Dwarf BRs Are Off

Jules

Nah it's been happening awhile. Here is from last week. Same story. Had a majority of my units remaining after the first hit, I lost only a ₁/3 of my ATC. But somehow he won the BR.

On July 9, 2025 at 03:45:28:

My Lord, our troops fought bravely making the great difference in battle between you and our enemies in Independence at Khardfee-19, our noble men are proud to be part of your kingdom an they fought in the name of you, honor and justice, leading no man behind.

We won 1 Castle(s) sorrounded by 25 lands.
In this lands are also constructed : 6 Advanced Training Center , 26 Farm , 2 Forge , 19 Guard House , 0 Guard Tower , 51 House , 15 Market , 6 Medical Center , 8 Mill , 7 Mine , 0 School , 6 Training Center ,

In this lands also lived 8663 people who are gratefull to join our Kingdom.

We managed to kill : 0 Shieldbearer 413 Hammer wheilder 607 Axe Man 254 Runner 0 Light Crossbowman 0 Heavy Crossbowman

But we lost : 0 Knight 0 Infantry 0 Pikeman 0 Heavy Infantry 0 Archer 0 Mounted Archers

On July 9, 2025 at 03:25:32:

My Lord, my Lord, we were invaded by Independence at Khardfee-19! Enemies are upon us. They took everything what they could, our troops were unable to defend our kingdom. We must do something now!

We lost 2 Castle(s) sorrounded by 50 lands.
In this lands are also constructed : 14 Advanced Training Center , 87 Farm , 5 Forge , 49 Guard House , 0 Guard Tower , 156 House , 48 Market , 50 Medical Center , 25 Mill , 30 Mine , 14 School , 14 Training Center ,

In this lands also lived 17037 people who left our Kingdom.

We managed to kill : 2059 Shieldbearer 1566 Hammer wheilder 1286 Axe Man 0 Runner 2448 Light Crossbowman 1570 Heavy Crossbowman

But we lost : 2066 Knight 1584 Infantry 34 Pikeman 60 Heavy Infantry 1137 Archer 2658 Mounted Archers

Lord Thane

Jules I think that looks expected. In the retal he didnt have any ranged, guessing that's where you zeroed him out. In the first attack, maybe he won due to the MC bug where the healed troops happened before the win calculations to give him the numbers needed to achieve victory conditions.

Nolio

Lord Thane

Nope the time of that attack and defend were

Jules On July 9, 2025 at 03:45:28:

Jules On July 9, 2025 at 03:25:32:

Your change log says

7-7-2025
*Fix: Medical Centers were running heal% before battle calcs had finished determining the winner – skewing results for technical win to whomever had the highest ratio of MC.

@Lord Thane Lord Thane "now they're correctly getting extra defense added to their army, whereas before it was helping the enemy"

How was this working? Are you saying that the enemy (me) would have gotten the 140k defense that the SBs were providing and that he would have had the defensive numbers less that 140k? Which would have put his defense to 90k?

Lord Thane

Nolio part of the calc of shieldbearers strat was to weaken the SB defenses, and give a little buff to remaining units in the army defense to increase their survival rate based on how much weaker the SB became. The buff isn't equal to what the SB lose, it's much smaller. Previously that little buff was getting sent to the enemy army, but now the Dwarf is getting credited with those points properly.

Nolio

Lord Thane Right that makes sense in line with "Shieldbearers close-combat damages increased by 100%Other units damages reduced depending on shieldbearer damages."

However it seems that the SBs are not taking that extra 100% damage. Are they just giving the Defense bonus to their own, getting full defense bonus for themselves, and getting full reduction of LR attack? So triple dipping their defense?

In my BR the SBs are doing 109k removal of LR, adding 134k defense, then also buffing the defense of the other units by an unknown amount. So 6704 SBs (numbers provided by the dwarf) were able to do 243k plus whatever extra for the rest of their units, meaning they had over 37 base defense.

Dwarf SBs need a rework. They shouldn't be able to do 4.6 times the damage to an opponent who has 1.25 ghs per land compared to them (which is what I had)

Lord Thane

Nolio I think your expectation of SB getting more damages is skewed by the Unit Weighted Damage Allocation. The actual defense points from SB are getting reduced so they technically get double damages, but they're not quite getting double the "attack points from the enemy applied", they get their allocation of attack points based on UWDA which will absorb into that unit and any overflow would get passed to unit2 (if there's any overflow, which I wouldn't expect from a large SB army).

Your Far Fighting strat was hurt by their Shield Line that reduced your long range -62%. So you increased your long range attack +100% with your strat, but then it was also reduced -62% (depending which strat fires off first you might end up at 124% or 76% of your original long range power) by the enemy strat.

The real gotcha moment here is that you boosted the Dwarf's long range, while they nerfed your long range. You got a much smaller benefit from the strategy than they did in this scenario (by the % buffs, since they got +100% and there was nothing working against them in long range).

