300 difference on a very high mass high armour target no less.

yst#1879

zer0 said:

Well mmm, 2 chariots doing 1k damage each is a lot more than 3 chariots doing 100 damage each. I've run over quite a few dwarfs with both of them and can tell you I'd much rather have a pair of gorebeast at full health in a dwarfen backline than 3 normal ones. The main problem is the dawi can often kill one of the chariots before it can do much and I'd prefer the disruption of two normal ones over the killing power of one gorebeast.

Just 1 bypassing the defenders and squeezing onto ur missiles is way more threat than 2 killing defenders with safe missiles.

And thats on dwf, ur talking about a faction thats armoured by default. If thats on any other, say even them rocking on berserkers, biguns or really just any other missiles if would be extremely devastating. Of coz theres always black orks, mara champs and armoured one. But really theres other tools for that and ap chariot may or may not be the best choices, u can also run lance cavs etc

No one is downplaying ap, but it really isn’t compulsory on all accounts. Skaven elves, etc many factions r have truckloads of light targets that r costly to bring

Aps not free, its a paid commodity.

Simply look at dogs, expensive af, ap is near nonexistent. Bats as well, why r they so highly look upon. Personally i dont think they r good aT all but theres a lot of things they can disrupt

Cadia101

yst said:

zer0 said:

Well mmm, 2 chariots doing 1k damage each is a lot more than 3 chariots doing 100 damage each. I've run over quite a few dwarfs with both of them and can tell you I'd much rather have a pair of gorebeast at full health in a dwarfen backline than 3 normal ones. The main problem is the dawi can often kill one of the chariots before it can do much and I'd prefer the disruption of two normal ones over the killing power of one gorebeast.

Just 1 bypassing the defenders and squeezing onto ur missiles is way more threat than 2 killing defenders with safe missiles.

And thats on dwf, ur talking about a faction thats armoured by default. If thats on any other, say even them rocking on berserkers, biguns or really just any other missiles if would be extremely devastating. Of coz theres always black orks, mara champs and armoured one. But really theres other tools for that and ap chariot may or may not be the best choices, u can also run lance cavs etc

No one is downplaying ap, but it really isn’t compulsory on all accounts. Skaven elves, etc many factions r have truckloads of light targets that r costly to bring

Aps not free, its a paid commodity.

Simply look at dogs, expensive af, ap is near nonexistent. Bats as well, why r they so highly look upon. Personally i dont think they r good aT all but theres a lot of things they can disrupt

I think it is mainly because they come from rosters with limited to no range. So for those factions, bothering enemies range units is more important.

BovineKing#8781

Awe thanks for confirmation on that Tlaxtlan!

TlaxtlanSoothsayer

BovineKing said:

Awe thanks for confirmation on that Tlaxtlan!

You're welcome.

That being said, take it with a grain of salt, please.



My posts don't mean that AP chariots are better than non-AP chariots. It's mainly about game mechanics. The cost efficiency of chariots is a different topic.

There are way too many variables. It depends on the match-up, on your prefered playstyle, on your opponent, it depends on the rest of your army, and so on and so forth.

I'm not trying to convince you that for example Gorebeast Chariots are better than Chaos Chariots 100% of the time. I think both units have a place in the army roster. As it is the case for the majority of other chariots. There are rare exceptions. Obviously certain chariots make more sense against specific factions than others, but I don't want to discuss this in detail without writing another essay. To be honest, I learn something new about this game every day, too.

Glad you liked some tests and number crunching anyways.

yst#1879

Do u know how we can find out the size of a unit hitbox? Terradon hitbox is idiotically huge, i wanna know exactly how stupid they are. Also all chariots seems to be roughly the same size

Lotus_Moon#2452

yst said:

Do u know how we can find out the size of a unit hitbox? Terradon hitbox is idiotically huge, i wanna know exactly how stupid they are. Also all chariots seems to be roughly the same size

Total war stats, under unit cards, you can expand it and see the high, width, length and unti type of the unit, its not perfect but its quite decent and best thing we have...do you need a link?

yst#1879

That doesnt explain why terradon takes close to 200%++ more range dmg that eagle.

Eagle hitbox is either bugged or so absurdly small its a totaljoke. Even smaller than character on pegasus

doktarr

This is great stuff, thanks. I've been aware of the distinction between collision damage (limited to a few units like chariots & mammoths) and impact damage (available to all big units hitting little units) but I wasn't aware of the specific mechanics of each. Specifically, I didn't know that impact damage was basically a set amount with a set AP ratio, while collision used MA/MD/weapon damage.

There's a number of other hidden stats that (assuming I understand things correctly) are pretty crucial for how effective collision damage is. Namely, "collision damage max targets", "collision damage cooldown", and to a lesser extent "radius" and "combat reaction radius".

Collision damage max targets/cooldown determines how many units can get hit within one cooldown period by a chariot. Max targets is 3 for most things, but it's 2 for non-Settra TK chariots, 4 for mammoths/steam tanks/doomwheels/Settra, and 6 for Ikit's Doomwheel. Cooldown is 2 for most things, but 1 for Doomwheels and 4 for Settra/Black Coach/Steam Tanks.

When you put this together, you can get a "max hit rate" for each type of unit, assuming you can collide with new units often enough to hit these numbers:

• Ikit's Doomwheel: 6 units per second
  
• Other Doomwheels: 4 units per second
  
• Mammoths: 2 units per second
  
• Most other chariot-type things: 1.5 units per second
  
• Black Coach/TK chariots/Bells/Furnaces/Steam Tank: 1 unit per second
  

Note that even the slowest of these attacks is much faster than the fastest normal attack animations. As such, I'd break somewhat with Tlaxan's advice and say that, when it's practical, it pays to move collision damage units around as much as possible, as opposed to sticking around in combat for even 5 or 6 seconds. You really want to collide with enough models to reach your collision attack cap, as this will maximize your DPS.

The larger your radius + reaction radius, the more units you will contact while moving around, so the easier it will be to trigger enough collisions to hit your attack cap.

Sarmatianns#6760

yst said:

That doesnt explain why terradon takes close to 200%++ more range dmg that eagle.

Eagle hitbox is either bugged or so absurdly small its a totaljoke. Even smaller than character on pegasus

No, it's not. It's the on hit animation that protects eagles, which is why they suffer horribly against arrows once they land.

Ironically, shooting eagles with less accurate archers (while the eagles are in the air) is more beneficial.

Lotus_Moon said:

yst said:

Do u know how we can find out the size of a unit hitbox? Terradon hitbox is idiotically huge, i wanna know exactly how stupid they are. Also all chariots seems to be roughly the same size

Total war stats, under unit cards, you can expand it and see the high, width, length and unti type of the unit, its not perfect but its quite decent and best thing we have...do you need a link?

That is very flawed, though, because it takes only one value from the game data and presents it. Quite a few chariots have multiple hit boxes (the chariot itself, the infantry models, mounts that are pulling it... ). The reason Doom Flayers are so resilient to missiles is because they have only one hit box, unlike, say, Gorebeast Chariot.