Attack Speed and DPS Mechanic

#256487

Weapon Strength not showing real damage values. Attack interval, animation speed, animation itself, splash damage affects units damage output significantly. I think total war games need some DPS mechanic(ignoring melee def and attack) which includes all of damage resources bundled together, just like ranged damage but more advanced version including animation speed and such.

SettraDoesNotSimp#5603

#256487 said:

Weapon Strength not showing real damage values. Attack interval, animation speed, animation itself, splash damage affects units damage output significantly. I think total war games need some DPS mechanic(ignoring melee def and attack) which includes all of damage resources bundled together, just like ranged damage but more advanced version including animation speed and such.

If they do that, It would make other aspects problematic. If, say, you see a SE unit with 500+ damage accounting for everything as you sayd, you night think that that unit hit like a truck so it can go 1vs1 with others similar units but then got crushed, because part of that damage was splash damage and in 1vs1 maybe It does not do anything, leasing to misunderstansings


What could be done is add a clearer distinction in damage types as a small tooltip on WS of a unit maybe

Spellbound1875#4610

Attack interval is a standardizing factor designed to make the WS value you see as consistent across unit types.

What you are asking for would be a calculation for damage over time like we see for ranged units which is prone to be less accurate due to splash attacks, animation weirdness, movement, position etc. Providing the level of accuracy iyou want is basically impossible.

Case in point ranged unit got hit with the reload nerf, damage loss appeared minimal but since in practice the difference is often between half and an entire volley less when unprotected missile unit performance became a lot less reliable.

Asamu#6386

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

Attack interval is a standardizing factor designed to make the WS value you see as consistent across unit types.

What you are asking for would be a calculation for damage over time like we see for ranged units which is prone to be less accurate due to splash attacks, animation weirdness, movement, position etc. Providing the level of accuracy iyou want is basically impossible.

Case in point ranged unit got hit with the reload nerf, damage loss appeared minimal but since in practice the difference is often between half and an entire volley less when unprotected missile unit performance became a lot less reliable.

In most cases, yes, but it's not consistent. There are clear examples where this is NOT the case, such as Varghulfs, which have a very low weapon strength, but close to double the attack rate of other monsters. While their intent is for interval to compensate for animations to have everything attack at similar intervals, in practice many units do have different attack rates. It's most apparent when looking at single entities. Some do attack significantly faster than others, and having multiple animations can cause a lot of inconsistency.
In general, shorter, more efficient animations are an advantage, especially for single entities, since getting locked into animations prevents units from acting on orders, and longer animations usually correlates with shorter intervals between the start/end of the next animation.

There's definitely merit some sort of change to how weapon strength is displayed on the unit card; if the game could take the attack interval and average animation length into account to calculate a dps/dp5 or dp10, that would remove the need for CA to try to balance intervals and animation lengths to be about the same for everything.

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

Case in point ranged unit got hit with the reload nerf, damage loss appeared minimal but since in practice the difference is often between half and an entire volley less when unprotected missile unit performance became a lot less reliable.

In multiplayer, ranged units were effectively buffed with the move to ultra, because ranged units don't care about surface area (Melee units on large and ultra put out the same amount of damage until they lose a significant portion of their models, while missile unit output scales directly with unit size, and larger units adds more mass to block enemy units from reaching them). Ranged armies are still competitive in both campaign and multiplayer (One major reason for the nerf was that people were constantly complaining about ranged units being too strong on campaign). The reload nerf is a non-issue.

Spellbound1875#4610

@Asamu#6386

On the first point only SEM's are impacted in a consistently observable manner and that's because they only have one entity attacking. This is basically a sacrifice necessary to have SE's look cool and their isn't a way around it, which I'm fine with.

As soon as we talk about multi-entity models the number of attacks animations being made and the level of difference in length shrinks massively. There isn't a lot of evidence that animation length for multi-entity units is particularly impactful as of game 3 as long as the animations are properly working. Previously the biggest issue was related to charges but that's been addressed. They would be an advantage if attack intervals weren't present but they are.

I don't think there is a lot of merit to moving to an over time system for damage. If attack intervals are working properly (and all tests I've run suggest they are) you'd see units with matched WS still have around the same damage value, only now we'd need more information to determine damage per successful hit and how to factor in accuracy.

The current system is readable at a glance and let's us draw accurate conclusions about unit performance. Folks can look at Gors statline and intuit that these guys aren't gonna trade well into Dwarf Warriors. Jade Warriors, Orc Boyz, and Bleakswords, which tells us Gors probably could use a buff or price cut. If it ain't broke why fix it?

As for point two that makes sense in theory but in practice most missile units have gotten less effective in game 3, both in land battles and domination when looking at in game performance (skirmish in particular almost died for most factions).

Some of this may be confounded by unit responsiveness issues but I think the issue is just that per volley damage gain was much smaller than entity health. Result is lower percentage of health removed per volley.

Handgunners deal max 1980 damage on ultra and max 1496 on large. So 484 damage difference.

Karl on Deathclaw has 5836 health on ultra and 4277 health on large. A difference of 1459.

Karl gained about 1500 health while hand gunners gained about 500 damage, which means per volley missiles do less. Obviously this is worse against targets with bigger health pools which is most things. And then reload rate got nerfed across the board with no compensation further hurting missile units.

Infantry by contrast gained more time to fight and output damage and became less likely to die while contributing. Sure they don't deal a greater percentage of damage but they hang around fighting longer and are more likely to close to melee with ranged units who they still beat handily.

So I don't think it's correct to say ultra buffed missiles and I don't think it's reasonable to assert the reload rate change is a non issue. I'm no longer in favor of a blanket buff for ranged units but quite a few of the mid to high tier units could use some help.

NameName#1169

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

Handgunners deal max 1980 damage on ultra and max 1496 on large. So 484 damage difference.

Karl on Deathclaw has 5836 health on ultra and 4277 health on large. A difference of 1459.

Karl gained about 1500 health while hand gunners gained about 500 damage, which means per volley missiles do less. Obviously this is worse against targets with bigger health pools which is most things. And then reload rate got nerfed across the board with no compensation further hurting missile units.

I do not see what case you are trying to present with this? All units with more than one model gain 33% more models, while SEMs gain 33% extra health (and WS). KF will therefore go down in the same amount of volleys as before, no matter what the technical damage-to-health ratio that a change in unit size introduces. He dies to 5836/1980 ~= 2.94 volleys on ultra and 4377/1496 ~= 2.92.

If anything melee infantry is what lose potential since their ranks only get deeper when going from large to ultra, so their damage will remain the same while gaining additional HP. Meaning that the fight will only last longer when increasing unit size.

I would argue that it is semi-incorrect to say that "ranged was buffed", but the case is rather that ranged was unaffected (if we ignore the reload changes) while melee infantry had their engagements prolonged. Which in turn benefits the damage dealers that are outside of the melee engagement.

Asamu#6386

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

Some of this may be confounded by unit responsiveness issues but I think the issue is just that per volley damage gain was much smaller than entity health. Result is lower percentage of health removed per volley.

Handgunners deal max 1980 damage on ultra and max 1496 on large. So 484 damage difference.

Okay, now compare that with the effective damage change of melee cav/infantry units (and monsters for that matter), which was 0; they deal the same damage on ultra that they do on large, which means melee fights generally take longer, giving more time for missile units to deal damage so long as they aren't engaged and allowing more time to respond to something attacking the missile units in melee.

Also, larger units effectively give missile units more accuracy vs other multi-entity units (particularly infantry and cav), because shots can stray further and still potentially hit an enemy; this is particularly relevant for units with explosive damage, not even accounting for the buff to explosions giving them full damage across the entire area. That's not a huge deal for handguns, which are highly accurate, but it does matter quite a bit for artillery and anything with arcing shots, like archers and crossbows.