What you really needed to fight against this SB strategy is more melee, and a strategy that helps your melee (or no strategy so it doesn't inadvertently help the enemy). I've added the Rider unit to my armies to help fight back against Shield Line, because I can have 2 of them for cheaper upkeep than Balista while getting more melee and a good chunk of defense to spread out the damages. I was previously only running cat/bal, but now I'm switching my strat to fight against Dwarfs using the SB strat on me, so I'll prolly end up with something like 2:1 riders over balista, or more. My example is a simplified version of what you went through. I also stopped leaving Far Fighting on as a default, because it's actually empowering Dwarves to do more damages against me than it's helping, and the last 5 attacks have been from Dwarfs.

I think if you had used Infantry Attack or No Strat, you probably would have won, or at least you wouldn't have lost as many cats/bals (because the Dwarf killed as many cat/bal in long range as they did in melee, in this battle).

Nolio

Lord Thane Your Far Fighting strat was hurt by their Shield Line that reduced your long range -62%. So you increased your long range attack +100% with your strat, but then it was also reduced -62% (depending which strat fires off first you might end up at 124% or 76% of your original long range power) by the enemy strat.

Yes this is all accounted for, also with the 80% of my army so even less LR.

Lord Thane SB getting more damages is skewed by the Unit Weighted Damage Allocation

This was discussed in your thread about UWDA which was proposed that SB are unit level 3 taking more damage since that's what they're supposed to do. Though the way I see it, that should probably only be the case when using Shield Line. Like if you're strategy is to expose your strongest defenders, they should be the first ones attacked.

Lord Thane The real gotcha moment here is that you boosted the Dwarf's long range, while they nerfed your long range. You got a much smaller benefit from the strategy than they did in this scenario (by the % buffs, since they got +100% and there was nothing working against them in long range).

This was also accounted for, and the boost I got was still larger than his

Lord Thane I've added the Rider unit to my armies to help fight back against Shield Line, because I can have 2 of them for cheaper upkeep than Balista while getting more melee and a good chunk of defense to spread out the damages.

I had 3500 Riders and 3500 Ballista

Lord Thane I think if you had used Infantry Attack or No Strat, you probably would have won, or at least you wouldn't have lost as many cats/bals (because the Dwarf killed as many cat/bal in long range as they did in melee, in this battle).

This doesn't make sense when so much of my Rock Throwers lived. How is so much LR damage getting past the tier 3 and tier 2 units to hit my Catapults and Ballista?

Lord Thane

Nolio This doesn't make sense when so much of my Rock Throwers lived. How is so much LR damage getting past the tier 3 and tier 2 units to hit my Catapults and Ballista?

They didn't, all your fodder units got zeroed out in long range 100%, only your cats/bals survived to go on to melee where they got blasted. Your MC healed a bunch of them after the battle was over. That's why I was saying the Far Fighting really helped the Dwarf so much, gave their ranged attack a big boost. If they didn't have that boost, I think probably around half your fodder units would have went on to melee phase.

By fodder units, I mean anything except cats/bals, lol

Nolio

Lord Thane Can you show me that? Because I have 50% of my fodder still alive after the battle. Take away 20% from before the battle began, that leaves 40%, then take away the 16% which leaves 32% of the units that fought lived

Nolio

Lord Thane Lets use the numbers since we have them

The dwarf had 21.3k Ranged damage. Times that by 2

Range = 42.6k

My range after the 62.8% reduction then times 2 =

Range = 64.2k

My defense of the fodder units after 20% removed is

50.5k

His defense of fodder units is

64k

So I should have killed 100% of his fodder units in the LR phase, while he should have killed about 80%

Then I should have wiped out the all the rest of his units given their penalty from the SL strategy.

He had less than 37k remaining defense

I had about 40k attack at that point

He had about 30k attack points My fodder should have soaked the rest of that with some still getting through to the Catapults and Ballistae

But not 64k worth of damage on them.

FriendsInSpace

Lord Thane

Nolio

I tend to agree with Nolio here, but I am also biased. Every other racial strat has a fairly significant downside:

Gnomes doubles the LR of the enemy force as well as your own
Elves makes an unupgradeable 2 defence mage vulnerable in melee (two for one sale on mages to militia!), but the mages do slightly more than 50% more damage
Humans does 1.5x damage to their knights for 1.5x the damage output in melee. Plus SR atk
Orcs makes their SW more vulnerable so they can move their ATK up a phase
Undead - don't know what their strat is but I'm sure there's a downside and an upside

Then Dwarves? Oh you just need to have more units. That's the downside. Which may have been harder to achieve pre-market, but now with gold being almost worthless to all races except elves due to its abundance, dwarves are only limited by how fast they can train the units.

