What's the point of charge bonus in cavalry beta?

epic_159733426971RLfP0ma

So correct me if I'm wrong, but with the move to collision power being how charge works, what's the point of charge bonus then?

Because now, it seems like only speed, mass, and bracing (which isn't shown numerically to us) will matter. So then for every perk that adds charge bonus to units, would it become near useless? I feel like the dev team is shooting itself in the foot in terms of creating more work for themselves.

Maybe I missed something here.

I'm asking because cavalry has needed changes for awhile now, and on the beta, I'm not quite seeing the oomph of cavalry just yet, and they are still very easily getting stuck amongst the infantry.

Oh and, I feel like the changes to how individuals charge is doing weird stuff in Bretonnia's triangle formation. Like instead of the whole mass wedging into the enemy, now it's peeling only half of the first layer.

I'm still playing around, but I just don't feel like Bretonnia's got benefits from these changes.

Spellbound1875#4610

Collision is different from attacking and attacking still benefits from the full CB.

epic_159733426971RLfP0ma

Spellbound55 said:

Collision is different from attacking and attacking still benefits from the full CB.

So, that would be the bonus to melee attack, but not damage? I guess I'm just trying to understand what's the difference between collision damage and the charge bonus from before.

epic_159733426971RLfP0ma

Actually, I think I'm understanding something. Le dumb me is realizing, there has always been a collision damage (I think). They removed the charge bonus from the collision calculation. To make it more of a fair trade, they also reduced the number of units that could charge. Ok things are making sense there now.

I should keep playing and see. I still feel a little weirded out by how Bretonnia's triangle formation is acting. Maybe it's just me.

Loupi#8512

there is collision damage and attack damage, charge bonus affects melee attack and the damage of that attack (when you charge)

saweendra#3399

epic_159733426971RLfP0ma said:

Spellbound55 said:

Collision is different from attacking and attacking still benefits from the full CB.

So, that would be the bonus to melee attack, but not damage? I guess I'm just trying to understand what's the difference between collision damage and the charge bonus from before.

CB applies to both MA and WS, after the Collison

epic_159733426971RLfP0ma

Thank you all for clarifying. I dunno if it's just me, but I am now better understanding the changes.

Here's to hoping the heavy calvs feel better. I'm jumping back to the Brets to see how it feels.

Lotus_Moon#2452

It feels very tinny bit better on beta but still bad, Duck already mentioned on discord his looking into it and already adjusted some values that are not on beta yet, but likley will make even further adjustments, bracing on the other hand is quite good, still has same issues of being able to pull it off as before but it actually is beneficial to brace now even not vs cav, i do wonder how much it improves vs monsters.

littlenuke#9412

It's not...

Bracing does no damage, and makes you take a large amount of damage. Now cav gets stuck less so they can pull out more cleanly.. so cyclecharging braced spears is good.

Lotus_Moon#2452

littlenuke said:

It's not...

Bracing does no damage, and makes you take a large amount of damage. Now cav gets stuck less so they can pull out more cleanly.. so cyclecharging braced spears is good.

That is defiantly horrible outcome if its happening

Rat-ee-jiK#7094

CA i've done a post about this already, but please BE BOLDER with your BETA patches. THis patch hasn't changed much regarding the efficacy of heavy cavalry. Its FINE to go too far with changes in BETAs. The danger is that you miss the opportunity to change the game for the better by being excessively conservative with changes that you make.

Make heavy cav (e.g empire knights and better) more impactful on the charge.

Consider increasing heavy cav health/ physical resistance.

increase unit pricing as needed for balance.

technically speaking either increase heavy cavalry mass for stronger charges or impact force (I made a mod for this a while ago).

Spellbound1875#4610

littlenuke said:

It's not...

Bracing does no damage, and makes you take a large amount of damage. Now cav gets stuck less so they can pull out more cleanly.. so cyclecharging braced spears is good.

One thing I'm curious about is how much of this result is related to sustained combat damage and dragon princes having very high MD. This situation may be aberrant because of a large number of missed attacks from the anti-large infantry and because even without CB Dragon princes still land attacks consistently on the charge.

elkapp

captainbeastfeast said:

CA i've done a post about this already, but please BE BOLDER with your BETA patches. This patch hasn't changed much regarding the efficacy of heavy cavalry.

Because CA didn't intend to change the role of cavalry : they made the beta to test a new collision system.