NameName#1169 said:

I would argue that it is semi-incorrect to say that "ranged was buffed", but the case is rather that ranged was unaffected (if we ignore the reload changes) while melee infantry had their engagements prolonged. Which in turn benefits the damage dealers that are outside of the melee engagement.

Yes, this is why I said "effectively" buffed. Other things being nerfed by a change (in this case melee infantry, cavalry, chariots, and monsters, which all deal less effective damage relative to total hp than before; IE: Anything that is not a multi-entity ranged unit) is effectively the same as buffing whatever is left unchanged.

Of course, single entity missile units have probably gotten the worst end of things (in most cases), because they essentially deal 25% less damage (well, it's a bit less significant than that in most cases, because they effectively gain accuracy vs infantry/cav due to having more entities to hit for longer) while also having longer reload-times, but every other type of missile unit still comes out fine.

Spellbound1875#4610

NameName#1169 said:

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

Handgunners deal max 1980 damage on ultra and max 1496 on large. So 484 damage difference.

Karl on Deathclaw has 5836 health on ultra and 4277 health on large. A difference of 1459.

Karl gained about 1500 health while hand gunners gained about 500 damage, which means per volley missiles do less. Obviously this is worse against targets with bigger health pools which is most things. And then reload rate got nerfed across the board with no compensation further hurting missile units.

I do not see what case you are trying to present with this? All units with more than one model gain 33% more models, while SEMs gain 33% extra health (and WS). KF will therefore go down in the same amount of volleys as before, no matter what the technical damage-to-health ratio that a change in unit size introduces. He dies to 5836/1980 ~= 2.94 volleys on ultra and 4377/1496 ~= 2.92.

If anything melee infantry is what lose potential since their ranks only get deeper when going from large to ultra, so their damage will remain the same while gaining additional HP. Meaning that the fight will only last longer when increasing unit size.

I would argue that it is semi-incorrect to say that "ranged was buffed", but the case is rather that ranged was unaffected (if we ignore the reload changes) while melee infantry had their engagements prolonged. Which in turn benefits the damage dealers that are outside of the melee engagement.

The point was primarily to refute that the move to ultra was a buff to missile units, which your math also supports. The fact that things like healing, resistances, and larger base health pools make this difference larger in practical terms can become a problem.

Dumb math

Karl in practice has about 20% reduce against handgunner fire between armor and missile resist. That gives us 1584 and 1197 damage per volley which equates to 3.68 and 3.65 volleys to kill.

Now if each volley misses 50% of their shots because Karl dodges we see this slight difference become more and more impactful, with 792 damage and 599 damage giving us 7.36 volleys and 7.31 volleys, so about 5% of a volley difference.

Now if we started with a unit with a much larger health pool, say 10000, we see our volley difference in our 50% accuracy scenario is 12.63 volleys on ultra and 12.52 volleys on large, which is about 10% of one volley. Small but significant difference. And this is before we look at healing cap, which puts Karl to 9746 and 7310 health respectively.

I'm not trying to say ultra was a huge nerf to missile units but when added to the reload rate change, which often results in losing a volley entirely, missile units are performing substantially worse in game 3 when against a competent opponent. Additionally a lot of skirmish units were hit a lot harder because their original damage was much lower. 33% more damage when your unit can't cost effectively kill targets already just puts you farther in the hole, whereas most infantry missiles had more than enough damage to perform.

A couple other notes. SE's actually lost damage in the move to game 3 since their WS values were taken from large size in game 2. The fact that the value scales now doesn't change the fact that overall SE's deal less damage, something which hits missile SE's really hard. Cygor are the poster child but Hell Cannons are also noteworthy victims.

As for whether or not melee infantry lost damage in the move to ultra that's harder to determine. How much time was added to melee engagements is hard to measure and is influenced by factors beyond raw damage such as leadership. Even looking at damage about half of the infantry entities in game 3 are engaging in melee on the charge for the damage numbers we see to be accurate. This is a lot more than were engaging for the majority of game 2 given the charge bug, and towards the end of game 2 when the bug was fixed infantry got a lot stronger, so much so that a lot of balance changes were made to counter balance it. The idea that infantry are worse off from ultra seems more theory than fact, even if it's true combat lasts longer (which I've seen mixed evidence for and against).

In practice infantry being more durable at base has seemed to increase their power as seen by their increasing presence and dominance within the land battle meta. Rush factions are extremely strong now and boxes relying on stationary infantry units are a lot more prevalent than their were in game 2.

Spellbound1875#4610

@Asamu#6386

Okay, now compare that with the effective damage change of melee cav/infantry units (and monsters for that matter), which was 0; they deal the same damage on ultra that they do on large, which means melee fights generally take longer, giving more time for missile units to deal damage so long as they aren't engaged and allowing more time to respond to something attacking the missile units in melee.

Also, larger units effectively give missile units more accuracy vs other multi-entity units (particularly infantry and cav), because shots can stray further and still potentially hit an enemy; this is particularly relevant for units with explosive damage, not even accounting for the buff to explosions giving them full damage across the entire area. That's not a huge deal for handguns, which are highly accurate, but it does matter quite a bit for artillery and anything with arcing shots, like archers and crossbows.

Infantry and cavalry don't do the same damage on large and ultra though, they do a fair bit more.

I'm not sure where this idea came from, we've known throughout game 2 that units which scaled with game size had their performance into each other remain relatively consistent, while units which didn't have their damage scale were unbalanced. Like, I'm genuinely not sure where this idea came from we've had evidence suggesting unit scaling works since game 1.

Additionally the idea that melee fights take longer on ultra specifically is not something I've seen tested or verified, since the primary determining factor for when a fight ends is leadership which is impacted by a large number of factors beyond raw damage.

As for unit accuracy improving I'm not sure this is meaningfully supported. I've seen lots of people pull up example and complain about accuracy being worse as of game 3. I myself haven't noticed any meaningful change one way or the other.

Asamu#6386

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

I'm not sure where this idea came from, we've known throughout game 2 that units which scaled with game size had their performance into each other remain relatively consistent, while units which didn't have their damage scale were unbalanced. Like, I'm genuinely not sure where this idea came from we've had evidence suggesting unit scaling works since game 1.

In my own experience in all 3 games, unit scale has always made a big difference. Ultra vs large is less significant when compared to ultra vs medium or small, but it's still noticeable. Just go test a fight between two infantry or cav units (of the same type) on each size setting. If you seriously think that unit scale makes no difference, you've likely never played on small or medium (especially small. It's like a completely different game).

I think this should be obvious given that units which were fine in previous games got notably worse, despite no changes, like gors, bestigors, and wardancers. Less proportional contact de-values the charge bonus for infantry vs infantry.

As far as the "accuracy got worse in game 3" thing. That was disproven within an hour of people making the claim; idk why people still hold the idea that Cathay cannons are more accurate than empire cannons, despite them having the exact same projectile parameters and testing showing their performance to be identical (without harmony* With harmony, cathay cannons are obviously quite a bit better).

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

In practice infantry being more durable at base has seemed to increase their power as seen by their increasing presence and dominance within the land battle meta. Rush factions are extremely strong now and boxes relying on stationary infantry units are a lot more prevalent than their were in game 2.

Infantry got better vs large units and cav. because more entities = stronger bracing and more mass.
Vs missile units, infantry are worse on ultra. In MP, that was a non-issue due to bugs and poor responsiveness hindering missile units and Domination mode favoring melee units.

Knights vs low mass infantry where they penetrate practically all the way through even on ultra will have similar proportional charge damage. You should look at what happens with 2 infantry units, 2 cav units, or a cav unit vs an infantry unit with high mass that it can't penetrate easily. You picked the worst possible sort of infantry vs cav test for this...
There's clearly something in that test causing an inconsistency as well, likely attack RNG causing the charge on large to stall earlier (just look at how much further the cav penetrated in the ultra fight), because melee units dealing more damage on ultra relative to HP should be an outlier scenario.

Spellbound1875#4610

@Asamu#6386

In my own experience in all 3 games, unit scale has always made a big difference. Ultra vs large is less significant when compared to ultra vs medium or small, but it's still noticeable. Just go test a fight between two infantry or cav units (of the same type) on each size setting. If you seriously think that unit scale makes no difference, you've likely never played on small or medium (especially small. It's like a completely different game).

I didn't say unit scale made no difference, I said units do more on larger settings which is empirically provable. Your initial position was that infantry and cavalry do the same damage on ultra and large which meant missile units gained on them and that's simply not correct. Additionally as shown below damage is relatively consistent between unit sizes, though not perfectly matching. I picked Exalted Daemonettes since their high damage should make it readily apparent if their was a big difference in attack entities.

Ultra

Large

In this example post charge we see 2887 damage on ultra compared to 1722 on large, which is about a 68% damage increase, more than double what we'd expect simply from the extra entities. In terms of percent it's also 32% of the chaos warriors health, versus 25% on large. At our next snap shot 15 seconds later we see that damage difference largely holds rather than continuing to increase, with 4808 vs 3882, suggesting outside of a charge the number of successful hits exchanged is much closer between large and ultra. That trend appears to continue but routing makes it impossible to directly compare.

This isn't entirely surprising since on ultra you need to roll more successful hits to deal damage and accuracy rolls tend to be shy of 50% (39% in this match up). I think the result is better explained by the accuracy attritioning a bit more damage from ultra combat and greater damage lose from overkilling entities, rather than a major difference in the percentage of involved combatants. This also explains why charges see the opposite outcome, gaining a disproportionately large amount of damage since the larger number of attacks benefit more from the extra accuracy and damage. Result is by percentage infantry (and probably cavalry) on ultra do a greater percentage of damage early to infantry, then see their percentage slow and match large at rout because of how health is distributed by entity.

Chaos warriors break when about 70% of their health has been lost (and about 61% of their entities dead) and that value is hit more quickly on lower entity sizes because health gain from additional entities outpaces damage gained by additional entities, same as we see for missile units. Infantry on ultra are doing more damage but in terms of percentage they fall behind over time since most infantry are gaining something like 1500-2000 health. Damage goes up in absolute terms, but drops in relative terms.

It's important to note that in this case the difference was combat lasted for 7 additional seconds. Not insignificant but not enough to argue there is a major performance disparity. I imagine if you pushed it with two extremely grindy infantry you could see a fairly long increase in combat time, but since that's what those units are designed for that would arguably be a performance increase. Point is while there is a difference it's not massive here.

Infantry got better vs large units and cav. because more entities = stronger bracing and more mass.
Vs missile units, infantry are worse on ultra. In MP, that was a non-issue due to bugs and poor responsiveness hindering missile units and Domination mode favoring melee units.

Knights vs low mass infantry where they penetrate practically all the way through even on ultra will have similar proportional charge damage. You should look at what happens with 2 infantry units, 2 cav units, or a cav unit vs an infantry unit with high mass that it can't penetrate easily. You picked the worst possible sort of infantry vs cav test for this...
There's clearly something in that test causing an inconsistency as well, likely attack RNG causing the charge on large to stall earlier (just look at how much further the cav penetrated in the ultra fight), because melee units dealing more damage on ultra relative to HP should be an outlier scenario.

I find these explanations to run contrary to the available data and my own testing. Everything I've seen suggests cav and infantry do more raw damage on ultra if you match circumstances appropriately, but that this larger damage is a smaller percentage which causes combat to drag out longer (and how much longer depends on leadership more than damage in practice). I suspect this would be even greater with cavalry in your braced scenario given a larger percentage of cavalry damage comes from attacks rather than impact damage and as seen above, Ultra unit size increases charge damage significantly.

I think this should be obvious given that units which were fine in previous games got notably worse, despite no changes, like gors, bestigors, and wardancers. Less proportional contact de-values the charge bonus for infantry vs infantry.

Bestigors, Gors, and Wardancers were all bad in game 2. They've been bad for literal years something observable by going back over forum discussions if you're so inclined. These units didn't just become terrible with the move to ultra, CA just started buffing other bad units which made it painfully obvious they sucked. Black Ark Corsairs and Nehekaran warriors used to be members of this club but CA buffed them and now they see use. The entire class of shock infantry has been underpowered for years, partially because infantry balance has been based on bad data for most of the games history due to the charge bug. These units are potentially doing better in game 3 than they would be in game two on the same size setting (though I'm not sure about that given CA may have further tweaked charge behavior to depress infantry charge performance which was overbearing at the end of game 2).

Finally I agree on the cannon comment. I think people are motivated to find an explanation for the things they don't like about game 3 and latch on to outliers due to random chance then assume these must be a system change. Many, many people complain that accuracy for artillery and big monsters is worse (even going so far as to chevron units) when in practice you just see less relative damage per shot. Targets aren't dying because something is missing, they just have more health and less gold value per hit point.

Asamu#6386

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

@Asamu#6386

In my own experience in all 3 games, unit scale has always made a big difference. Ultra vs large is less significant when compared to ultra vs medium or small, but it's still noticeable. Just go test a fight between two infantry or cav units (of the same type) on each size setting. If you seriously think that unit scale makes no difference, you've likely never played on small or medium (especially small. It's like a completely different game).

I didn't say unit scale made no difference, I said units do more on larger settings which is empirically provable. Your initial position was that infantry and cavalry do the same damage on ultra and large which meant missile units gained on them and that's simply not correct. Additionally as shown below damage is relatively consistent between unit sizes, though not perfectly matching. I picked Exalted Daemonettes since their high damage should make it readily apparent if their was a big difference in attack entities.

Ultra

Large

In this example post charge we see 2887 damage on ultra compared to 1722 on large, which is about a 68% damage increase, more than double what we'd expect simply from the extra entities. In terms of percent it's also 32% of the chaos warriors health, versus 25% on large. At our next snap shot 15 seconds later we see that damage difference largely holds rather than continuing to increase, with 4808 vs 3882, suggesting outside of a charge the number of successful hits exchanged is much closer between large and ultra. That trend appears to continue but routing makes it impossible to directly compare.

Look closely at what's going on in those tests. The AI being tested with is going narrower on large, resulting in wraparound/flank attacks for the sustained fight, but less initial contact, which is why the charge damage is relatively lower, but the fight still ended a bit faster.

After testing to confirm: on large, the AI goes 15x5 with chaos warriors, while on ultra, it goes 20x5; IE: it uses the same depth, not width, so this testing gets completely thrown off. The narrower frontage results in relatively less charge damage coming in and stalls the fight. You'd probably get a more accurate test swapping positions with the AI and running 15 wide chaos warriors on the ultra test, and then comparing results with the performance of 20 wide Edaemonettes vs 15 wide CW on large.
The result is pretty stark. Actual combat time in my test was almost double on ultra for 15 wide CW vs 20 wide EDaemonettes on ultra compared to what it was on large (Combat time of ~23s on large vs ~43s on ultra; granted, this was only 1 test for each, and combat times can vary some, but I wouldn't expect that much variance on either). With how leadership reduction from damage is based on damage in proportion to unit max HP, it would make some sense that, when given similar total numbers of entities fighting, the route would happen disproportionately faster on large compared to ultra.