If you want stronger cav i think it'd be better if you just stick with mods because of 1) what i wrote above, and 2) because the devs seems done with changing stats in TWW2 (and probably TWW3 since i guess that game will keep the standards of TWW2).

littlenuke#9412

Spellbound55 said:

littlenuke said:

It's not...

Bracing does no damage, and makes you take a large amount of damage. Now cav gets stuck less so they can pull out more cleanly.. so cyclecharging braced spears is good.

One thing I'm curious about is how much of this result is related to sustained combat damage and dragon princes having very high MD. This situation may be aberrant because of a large number of missed attacks from the anti-large infantry and because even without CB Dragon princes still land attacks consistently on the charge.

The first picture is silverhelms not princes, frontal charging spears and halberds for around 10s

I guess they can just roll over and die now

Spellbound1875#4610

littlenuke said:

Spellbound55 said:

littlenuke said:

It's not...

Bracing does no damage, and makes you take a large amount of damage. Now cav gets stuck less so they can pull out more cleanly.. so cyclecharging braced spears is good.

One thing I'm curious about is how much of this result is related to sustained combat damage and dragon princes having very high MD. This situation may be aberrant because of a large number of missed attacks from the anti-large infantry and because even without CB Dragon princes still land attacks consistently on the charge.

The first picture is silverhelms not princes, frontal charging spears and halberds for around 10s

I guess they can just roll over and die now

Shielded or Unshielded? If Shielded then they are taking the exact same number of return hits as dragon princes. Only difference would be around 10% extra reduction to base damage and a 20% reduction to remain WS from physical resistance. On a per attack basis against halberdiers that would be an average difference of 2.45 damage (12.25 - 9.8 = 2.45). Against Reiksguard on the other hand halberdiers would on average deal 16.32 damage per hit. The difference between Reiksguard and Shielded Silver helms is almost twice the difference between Silver helms and Dragon Princes.

High Elves have really high MD from marital prowess compared to every other shock cav in the game. Put another way all high elf cav have the combat stats of melee cav on top of the CB of shock cav while over 50% health. They're the worst faction you could try testing these changes with if you wanted to make a generalization since they largely ignore the accuracy gain of AL boni. My testing hasn't shown bracing to be fantastic, but over 10 seconds of combat whether cycle charging or remaining in sustained melee I am not seeing comparable results with shock cav on other rosters (I've mostly tried the Empire and Bretonnian shock cav). This suggests the results you're presenting are outliers related to individual unit balance rather than the bracing mechanic in general.

User_Clue

Spellbound55 said:

littlenuke said:

Spellbound55 said:

littlenuke said:

It's not...

Bracing does no damage, and makes you take a large amount of damage. Now cav gets stuck less so they can pull out more cleanly.. so cyclecharging braced spears is good.

One thing I'm curious about is how much of this result is related to sustained combat damage and dragon princes having very high MD. This situation may be aberrant because of a large number of missed attacks from the anti-large infantry and because even without CB Dragon princes still land attacks consistently on the charge.

The first picture is silverhelms not princes, frontal charging spears and halberds for around 10s

I guess they can just roll over and die now

Shielded or Unshielded? If Shielded then they are taking the exact same number of return hits as dragon princes. Only difference would be around 10% extra reduction to base damage and a 20% reduction to remain WS from physical resistance. On a per attack basis against halberdiers that would be an average difference of 2.45 damage (12.25 - 9.8 = 2.45). Against Reiksguard on the other hand halberdiers would on average deal 16.32 damage per hit. The difference between Reiksguard and Shielded Silver helms is almost twice the difference between Silver helms and Dragon Princes.

High Elves have really high MD from marital prowess compared to every other shock cav in the game. Put another way all high elf cav have the combat stats of melee cav on top of the CB of shock cav while over 50% health. They're the worst faction you could try testing these changes with if you wanted to make a generalization since they largely ignore the accuracy gain of AL boni. My testing hasn't shown bracing to be fantastic, but over 10 seconds of combat whether cycle charging or remaining in sustained melee I am not seeing comparable results with shock cav on other rosters (I've mostly tried the Empire and Bretonnian shock cav). This suggests the results you're presenting are outliers related to individual unit balance rather than the bracing mechanic in general.

You can see in the picture that they're unshielded. All the pictures are dragons princes though.

littlenuke#9412

OK, no elf cav then. how about empire knights (high armour) vs AP Anti Large 44MD eternal guard?