Obviously, if you match width with the AI, things will look the same as on ultra in terms of proportional damage for both the charge and sustained fighting, but in real battles, players are maxing width on their units, resulting in less depth and relatively more contact at all points of the fighting.

Testing with the AI can be pretty finnicky because of things like this. It'll throw off testing completely due to quirks if you don't manipulate it correctly.



Regardless, this discussion isn't really the topic of the thread...

I support the basic idea of giving units a D/X stat, like how missile attacks work, instead of a melee damage value, just because there are outliers like Varghulfs that are intended to have a faster attack rate, causing them to look worse on the unit card.
More details and more clarity is better. Showing splash attack parameters would also be nice. I get that CA (mostly) tries to keep attack intervals the same on average, but it'd be nice if the unit cards were set up so they didn't have to.

UrbansKompis#7871

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

Additionally the idea that melee fights take longer on ultra specifically is not something I've seen tested or verified, since the primary determining factor for when a fight ends is leadership which is impacted by a large number of factors beyond raw damage.

I fail to see why it would be necessary to present this with data when units literally only gain rank depth when we go from large to ultra. Meaning that their health is increased while their absolute damage stays the same, and the relative damage goes down.

It will guarantee that LD will be lost at a slower rate since reaching all thresholds will take longer, and it might even lead to the "recent damage" modifier being reduce depending on how long the battle is prolonged. If we really want to hammer home this point then imagine the case where we introduce "mega ultra", where unit sizes are increased with 33% again while still only increasing the unit depth. How would that impact the fight? To me it just brings the game towards "queue simulator", since the overwhelming majority of an infantry unit will not be engaged.

For the case on the main discussion I do not think that a dps meter would be good as a replacement for the damage value, but I could see it being beneficial if the necessary information for that was presented (e.g., the game showing the cooldown if you hover the WS). How would dps be presented for chariots and cavalry, where their performance is extremely dependent on the type of target and how well the engagement goes? How does dps take into account the charge? Is it completely left out or is it included in some sense? Ranged isn't as dependent on extra parameters like how melee is, which allows ranged to have the benefit of being easy to represent (but it still have unique cases with some units having penetration).

I prefer the case where WS is presented initially and dps is the stat that is presented if you want extra details.

Spellbound1875#4610

@Asamu#6386 I see you're wanting to move away from this so I'll strive to be brief. Ran some additional tests and it does appear that the damage gain on ultra is much milder (though still present) when fully stretching infantry into spaghetti lines. This tracks with damage numbers requiring a pretty significant number of entities from the mid ranks to engage in combat regularly. In this context I still found combat differed by only about 10 seconds however for our Chaos Warriors/Exalted Daemonette match up. I imagine for less killy infantry the effect may be exaggerated but again that can be construed as a buff.

The result you're seeing with the chunkier formation chaos warriors on ultra is just the result of reducing entities in combat extending fights, something that works regardless of unit size. Setting to large and shrinking the frontline by 5 entities increases combat time by ~15-20 seconds. It does seem likely that the greater real health gain of ultra will exacerbate the effect. However I'd argue this shows engagements and performance across unit size is fairly consistent given the same manipulations produce comparable outcomes. Additionally I still think disproportionate health gain is the strongest explanatory factor, which gels with your observations on leaderships relationship to remaining health/damage done.

@UrbansKompis#7871 The reason I think it's worth testing rather than assuming is because for years players were laboring under the impression that only the front line of infantry engaged in combat because of charges being bugged. After that was fixed it became apparent that it's more like the first 3 rows engage in combat. Ultra increasing then number of entities in the back rows could (and does) increase damage done by infantry.

Flatly, their absolute damage does not stay the same, which means your inferences do not necessarily follow. It does turn out through testing we do see an lengthing of combat, but we also see an increase in infantry damage (lower than my initial test for the record) just one which is smaller than the health gained by the move to ultra. This shouldn't be surprising since every entity in the game has greater health than WS or missile damage.

Your mega ultra example would likely see a point where we gained no additional damage and we entered into "queue simulator" but we aren't at that point with ultra as it exists in game (and no one wants to add more entities to infantry/cavalry). Beyond that we don't need that effect to explain what we're seeing on ultra, since we know that health gain outpaces damage gain, and that this effect is more pronounced the larger the difference is between WS values and Health values. I'd argue this is why Chariots, Skirmish cavalry, and SE's have seen pretty notable drop in performance not shared by infantry and melee cavalry, they just gained far less damage relative to health.

I do agree with your final takeaway though. It would be nice to have more transparency on how some of the mechanics work, even if creating a accurate calculation for all circumstances isn't feasible. Though some like collision attacks are probably quite difficult to explain succinctly.

Asamu#6386

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

Ran some additional tests and it does appear that the damage gain on ultra is much milder (though still present) when fully stretching infantry into spaghetti lines. This tracks with damage numbers requiring a pretty significant number of entities from the mid ranks to engage in combat regularly. In this context I still found combat differed by only about 10 seconds however for our Chaos Warriors/Exalted Daemonette match up. I imagine for less killy infantry the effect may be exaggerated but again that can be construed as a buff.

The result you're seeing with the chunkier formation chaos warriors on ultra is just the result of reducing entities in combat extending fights, something that works regardless of unit size. Setting to large and shrinking the frontline by 5 entities increases combat time by ~15-20 seconds. It does seem likely that the greater real health gain of ultra will exacerbate the effect. However I'd argue this shows engagements and performance across unit size is fairly consistent given the same manipulations produce comparable outcomes. Additionally I still think disproportionate health gain is the strongest explanatory factor, which gels with your observations on leaderships relationship to remaining health/damage done..

10s in a combat that lasts 25s on large would be a 40% increase in combat time; enough for a full volley from missile units, a disproportionately larger increase than the health gain from large to ultra (33%), and definitely relevant when missile units are dealing similar proportional damage on both unit scales (perhaps a bit more on ultra). Longer combat times = less relative output from melee units, which is a significant nerf in practical terms.
For damage/combats to scale proportionally, damage has to be consistently 25% lower on large/~33% higher on ultra, which it clearly is not for multi-entity melee units given the difference in combat times, but it is for ranged units (slight caveat that lower accuracy missile units gain a bit more than that on ultra).

Combat time is determined more by depth than width; 15x5 on large for two units should have the same average combat time as 20x5 on ultra, but given the same width, units on large have less depth/more entities fighting relative to total unit size, which results in much shorter combats. Players favor wider units, because it provides an overall advantage and more coverage, which means shorter combat times on smaller unit scales. That's not comparable outcomes with the same manipulations; it's significantly different outcomes.

On "Disproportionate health gain": Per entity hp on ultra and large is the same for all non-SE units (which scale proportionally, having 25% less HP on large compared to ultra). HP gain is exactly proportional from large to ultra. The only thing that changes is the relative number of entities fighting for multi-entity units of the same width.

Spellbound1875#4610

@Asamu#6386

On "Disproportionate health gain": Per entity hp on ultra and large is the same for all non-SE units (which scale proportionally, having 25% less HP on large compared to ultra). HP gain is exactly proportional from large to ultra.

To clarify what I mean, health gained per entity outpaces damage gained per entity. ED are a pretty bad example of this having very high WS and very low health but even there we see 50 WS to 77 HP. Chaos Warriors it's 36 WS to 90 HP. And of course this is ignoring defenses which make the effective health larger (or the effective damage lower). Even with perfectly symmetrical engagements as we added more entities combat lengths would inevitably increase.

10s in a combat that lasts 25s on large would be a 40% increase in combat time; enough for a full volley from missile units, a disproportionately larger increase than the health gain from large to ultra (33%), and definitely relevant when missile units are dealing similar proportional damage on both unit scales (perhaps a bit more on ultra). Longer combat times = less relative output from melee units, which is a significant nerf in practical terms.

Or a buff for holding infantry. I'm not disputing that damage output is lower but I think the practical impact from a meta standpoint is smaller than you're implying. Unit performance into other unit classes is broadly similar with infantry being a bit more durable, something I'd argue is positive given how ignorable they were for most of game 2. Beyond that while combat takes longer percentage wise as long as you match width relative health exchange is about equal. Also most reload rates are a bit longer than 10 seconds and were so before the reload rate nerf.

Combat time is determined more by depth than width; 15x5 on large for two units should have the same average combat time as 20x5 on ultra, but given the same width, units on large have less depth/more entities fighting relative to total unit size, which results in much shorter combats. Players favor wider units, because it provides an overall advantage and more coverage, which means shorter combat times on smaller unit scales. That's not comparable outcomes with the same manipulations; it's significantly different outcomes.

The only thing that changes is the relative number of entities fighting for multi-entity units of the same width.

I still think you are putting too many eggs in the entity engagement basket here to explain differences in performance. There are other factors such as overkilling damage which also increase as unit sizes grow. Using our ED into CW example we can calculate about 360 more damage is being lost in additional overkill damage by the time of rout. That's about 10 extra hits which when we consider the accuracy is only about 40% that's effectively 25 lost attacks.

ED deal ~38 damage per attack, CW have 90 health so 3 successful hits are needed to kill a entity with a damage loss of 24 on average for each overkill. Both units break with about 60% of their entities dead which is 5400 health and 4050 health. Since for every 90 damage dealt we expect to see a loss of 24 damage is we divide the health lost we can calculate lost damage. 5400/90=60 for ultra and 4050/90=45. 1440-1080=360 more lost damage.

Assuming there is a significant percentage reduction in engagement (which seems likely though more entities on ultra do seem to be engaging) it's only one element slowing combat and I don't think entity engagement is the most significant of them. Even then when looking at slowed engagements I don't see significant performance differences making infantry worse as a class. They're very much better than in game 2.

For damage/combats to scale proportionally, damage has to be consistently 25% lower on large/~33% higher on ultra, which it clearly is not for multi-entity melee units given the difference in combat times, but it is for ranged units (slight caveat that lower accuracy missile units gain a bit more than that on ultra).

Again the math and data don't support the idea that missiles gained anything, merely that they (potentially) lost less in the tradeoff. Even that I think is a bit rosy of an interpretation given a greater amount of raw damage is lost through various sources of attrition. And of course then the reload nerf hit them which is largely why missile units and factions have generally been worse in game 3. Which i think is a safe statement to make looking at both the land battle and the dom scene where folks are more prone to complain about infantry performance than missile units.

Though as you noted we are pretty off topic. I'd be comfortable leaving this as a disputed topic while noting that ultra tended to lengthen combat and lower relative damage across the board, statements which I think we both would broadly agree with.

Asamu#6386

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

Or a buff for holding infantry. I'm not disputing that damage output is lower but I think the practical impact from a meta standpoint is smaller than you're implying. Unit performance into other unit classes is broadly similar with infantry being a bit more durable, something I'd argue is positive given how ignorable they were for most of game 2.

Yes, infantry is overall "better" relative to other units... because cavalry, chariots, and monsters became worse against it (more ranks for greater resistance to impact damage and higher mass + more bodies to potentially trap/surround), and it's better at holding the line due to having overall more mass. Longer combats hurts most for units that want short engagements, which benefits defensive infantry against other melee units, but missile units retain similar relative output vs everything, while also taking longer for melee units to kill: IE: they are essentially better vs everything, while some melee units are only better/worse vs specific other units. There are other bugs/issues that hurt missile units, but the shift to ultra in isolation improves their relative performance when compared with every other type of unit.

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

still think you are putting too many eggs in the entity engagement basket here to explain differences in performance. There are other factors such as overkilling damage which also increase as unit sizes grow.

... That's because you get might get a few extra charge attacks on ultra on first contact. Overkill damage is otherwise unchanged, and relative to total unit HP, is inconsequential.

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

I don't see significant performance differences making infantry worse as a class. They're very much better than in game 2.

My point was not that infantry specifically is worse relative to all other units. My point is that the way that melee units (not just infantry) are functionally weaker on ultra than on large (They deal less damage relative to hp and take longer to route each other), while missile units are not, as missile units deal similar relative damage on both large and ultra (A bit more on ultra for some units against specific targets, particularly artillery with low accuracy, like hellstorms, mortars, etc..., vs infantry/cav, as shots can stray a bit further and still hit).

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

And of course then the reload nerf hit them which is largely why missile units and factions have generally been worse in game 3.

Eh, responsiveness being worse and dom favoring heavy melee play had a much bigger impact on missile units than the reload nerf. Cathay, Empire, Vampire Coast, and Dwarfs are certainly performing very well in game 3. Elves are doing fine. Skaven is doing fine. Tomb Kings are still playing multiple bowshabti and/or archers.
Skirmish play is still very strong in land battles, etc...

The factions that got hit the hardest in land battles seem to be Greenskins. Beastmen, and Bretonnia (Prior to the lance formation buff) which are factions with very limited focus on missile play. Norsca was also suffering on launch, though the massive buff to marauder champions largely compensated. Lizardmen performance also seems to have dropped a bit in land battles....

Vampire Counts benefitted significantly from the healing changes, so it's a bit of an outlier, and WoC got some powerful new units. the daemon factions, aside from Nurgle, also perform well into many of the missile factions because they have access to units like furies and hellstriders.

Spellbound1875#4610

Yes, infantry is overall "better" relative to other units... because cavalry, chariots, and monsters became worse against it (more ranks for greater resistance to impact damage and higher mass + more bodies to potentially trap/surround), and it's better at holding the line due to having overall more mass. Longer combats hurts most for units that want short engagements, which benefits defensive infantry against other melee units, but missile units retain similar relative output vs everything, while also taking longer for melee units to kill: IE: they are essentially better vs everything, while some melee units are only better/worse vs specific other units. There are other bugs/issues that hurt missile units, but the shift to ultra in isolation improves their relative performance when compared with every other type of unit.

I see your point here though even here I think there are some caveats. For instance the extra damage on a charge from ultra means when punching into units with smaller relative entity counts like most missiles they force routs slightly faster (5-10 seconds at full stretch). The extra attacks gained by the move to ultra go farther in this context when closing to missile infantry. I suspect cavalry benefit from a similar change and I'd argue in most cases they're doing solidly, though some of that is the result of buffs and the charge bug fix. Chariots do in fact suck but that's explained by their low damage gain relative to health gain in real terms. I'd argue most chariots were sketchy in game 2 after the mass/impact damage changes and in spite of having full use of their new entities.

It is fair to say missile unit performance is more stable across unit sizes but against I don't think the issue is as cut and dry even without bugs/issues for missile units. There's also the fact that in practice missile units and factions tend to be performing worse both in land battles and domination, though there is a meta component. Even the successful missile factions tend to be reliant on overperforming infantry in some way.

Cathay, Empire, Vampire Coast, and Dwarfs are certainly performing very well in game 3. Elves are doing fine. Skaven is doing fine. Tomb Kings are still playing multiple bowshabti and/or archers.
Skirmish play is still very strong in land battles, etc...