Frook#4684

littlenuke said:

OK, no elf cav then. how about empire knights (high armour) vs AP Anti Large 44MD eternal guard?

Please make a separate thread with this showing how braced anti-large elite spear infantry lose so heavily against charging low AP shock cavalry.

This is so representative too, unlike the misrepresenting and misguiding "cavalry is in a bad place" videos that showed people charging low CB cheap melee cavalry like questing knights or hexwraiths against AP monstrous infantry or greatswords infantry.

Infantry doing better on counter-charge than charge had a lot more to do with how much bracing sucks than cavalry being weak, which was masked partially by the previous collision changes. Even though I like the collision changes in the beta, clearly bracing needs to actually actively deal impact damage to cavalry if the bracing units have charge defense.

RawSugar#1229

health bars are deceptive but looks like knights lost 10% and spears 20%? if so the spears traded up despite being ½ as expensive. far as i can tell bracing hasnt changed much in 1.10 1.12 or beta

Frook#4684

RawSugar said:

health bars are deceptive but looks like knights lost 10% and spears 20%? if so the spears traded up despite being ½ as expensive. far as i can tell bracing hasnt changed much in 1.10 1.12 or beta

It looks more like spears lost 25% HP and knights lost about 10%. That would make the gold cost of this trade skewed towards the knights, while knights are infinitely more mobile and are supposed to be countered by anti-large infantry. Low cost shock cavalry trading efficiently doing the one thing they shouldn't be doing is absurdly broken. Knights never have to take this trade, as bracing is difficult and makes the infantry static, yet even if they do take the worst trade they could take in this situation they still trade better.

Disposable Hero

Is this vs a player or ai?

RawSugar#1229

Frook said:

RawSugar said:

health bars are deceptive but looks like knights lost 10% and spears 20%? if so the spears traded up despite being ½ as expensive. far as i can tell bracing hasnt changed much in 1.10 1.12 or beta

It looks more like spears lost 25% HP and knights lost about 10%. That would make the gold cost of this trade skewed towards the knights, while knights are infinitely more mobile and are supposed to be countered by anti-large infantry. Low cost shock cavalry trading efficiently doing the one thing they shouldn't be doing is absurdly broken. Knights never have to take this trade, as bracing is difficult and makes the infantry static, yet even if they do take the worst trade they could take in this situation they still trade better.

even 25% vs 10% would be a slight advantage in terms or resource use.
its always been like this though, its how bracing works in this game. knights are denied the damage on charge and when they turn to cycle charge they get a few 100 extra damage, steadily putting them at a disadvantage. it'd be a bit of an issue if knights were able to do 1 sec cycle charges and win vs something like saurus spears i guess though

Frook#4684

RawSugar said:

Frook said:

RawSugar said:

health bars are deceptive but looks like knights lost 10% and spears 20%? if so the spears traded up despite being ½ as expensive. far as i can tell bracing hasnt changed much in 1.10 1.12 or beta

It looks more like spears lost 25% HP and knights lost about 10%. That would make the gold cost of this trade skewed towards the knights, while knights are infinitely more mobile and are supposed to be countered by anti-large infantry. Low cost shock cavalry trading efficiently doing the one thing they shouldn't be doing is absurdly broken. Knights never have to take this trade, as bracing is difficult and makes the infantry static, yet even if they do take the worst trade they could take in this situation they still trade better.

even 25% vs 10% would be a slight advantage in terms or resource use.
its always been like this though, its how bracing works in this game. knights are denied the damage on charge and when they turn to cycle charge they get a few 100 extra damage, steadily putting them at a disadvantage. it'd be a bit of an issue if knights were able to do 1 sec cycle charges and win vs something like saurus spears i guess though

It has been this way for 4 years, where cavalry and cycling charging ruled the meta. Now we get couple of patches where this doesn't happen and it is immediately remedied. While bracing being useless for entire duration is "just how it is"?

We are back to meta of just frontal charging all infantry, even the anti-large charge defense ones with cavalry then games being decided by who can cycle charge best with cavalry, monsters and flying units.

This is also actually worse than what came before, because I remember frontal charging braced eternal guards with empire knights used to be a bad trade, now even that is not a bad trade.

epic_159733426971RLfP0ma

I'm really thankful for all the discussion that's been happening.