The factions that got hit the hardest in land battles seem to be Greenskins. Beastmen, and Bretonnia (Prior to the lance formation buff) which are factions with very limited focus on missile play. Norsca was also suffering on launch, though the massive buff to marauder champions largely compensated. Lizardmen performance also seems to have dropped a bit in land battles....

I don't think the way these factions play supports your conclusion. Coast, Dwarfs, and Skaven are heavily reliant on explosive damage units with many of their dedicated missile pieces seeing extremely limited play (both in dom and land battles from my observations). Cathay missile performance is overshadowed by overperforming melee, the empire largely uses a very limited selection of missile units, mostly overtuned ones, despite having a very large selection.

As for skirmish being equally strong in land battles I'm not sure I'd agree with that assessment. Wood elves are doing pretty terribly with meh missile performance being part of the issue (though cavalry falling behind is a bigger one). Dark Elves and High Elves both rely on melee units which were pretty solidly buffed. Greenskins and Beastmen were both extremely reliant on skirmish units in game 2 something which has been greatly reduced in game 3.

Bretonnia I think get hit harder by the Fay nerf but peasant archers were consistently core to their playstyles. Norsca I think was pretty strong on IE release, largely due to infantry buffs though the bugged marauder horsemen were also a big factor. Marauder Champions with shields are still a touch overtuned imo and are one of the strongest parts of the roster. Lizards I'd point more to SEM nerfs as the issue, rather than missile changes. Yes skirmishers getting less effective hurt them a touch but I wouldn't make that central. In dom they've shifted towards melee units with rippers in particular becoming very powerful after being nearly ignored for years.

The meta shift away from missile units may relate more to their ideal targets becoming less prevalent/harder to snipe rather than a meaningful decrease in damage output, though either way the reload nerf did them no favors.

Loupi#8512

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

@Asamu#6386

In my own experience in all 3 games, unit scale has always made a big difference. Ultra vs large is less significant when compared to ultra vs medium or small, but it's still noticeable. Just go test a fight between two infantry or cav units (of the same type) on each size setting. If you seriously think that unit scale makes no difference, you've likely never played on small or medium (especially small. It's like a completely different game).

I didn't say unit scale made no difference, I said units do more on larger settings which is empirically provable. Your initial position was that infantry and cavalry do the same damage on ultra and large which meant missile units gained on them and that's simply not correct. Additionally as shown below damage is relatively consistent between unit sizes, though not perfectly matching. I picked Exalted Daemonettes since their high damage should make it readily apparent if their was a big difference in attack entities.

Ultra

Large

In this example post charge we see 2887 damage on ultra compared to 1722 on large, which is about a 68% damage increase, more than double what we'd expect simply from the extra entities. In terms of percent it's also 32% of the chaos warriors health, versus 25% on large. At our next snap shot 15 seconds later we see that damage difference largely holds rather than continuing to increase, with 4808 vs 3882, suggesting outside of a charge the number of successful hits exchanged is much closer between large and ultra. That trend appears to continue but routing makes it impossible to directly compare.

This isn't entirely surprising since on ultra you need to roll more successful hits to deal damage and accuracy rolls tend to be shy of 50% (39% in this match up). I think the result is better explained by the accuracy attritioning a bit more damage from ultra combat and greater damage lose from overkilling entities, rather than a major difference in the percentage of involved combatants. This also explains why charges see the opposite outcome, gaining a disproportionately large amount of damage since the larger number of attacks benefit more from the extra accuracy and damage. Result is by percentage infantry (and probably cavalry) on ultra do a greater percentage of damage early to infantry, then see their percentage slow and match large at rout because of how health is distributed by entity.

Chaos warriors break when about 70% of their health has been lost (and about 61% of their entities dead) and that value is hit more quickly on lower entity sizes because health gain from additional entities outpaces damage gained by additional entities, same as we see for missile units. Infantry on ultra are doing more damage but in terms of percentage they fall behind over time since most infantry are gaining something like 1500-2000 health. Damage goes up in absolute terms, but drops in relative terms.

It's important to note that in this case the difference was combat lasted for 7 additional seconds. Not insignificant but not enough to argue there is a major performance disparity. I imagine if you pushed it with two extremely grindy infantry you could see a fairly long increase in combat time, but since that's what those units are designed for that would arguably be a performance increase. Point is while there is a difference it's not massive here.

Infantry got better vs large units and cav. because more entities = stronger bracing and more mass.
Vs missile units, infantry are worse on ultra. In MP, that was a non-issue due to bugs and poor responsiveness hindering missile units and Domination mode favoring melee units.

Knights vs low mass infantry where they penetrate practically all the way through even on ultra will have similar proportional charge damage. You should look at what happens with 2 infantry units, 2 cav units, or a cav unit vs an infantry unit with high mass that it can't penetrate easily. You picked the worst possible sort of infantry vs cav test for this...
There's clearly something in that test causing an inconsistency as well, likely attack RNG causing the charge on large to stall earlier (just look at how much further the cav penetrated in the ultra fight), because melee units dealing more damage on ultra relative to HP should be an outlier scenario.

I find these explanations to run contrary to the available data and my own testing. Everything I've seen suggests cav and infantry do more raw damage on ultra if you match circumstances appropriately, but that this larger damage is a smaller percentage which causes combat to drag out longer (and how much longer depends on leadership more than damage in practice). I suspect this would be even greater with cavalry in your braced scenario given a larger percentage of cavalry damage comes from attacks rather than impact damage and as seen above, Ultra unit size increases charge damage significantly.

I think this should be obvious given that units which were fine in previous games got notably worse, despite no changes, like gors, bestigors, and wardancers. Less proportional contact de-values the charge bonus for infantry vs infantry.

Bestigors, Gors, and Wardancers were all bad in game 2. They've been bad for literal years something observable by going back over forum discussions if you're so inclined. These units didn't just become terrible with the move to ultra, CA just started buffing other bad units which made it painfully obvious they sucked. Black Ark Corsairs and Nehekaran warriors used to be members of this club but CA buffed them and now they see use. The entire class of shock infantry has been underpowered for years, partially because infantry balance has been based on bad data for most of the games history due to the charge bug. These units are potentially doing better in game 3 than they would be in game two on the same size setting (though I'm not sure about that given CA may have further tweaked charge behavior to depress infantry charge performance which was overbearing at the end of game 2).

Finally I agree on the cannon comment. I think people are motivated to find an explanation for the things they don't like about game 3 and latch on to outliers due to random chance then assume these must be a system change. Many, many people complain that accuracy for artillery and big monsters is worse (even going so far as to chevron units) when in practice you just see less relative damage per shot. Targets aren't dying because something is missing, they just have more health and less gold value per hit point.

ive done a bunch of tests in the past on ultra vs large and in most of the 1v1 cavalry tests the fights lasted over 1 minute longer than on large (most extreme case was chaos knight fight which lasted an extra 2 minutes). the smallest difference was with the shock infantry, things like executioners, swordmasters, GW chosen which was about 15 seconds longers. most infantry fights took about 1 minute extra

Asamu#6386

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

There's also the fact that in practice missile units and factions tend to be performing worse both in land battles and domination,

But they aren't. DE, Skaven, Dwarfs, Vampire Coast, Empire, and HE are all performing better than they were at the end of WH2 in comparison to other WH2 factions. Only WE is suffering as far as missile factions go.

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

As for skirmish being equally strong in land battles I'm not sure I'd agree with that assessment. Wood elves are doing pretty terribly with meh missile performance being part of the issue

Bretonnia I think get hit harder by the Fay nerf but peasant archers were consistently core to their playstyles. Norsca I think was pretty strong on IE release, largely due to infantry buffs though the bugged marauder horsemen were also a big factor.