I'm a noob, but my 2cents on the bracing is that it is clunky and hard to pull of in a pinch. And I wish for my low APM clicking skills that we'd have like a "brace toward that unit all the time" button or something. But then again, that'd be a bit unfair and cheap for the experience. idk

epic_159733426971RLfP0ma

Frook said:

RawSugar said:

Frook said:

RawSugar said:

health bars are deceptive but looks like knights lost 10% and spears 20%? if so the spears traded up despite being ½ as expensive. far as i can tell bracing hasnt changed much in 1.10 1.12 or beta

It looks more like spears lost 25% HP and knights lost about 10%. That would make the gold cost of this trade skewed towards the knights, while knights are infinitely more mobile and are supposed to be countered by anti-large infantry. Low cost shock cavalry trading efficiently doing the one thing they shouldn't be doing is absurdly broken. Knights never have to take this trade, as bracing is difficult and makes the infantry static, yet even if they do take the worst trade they could take in this situation they still trade better.

even 25% vs 10% would be a slight advantage in terms or resource use.
its always been like this though, its how bracing works in this game. knights are denied the damage on charge and when they turn to cycle charge they get a few 100 extra damage, steadily putting them at a disadvantage. it'd be a bit of an issue if knights were able to do 1 sec cycle charges and win vs something like saurus spears i guess though

It has been this way for 4 years, where cavalry and cycling charging ruled the meta. Now we get couple of patches where this doesn't happen and it is immediately remedied. While bracing being useless for entire duration is "just how it is"?

We are back to meta of just frontal charging all infantry, even the anti-large charge defense ones with cavalry then games being decided by who can cycle charge best with cavalry, monsters and flying units.

This is also actually worse than what came before, because I remember frontal charging braced eternal guards with empire knights used to be a bad trade, now even that is not a bad trade.

I can see that point. They might want to up the bracing modifier by a significant amount. Bracing is not easy to do quickly and accurate (for slow people like me). Being able to pull it off should be awarded imo.

User_Clue

Frook said:

littlenuke said:

OK, no elf cav then. how about empire knights (high armour) vs AP Anti Large 44MD eternal guard?

Please make a separate thread with this showing how braced anti-large elite spear infantry lose so heavily against charging low AP shock cavalry.

This is so representative too, unlike the misrepresenting and misguiding "cavalry is in a bad place" videos that showed people charging low CB cheap melee cavalry like questing knights or hexwraiths against AP monstrous infantry or greatswords infantry.

Infantry doing better on counter-charge than charge had a lot more to do with how much bracing sucks than cavalry being weak, which was masked partially by the previous collision changes. Even though I like the collision changes in the beta, clearly bracing needs to actually actively deal impact damage to cavalry if the bracing units have charge defense.

Umm.. What? Questing knights are not cheap and they have a CB on par with other shock cav. They also have higher WS and MA than other shock cav too and absolutely hit harder on the charge than empire knights. I assume you're talking about the iddypride video where he tested QK against armored Bestigors so they'll do even better than expensive units like grail knights. And he did test 70+ CB units.

Greatswords are anti infantry so shouldn't do that well against cav anyway. Hexwraiths also should preform pretty well unless the target has magic damage. That's their whole purpose

Spellbound1875#4610

User_Clue said:

Spellbound55 said:

littlenuke said:

Spellbound55 said:

littlenuke said:

It's not...

Bracing does no damage, and makes you take a large amount of damage. Now cav gets stuck less so they can pull out more cleanly.. so cyclecharging braced spears is good.

One thing I'm curious about is how much of this result is related to sustained combat damage and dragon princes having very high MD. This situation may be aberrant because of a large number of missed attacks from the anti-large infantry and because even without CB Dragon princes still land attacks consistently on the charge.

The first picture is silverhelms not princes, frontal charging spears and halberds for around 10s

I guess they can just roll over and die now

Shielded or Unshielded? If Shielded then they are taking the exact same number of return hits as dragon princes. Only difference would be around 10% extra reduction to base damage and a 20% reduction to remain WS from physical resistance. On a per attack basis against halberdiers that would be an average difference of 2.45 damage (12.25 - 9.8 = 2.45). Against Reiksguard on the other hand halberdiers would on average deal 16.32 damage per hit. The difference between Reiksguard and Shielded Silver helms is almost twice the difference between Silver helms and Dragon Princes.

High Elves have really high MD from marital prowess compared to every other shock cav in the game. Put another way all high elf cav have the combat stats of melee cav on top of the CB of shock cav while over 50% health. They're the worst faction you could try testing these changes with if you wanted to make a generalization since they largely ignore the accuracy gain of AL boni. My testing hasn't shown bracing to be fantastic, but over 10 seconds of combat whether cycle charging or remaining in sustained melee I am not seeing comparable results with shock cav on other rosters (I've mostly tried the Empire and Bretonnian shock cav). This suggests the results you're presenting are outliers related to individual unit balance rather than the bracing mechanic in general.

You can see in the picture that they're unshielded. All the pictures are dragons princes though.

You know for some reason looking at the unit cards completely went over my head. Unshielded silver helms still have high MD for the cost at 34 so trying to generalize from High Elf units is still going to undervalue the average gain from bracing.

Mind you the more I've tested the more it seems expensive shock cav (and shock cav in general) are getting short changed by the loss of CB on impact calculations. CDvL still hits shock cavalry harder than melee cav (which tend to be cheaper anyway) and now impact damage is roughly the same resulting in shock cav's performance against most infantry being worse in terms of cost effectiveness.

Bracing also while superior defensively is still not making up the difference gained by counter charging. It's a bad trade relatively speaking, even if compared to previous performance bracing is offering more protection. The extra attacks gained by charging are still too valuable even with both the reduction of total attacks and the slowing of the remaining damage output.

I think going forward 3 points should be considered.

First, shock cav need some kind of change or compensation for the equalizing of impact damage. Whether stat buffs, price cuts, adjustments to impact damage, or nerfs to melee cav on the roster depends on how exactly we want cav to perform, but currently against infantry shock cav lost ground.

Second, it is worth looking at a way to reward infantry for bracing offensively, ideally through speeding up the attacks they are making in response to being charged. As is the defensive benefits are often just slowing down a losing match up, whereas counter charging is creating a winning match up from a cost perspective.

Third, cheap ap high model infantry probably need a nerf to CB. I think the gains from the bug fix were greater for larger entity infantry, though this is difficult to demonstrate conclusively. We don't know the rate at which each unit was being affected by the bug, merely that it was present across unit classes. However Chosen cost more than 3 times as much and gain only about 50% damage over Marauder GWs when controlling for accuracy so even if the rate is even in terms of pure damage GW chaff are going to punch far above their cost.

The spoiler has some theory crafting math to support my points about the relationship between cost and charge damage. You can ignore it.

.8 based damage reduction from armor for Reiksguard (R), 29 accuracy reduction from MD

Marauder GW (475) vs R
.62 accuracy on charge (34+22+35-29)
52 charge damage .23 base (12), .77 ap (40)
((12*.2)+40)*.62= 26.04 damage per attack (dpa)

30 attacks (1/3 of unit) = 781.2 average damage

Chosen GW (1450) vs R
.86 accuracy on charge (48+32+35-29)
82 charge damage .24 base (20), .76 ap (62)
((20*.2)+62)*.86= 56.76 dpa

20 attacks (1/3 of unit) = 1135.2 average damage

Chosen GWs cost 3.05 times as much as Marauder GWs, deal 2.18 times as much dpa, and 1.45 times as much damage over 1/3 of the total units attacks when accounting for CB.

CB (and WS) gain relatively little with cost since expensive units like chosen primarily gain defensive and sustained combat stats in comparison. This low cost and high burst damage creates a situation where it is very easy for cheap GWs to pay for themselves by counter charging expensive (and low health) units and makes bracing almost always a bad idea for cheap GWs since they have really poor sustained combat stats.

Arguably chaff in general should have their CB reassessed to recognize the increased benefit they received with the GSK bug. The general assumption seems to have been that the number of attacks gained by infantry after the bug fix was consistent across unit sizes, but this may not be a safe assumption.

Regardless cav often rely on armor for defense so GW attacks are already largely ignoring shock cavalries defenses which is exacerbating what is otherwise a minor concern. I'd lean towards shifting power from CB into sustained combat stats for cheap GW (which has worked nicely for a lot of GW units over some recent patches) but another option could be worsening ap ratios for cheap GWs to increase the damage reduced by armor, and therefore increase cavalries defensive resilience.

Frook#4684

User_Clue said:

Umm.. What? Questing knights are not cheap and they have a CB on par with other shock cav. They also have higher WS and MA than other shock cav too and absolutely hit harder on the charge than empire knights. I assume you're talking about the iddypride video where he tested QK against armored Bestigors so they'll do even better than expensive units like grail knights. And he did test 70+ CB units.