Skirmish in general is fine; units like War Wagons, scourgerunners, marauder cav, etc... are all extremely prevalent and strong.

The bigger issue for WE is that they're really bad into Slaanesh and WoC in particular right now due to hellstriders. Tzeentch, Cathay, Tomb Kings, and Khorne also do well into WE. VC, which WE used to do well into, got a huge buff.

As a faction that was typically rather reliant on cavalry and shock infantry and is itself somewhat vulnerable to enemy missile play/bad vs gunline factions like Dwarfs and Cathay, they're not good into the current meta., and all of the WE infantry aside from eternal guard suffered pretty badly from the move to ultra, since it's all shock infantry, and the cav has a similar issue. WE has always been reliant on melee shock damage provided by those units to protect its missile units when doing a heavy skirmish style, so those units being less effective is a significant nerf; the only playstyle WE has that isn't reliant on melee shock damage is tree blobbing, which is particularly bad vs the gunline factions.

Like WE, Bretonnia is reliant on melee shock damage to protect its archers and lacks solid defensive infantry. Cav/shock damage being weaker makes it significantly harder for Bretonnia/WE to protect their archers effectively. It doesn't matter if missile units are relatively stronger if they can't shoot because they're getting tied up more often because the faction can't protect them as effectively with its other options being weaker.
They fay mist nerf hurt a bit, but it wasn't enough to essentially remove the faction from competitive play, and her magic also got stronger, which should have largely compensated.

Disregarding new units/factions and significant buffs, missile factions that don't rely much on cavalry got better, missile factions that do got worse, and rush factions got worse.
A reliance on shock infantry/cavalry is the point in common between the factions that dropped the most with the move to game 3 and change to ultra units scale (Beastmen, Bretonnia, Greenskins, and WE).

The playstyles that dropped the most are ones that were heavy on cav/shock infantry, regardless of their use of missile units, while missile play is doing perfectly fine in factions that aren't so reliant on the cav/shock infantry, which runs in direct opposition to the idea that missile units are worse in game 3.

Spellbound1875#4610

@Loupi#8512 Thanks for the additional info on infantry and cav performance. We'd expect that combat would be slower given health gains outpacing damage gains and it makes sense that effect would be more pronounced on units which gain less entities, so cav doing worse in sustained combat makes sense.

I was curious to calculate the turning point where cavalry become less efficient and some quick tests suggest it's somewhere between the 5 and 10 second mark of sustained combat. On impact and within 5 seconds Ultra sees the same modest charge gain observed with infantry, something like 140% performance, slightly past the expected 133%. However at 10 seconds we're down to ~120% damage dealt with it getting closer to 110% at 15 seconds. Notably this initial gain in damage despite being above the expected value just keeps pace on percentage of health removed and naturally falls behind as both impact damage and CB drop. Health outpacing damage, though it makes determining the relative number of entities fighting pretty difficult.

There's a solid case for shaving some health off of pure chaff units like peasants, skavenslaves, new labouer units, and obviously zombies who shouldn't have got the ~2000 health buff in the move to game 3 anyway. I think you could make a case for some shock infantry to hit a touch harder as well. Things like Wardancers I suspect could be up at 30 CB without issue.

Spellbound1875#4610

@Asamu#6386

But they aren't. DE, Skaven, Dwarfs, Vampire Coast, Empire, and HE are all performing better than they were at the end of WH2 in comparison to other WH2 factions. Only WE is suffering as far as missile factions go.

Wood Elves are also the only one of these factions that didn't see massive intentional (DE and HE) or unintentional (SK, DW, Vcoast, and EM) buffs, instead getting some small improvements to a few melee infantry.

For the first two they saw pretty major combat buffs through passive changes and stat improvements, while the second group benefit pretty massively from the changes to explosive damage when looking at non-artillery units (also sometimes cost cuts). War Wagons being unintentionally overbuffed due to the missile damage bug from game 2 is a big one as well. Wagons would have been terribly oppressive in game 2 as they are now.

Wood Elves are actually a great metric for the performance of missile units that weren't buffed as heavily (Dryads and War Dancers did get some more damage) and the results aren't pretty. Especially since their Dom performance is being carried by dedicated high skill players not by faction strength. The only other super missile reliant faction that isn't benefitting from some other element is Cathay and while their oppressive in land battles it's not their missile units that are IDed as the problem.

Skirmish in general is fine; units like War Wagons, scourgerunners, marauder cav, etc... are all extremely prevalent and strong.

The examples you pick are all units which were either thought to be either over tuned or extremely good in game 2 (marauder skirmish and scourge runners) or were bugged and doing far less than the listed damage. The vast majority of skirmish units, even some which have been buffed like reaver archers, aren't seeing much play at all. I'd argue most of them struggle to trade effectively at their current price but that's an area of some debate.

As a faction that was typically rather reliant on cavalry and shock infantry and is itself somewhat vulnerable to enemy missile play/bad vs gunline factions like Dwarfs and Cathay, they're not good into the current meta.

As for your Wood Elf commentary I wouldn't say shock infantry were ever good in game 2, nor that the WE's relied on them. I also think the idea that wood elves relied on shock cav is at odds with their high usage of glade riders as road blocks rather than primary damage dealers.

Dryads and War Dancers got some solid buffs in game 3 and at least in the Dom sphere WE rushes are viewed as the most effective way to play. To the point that it's hard to advocate for additional War Dancers buffs even though at 750 they still struggle a bit at their job (just need like +4 CB I think). Part of this disparity is going to be the result of the charge bug which pretty massively depressed the performance of shock units in game 2. The shift you're describing isn't a change I've seen in the meta even if in theory if charges were working properly in game 2 this would make sense. It's important to keep in mind that large unit size with working charges wasn't something people were aware of for most of the time it was present and people weren't building around it for quite some time. Even then bugs and balance issues meant GW units were the focus not shock cav or shock infantry.

WE has always been reliant on melee shock damage provided by those units to protect its missile units when doing a heavy skirmish style, so those units being less effective is a significant nerf; the only playstyle WE has that isn't reliant on melee shock damage is tree blobbing, which is particularly bad vs the gunline factions.

Like WE, Bretonnia is reliant on melee shock damage to protect its archers and lacks solid defensive infantry. Cav/shock damage being weaker makes it significantly harder for Bretonnia/WE to protect their archers effectively. It doesn't matter if missile units are relatively stronger if they can't shoot because they're getting tied up more often because the faction can't protect them as effectively with its other options being weaker.

A bigger factor in not being able to protect missiles long enough to deal damage is the reload rate nerf which outweighs everything else we're discussing here. Bret holding potential is better than ever, even for their cavalry who also gain health disproportionate to the damage of SE's, missile units, and melee units. Beyond that Bret Cav that aren't Grail Knights seem to be thriving. Knights of the Realm in particular on consistently stand outs in good hands. They might be even stronger if we were playing on large but compared to game 2 we see far less Bret builds minimizing cav to entirely rely on drain blobs, though hero hammer still seems fairly common. Honestly I'm not even sure I'd say Bret is probably worse off in game 3 than game 2 even if they have a lower win rate overall.

Disregarding new units/factions and significant buffs, missile factions that don't rely much on cavalry got better, missile factions that do got worse, and rush factions got worse.

A reliance on shock infantry/cavalry is the point in common between the factions that dropped the most with the move to game 3 and change to ultra units scale (Beastmen, Bretonnia, Greenskins, and WE).

The playstyles that dropped the most are ones that were heavy on cav/shock infantry, regardless of their use of missile units, while missile play is doing perfectly fine in factions that aren't so reliant on the cav/shock infantry, which runs in direct opposition to the idea that missile units are worse in game 3.

I don't think any of this is supported by the results we are seeing. Missile factions have been doing worse basically since launch. Cathay in land battles was primarily overbearing because of overperforming infantry and rush factions have been the best performers when factions weren't obviously overtuned (Cathay harmony stacking with the free +9 MD). Shock units like Forsaken which for much of game 2 were avoided are consistently strong enough that people bring the bad versions with some of the monogods. WoC regularly uses them to great effect and is doing extremely well as a rush faction in both Dom and land battles (yes this is confounded by Be'lakor mostly and Hellstriders to a lesser extent). Norsca did see some damage buffs to underperforming units but Berserkers and Marauders are still seen in rushes and performance solidly.

For wood elves a lot of their units were already sketchily cost effective or were hurt by the charge bug fix (wild riders in particular take a lot more damage from counter charges), Beastmen got hit with bug fixes, nerfs to skirmish, lost effective chariots, and their infantry have always kind of sucked so not surprising. Greenskins mostly lost skirmish though another point is longer combat actually weakens Waagh! quite a bit. The swings it provides are smaller relatively speaking. Finally bret being worse is probably debatable all things considered, but is mostly down to drain blobs and hero hammer being worse which is just a positive thing.

I'm willing to concede that missiles are more hurt by the reload nerf than the move to ultra, you've convinced me on that point but the idea that missile units are stronger currently requires ignoring a huge amount of data and simplifying the impact of the move to ultra to an unhelpful degree.

SettraDoesNotSimp#5603

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

@Asamu#6386
The current system is readable at a glance and let's us draw accurate conclusions about unit performance. Folks can look at Gors statline and intuit that these guys aren't gonna trade well into Dwarf Warriors. Jade Warriors, Orc Boyz, and Bleakswords, which tells us Gors probably could use a buff or price cut. If it ain't broke why fix it?

Are you saying gors are fine? Cause i do not agree. Not understanding the point here lol sorry

Spellbound1875#4610

SettraDoesNotSimp#5603 said:

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

@Asamu#6386
The current system is readable at a glance and let's us draw accurate conclusions about unit performance. Folks can look at Gors statline and intuit that these guys aren't gonna trade well into Dwarf Warriors. Jade Warriors, Orc Boyz, and Bleakswords, which tells us Gors probably could use a buff or price cut. If it ain't broke why fix it?

Are you saying gors are fine? Cause i do not agree. Not understanding the point here lol sorry

God no! Been complaining about gors for a while now. I'm saying you can look at the unit card and see compared to the listed Gor herd suck for the price and could use a buff.

Since the unit cards let us accurately compare unit performance I don't think the way the info is displayed needs to change, which is the initial premise of this thread.

Asamu#6386

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

Wood Elves are actually a great metric for the performance of missile units that weren't buffed as heavily (Dryads and War Dancers did get some more damage) and the results aren't pretty. Especially since their Dom performance is being carried by dedicated high skill players not by faction strength. The only other super missile reliant faction that isn't benefitting from some other element is Cathay and while their oppressive in land battles it's not their missile units that are IDed as the problem.

When every other faction has been buffed in more meaningful ways, including many rush factions, it doesn't really make sense to look at a faction that didn't receive such buffs for comparison, especially when it functions a bit differently from any of the other missile factions. Unlike most of the other missile factions, WE doesn't see any benefit from melee engagements getting longer, because it doesn't have units that trade effectively in prolonged melee.

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

I don't think any of this is supported by the results we are seeing. Missile factions have been doing worse basically since launch. Cathay in land battles was primarily overbearing because of overperforming infantry and rush factions have been the best performers when factions weren't obviously overtuned (Cathay harmony stacking with the free +9 MD).

Missile factions were doing poorly in domination, which favors melee factions by design. Cathay and Kislev were both competitive in land battles from the start, even before they received buffs and the daemon factions received nerfs. Cathay was actually the best land battle faction in game 3 before its buffs and IE came out; once cultist summons were nerfed, Cathay took the top spot in the land battle meta.

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

Shock units like Forsaken which for much of game 2 were avoided are consistently strong enough that people bring the bad versions with some of the monogods.

Forsaken were avoided for most of game 2 because they were awful vs cavalry/monsters until the missing attack bug fix and impact damage rework, because they got obliterated and dealt negligible damage in return, and the meta was usually pretty heavy on cavalry/monsters. They still saw plenty of use against factions with no or limited cav, like skaven and vampire coast, and were actually better than they are now when not getting run over by cav/monsters.

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

I'm willing to concede that missiles are more hurt by the reload nerf than the move to ultra, you've convinced me on that point but the idea that missile units are stronger currently requires ignoring a huge amount of data and simplifying the impact of the move to ultra to an unhelpful degree.

Ignoring what data? Missile factions being competitive right now? Missile units still seeing as much use as ever for the types of builds that are strong right now?
What, exactly, points to missile units suffering in game 3 in land battles?
Certainly, in isolation, missile units output less DPS than in game 2 because of the reload nerf; they didn't get "stronger" (aside from units with explosive damage; even HE archers technically aren't stronger now than in game 2 for the cost - they just compare better with other missile units), but everything else also got weaker, and missile units seem to have come out perfectly fine in that exchange overall; they certainly don't need any sweeping buffs to compensate for the reload nerf.

As far as rush factions go, Khorne is near the bottom in land battles; it was carried early on by bloodletter summons and as soon as they got nerfed, it fell mostly out of the meta. Slaanesh is alright, if not top tier, but is propped up by blatantly OP units. DoC is carried by Be'lakor. Nurgle is one of the worst land battle factions (except in specific match ups like vs VC). Greenskins aren't meta currently. Beastmen is probably the worst faction right now. WoC shares some OP units with Slaanesh and DoC, and, while very strong, still isn't top of the meta. Ogres have never been particularly good in land battles...
VC had huge buffs across pretty much the entire roster and benefitted from the healing changes, and crumbling damage got weaker... It's still in a massively buffed state compared to what it was at the end of game 2, but it's not dominating the land battle meta.
The only rush factions that have been particularly strong in land battles in game 3 were in that position because of blatantly OP units/abilities.

I haven't seen anything that really supports the idea that missile units have suffered relative to other units given the overall land battle meta shift, which is actually less heavy on rush factions than the end of WH2 - where Greenskins, Beastmen, and WoC were all fairly meta. Only missile play that's reliant on shock units/cavalry has suffered in game 3 - that happens to include the builds that included the most missile units (You need a much larger proportion of infantry to missile units to offer an effective defense, so builds using more cav/monsters could effectively run more missile units).

SettraDoesNotSimp#5603

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

SettraDoesNotSimp#5603 said:

Spellbound1875#4610 said:

@Asamu#6386
The current system is readable at a glance and let's us draw accurate conclusions about unit performance. Folks can look at Gors statline and intuit that these guys aren't gonna trade well into Dwarf Warriors. Jade Warriors, Orc Boyz, and Bleakswords, which tells us Gors probably could use a buff or price cut. If it ain't broke why fix it?

Are you saying gors are fine? Cause i do not agree. Not understanding the point here lol sorry

God no! Been complaining about gors for a while now. I'm saying you can look at the unit card and see compared to the listed Gor herd suck for the price and could use a buff.

Since the unit cards let us accurately compare unit performance I don't think the way the info is displayed needs to change, which is the initial premise of this thread.

Oh ok then i get It. I missed a beat for a moment at the mere tought gors were fine lol

Glad to see you are a man of culture as well lol
Sadly, it seems CA has no clue about this, since they buffed every mid tier infa tey but them, let alone willing to help them