Greatswords are anti infantry so shouldn't do that well against cav anyway. Hexwraiths also should preform pretty well unless the target has magic damage. That's their whole purpose

Bestigors and QK have nearly similar CB, weapon damage, melee attack etc. QK being a bit higher on all accounts and being faster, while bestigors having more models, for similar price point. QK which has mobility at its side shouldn't be trading that efficiently into it, however people want the unit with the horse icon win heavily automatically. This is an absolutely unrepresentative match up to display that cavalry is doing excessively terribly. I considered they were underperforming but not heavily so as I wrote previously here.

The previous collision changes obviously had some weird interactions with every model in infantry line getting an attack off on counter-charge and had to be fixed but this odd interaction was simply masking the real fact, which is that bracing is useless and have always been and that's why even charge defense units were doing better on counter-charge. It is so micro-intensive and unreliable to actually brace against charging cavalry while getting basically no reward. Now the counter-charge issue is fixed, the only thing that remains on infantry side is bracing, which seems even more useless now somehow.

Charging an empire knight into eternal guard frontally is more representative than most of those tests that are being shown, like marauders with great weapons counter-charges. When you play empire against wood elves, the empire brings empire knights and wood elves bring eternal guard. Look how that trade goes now for the side that is supposed to be countering the other. If this change goes live without significant bonus to bracing your charge defense units against cavalry, it will lead to the same boring and one dimensional cycle charge meta we had for years.

If you have charge defense melee infantry, and make an effort to brace against cavalry, keeping the unit static and the unit itself posing less threat to everything else, trading badly in one situation it should have advantage in then this is a much more representative situation than the cavalry trading badly when frontally countercharging greatweapon infantry. Cavalry was still performing very well when actually doing their job, I.E flanking, hammer and anvil, chasing off and screening ranged units and artillery etc. while the spearmen can't perform one role they are supposed to do perform well with the current changes.

Spellbound1875#4610

littlenuke said:

OK, no elf cav then. how about empire knights (high armour) vs AP Anti Large 44MD eternal guard?

Thanks for taking the critique and adjusting your testing. I appreciate the new data. I'm not getting similar results but it might have to do with how exactly you are running your test. I used a bit chunkier infantry blocks but the empire knights I have were not trading effectively, nor was I see as great of a distinction in unit health. You mentioned earlier this was over 10 seconds, do you mean cycle charging over 10 seconds or are you just charging once? My tests may have used chunkier lines than you were using and we were informed that thin lines may be slightly worse on the beta.

In my experience bracing is better at mitigating damage but is not helping infantry to trade effectively in the way counter charging is, which suggests more work needs to be done.

Dragonsteel82#3883

littlenuke said:

It's not...

Bracing does no damage, and makes you take a large amount of damage. Now cav gets stuck less so they can pull out more cleanly.. so cyclecharging braced spears is good.

Seems like spears or halberds should do some reflective damage to charging cav if they are braced.

Dragonsteel82#3883

Spellbound55 said:

User_Clue said:

Spellbound55 said:

littlenuke said:

Spellbound55 said:

littlenuke said:

It's not...

Bracing does no damage, and makes you take a large amount of damage. Now cav gets stuck less so they can pull out more cleanly.. so cyclecharging braced spears is good.

One thing I'm curious about is how much of this result is related to sustained combat damage and dragon princes having very high MD. This situation may be aberrant because of a large number of missed attacks from the anti-large infantry and because even without CB Dragon princes still land attacks consistently on the charge.

The first picture is silverhelms not princes, frontal charging spears and halberds for around 10s

I guess they can just roll over and die now

Shielded or Unshielded? If Shielded then they are taking the exact same number of return hits as dragon princes. Only difference would be around 10% extra reduction to base damage and a 20% reduction to remain WS from physical resistance. On a per attack basis against halberdiers that would be an average difference of 2.45 damage (12.25 - 9.8 = 2.45). Against Reiksguard on the other hand halberdiers would on average deal 16.32 damage per hit. The difference between Reiksguard and Shielded Silver helms is almost twice the difference between Silver helms and Dragon Princes.

High Elves have really high MD from marital prowess compared to every other shock cav in the game. Put another way all high elf cav have the combat stats of melee cav on top of the CB of shock cav while over 50% health. They're the worst faction you could try testing these changes with if you wanted to make a generalization since they largely ignore the accuracy gain of AL boni. My testing hasn't shown bracing to be fantastic, but over 10 seconds of combat whether cycle charging or remaining in sustained melee I am not seeing comparable results with shock cav on other rosters (I've mostly tried the Empire and Bretonnian shock cav). This suggests the results you're presenting are outliers related to individual unit balance rather than the bracing mechanic in general.

You can see in the picture that they're unshielded. All the pictures are dragons princes though.

You know for some reason looking at the unit cards completely went over my head. Unshielded silver helms still have high MD for the cost at 34 so trying to generalize from High Elf units is still going to undervalue the average gain from bracing.

Mind you the more I've tested the more it seems expensive shock cav (and shock cav in general) are getting short changed by the loss of CB on impact calculations. CDvL still hits shock cavalry harder than melee cav (which tend to be cheaper anyway) and now impact damage is roughly the same resulting in shock cav's performance against most infantry being worse in terms of cost effectiveness.

Bracing also while superior defensively is still not making up the difference gained by counter charging. It's a bad trade relatively speaking, even if compared to previous performance bracing is offering more protection. The extra attacks gained by charging are still too valuable even with both the reduction of total attacks and the slowing of the remaining damage output.

I think going forward 3 points should be considered.

First, shock cav need some kind of change or compensation for the equalizing of impact damage. Whether stat buffs, price cuts, adjustments to impact damage, or nerfs to melee cav on the roster depends on how exactly we want cav to perform, but currently against infantry shock cav lost ground.

Second, it is worth looking at a way to reward infantry for bracing offensively, ideally through speeding up the attacks they are making in response to being charged. As is the defensive benefits are often just slowing down a losing match up, whereas counter charging is creating a winning match up from a cost perspective.

Third, cheap ap high model infantry probably need a nerf to CB. I think the gains from the bug fix were greater for larger entity infantry, though this is difficult to demonstrate conclusively. We don't know the rate at which each unit was being affected by the bug, merely that it was present across unit classes. However Chosen cost more than 3 times as much and gain only about 50% damage over Marauder GWs when controlling for accuracy so even if the rate is even in terms of pure damage GW chaff are going to punch far above their cost.

The spoiler has some theory crafting math to support my points about the relationship between cost and charge damage. You can ignore it.

.8 based damage reduction from armor for Reiksguard (R), 29 accuracy reduction from MD

Marauder GW (475) vs R
.62 accuracy on charge (34+22+35-29)
52 charge damage .23 base (12), .77 ap (40)
((12*.2)+40)*.62= 26.04 damage per attack (dpa)

30 attacks (1/3 of unit) = 781.2 average damage

Chosen GW (1450) vs R
.86 accuracy on charge (48+32+35-29)
82 charge damage .24 base (20), .76 ap (62)
((20*.2)+62)*.86= 56.76 dpa

20 attacks (1/3 of unit) = 1135.2 average damage

Chosen GWs cost 3.05 times as much as Marauder GWs, deal 2.18 times as much dpa, and 1.45 times as much damage over 1/3 of the total units attacks when accounting for CB.

CB (and WS) gain relatively little with cost since expensive units like chosen primarily gain defensive and sustained combat stats in comparison. This low cost and high burst damage creates a situation where it is very easy for cheap GWs to pay for themselves by counter charging expensive (and low health) units and makes bracing almost always a bad idea for cheap GWs since they have really poor sustained combat stats.

Arguably chaff in general should have their CB reassessed to recognize the increased benefit they received with the GSK bug. The general assumption seems to have been that the number of attacks gained by infantry after the bug fix was consistent across unit sizes, but this may not be a safe assumption.

Regardless cav often rely on armor for defense so GW attacks are already largely ignoring shock cavalries defenses which is exacerbating what is otherwise a minor concern. I'd lean towards shifting power from CB into sustained combat stats for cheap GW (which has worked nicely for a lot of GW units over some recent patches) but another option could be worsening ap ratios for cheap GWs to increase the damage reduced by armor, and therefore increase cavalries defensive resilience.

I'm ok with cheap chaff GW punching hard, they still end up losing quite abit. I don't think it is wise to charge cav into any GW infantry unit that has high models and hits hard.

I'd rather see the bracing for spears or anti large provide some reflective damage or something to help negate the cav charging in (and impaling themselves on a spear unit).