Upside? At 50% SB, you completely nuke 2 separate races, and the highest defence unit in the game tanks more hits in melee (after 1 armor upgrade) so the rest of the troops don't die. That 2nd part isn't a downside, it's an upside. Oh and both sides lose 10% close combat damage. Which helps their SB even more.

Hell, throw in a couple armor techs, assuming the percentage is something greater than 15% per, and a shieldbearer can tank a catapult without even using shield line, for a third of the cost and between a third and quarter of the upkeep. And they train twice as fast as cats and pretty much twice as fast as mages.

I fail to see the downside of running 50% shieldbearers on shield line. But I'm also a dirty biased elf, so I may be looking through poop colored glasses.

Nolio

@Lord Thane When attack powers are the same, and by that I mean there is no bottom feeding penalty, then the much larger army shouldn't be losing 4.6 times as much resources. They should be losing less do to the required multiple attacks it should take to break them.

There is something going wrong in the battle script that we need to find out.

Logically the way Caragous and Shieldbearers work should be flipped. Caragous should get their bonus based on how many there are in their own army and SBs should reduce damage based on the number compared to the enemy units. It makes no sense that 1 SB at home cancels out my 500k LR damage.

And to that note, There should never be a way for any race to cancel out 100% of any kind of damage. I could understand if the SBs were 100% of the army then they would cancel out 100% of LR damage, but that would be to themselves. And since they are supposed to do 0 damage, it would be a pointless strategy. Even for the swarm strategy, I get that there is some kind of detriment to that strategy, I'm not sure what it is, but logically it makes no sense that a skeleton getting crushed by 8,000 catapults and ballistae does 0 damage. Sure reduce it by 95%, but 100% makes no sense to this statistician.

Lord Thane

Nolio I'll pull up the battle report again when I get back inside. I know those numbers are way off though, all the modifiers like BAS and techs are also at play (which as we know from the other thread where I demonstrated the imbalance, techs give at least 6X more benefit to dwarf/human than they do gnome).

Nolio

Lord Thane Yeah that's the biggest issue with my analysis, I work with base numbers since I don't know the effects of upgrades etc. I just assumed our BAS are equal since mine is maxed I assume his is too. And I really appreciate you looking into these issues, I know you don't have all the time in the world to work on these things, which is why I'd love to help.

And I am a numbers guy, as you may have noticed lol, and I'm happy to go through things to help find ways to balance. I don't want any race to have crazy unfair advantages. I just want things to work out proportionately well. Typically that can be found relatively well based on resources lost. Then adjust for GHs based on land, and the answer should be visible.

But I've seen BRs from Humans, Elves, and Gnomes, that show a massive favour on the side of Dwarves. So there's definitely an imbalance happening, we just need to make small adjustments to bring them in line. If you're willing to let us or at the very least me, use a battle tester, I could get some very good data for you and then we can propose some small changes to make everyone feel like battles are more on par with where they should be.

skigglez

Lord Thane
While on the subject of techs - any traction with Keeper on implementing the point based Sharper Blades and Armours?

Muh Dude

Hell, I'm a dwarf and I've been thinking we're getting away with something too.. Even sent a few BRs to Thane asking if everything looks right. I'm not a number cruncher though, I leave that to you smart folk

Lord Thane

FriendsInSpace that's not quite right, the SB definitely has a downside as it loses 50% of its defense points. And both sides don't lose 10% of damages.

The downside of running 50% SB is that it cripples your offense. I tried it in the last test round, I beat the crap out of gnomes BUT the Orcs walked all over me like it was nothing.

FriendsInSpace

Lord Thane fair, I was just going off the guide description. Unsure exactly what anything does tbh.

I still feel like there's room to balance it a bit better, as even if they do lose 50% of their defence in melee, with the hit prioritization of units you don't lose very many SB in battles with melee armies. Seen a few weird BRs from humans that made no sense.

Perhaps changing the armor techs to a point system will solve this. I'm assuming the dwarves are running the full armor techs plus true silver from what I've seen.

Edit: Also as a side note, I do appreciate what you and Keeper are doing for the game, and the massive time commitment it must be. I don't mean to come off as flippant as I do sometimes. Wife constantly reminds me to stop being a dick lol.

Nolio

Lord Thane If they lose 50% of their defense points, then that doesn't seem to be reflected in the BRs. But also up until you fixed the SBs, it didn't cripple the offense, it improved it more than gnome fodder did!

FriendsInSpace

Lord Thane

I thought about this some more and I still think that this strat is broken. The downside of having to run a high percentage of SB's is offset by the fact that dwarves melee is among the best in the game, Axe men have the highest raw melee damage stats of any unit.

So if we were to have a dwarf run 50/50 SB and AM on shield line, not only is LR completely nullified, the SB's then tank hits from the equivalent of 1.25 knights each, while the axe men just shred. The only counter i see to this is another dwarf running no SB's and pure AM/HW to out melee him.

The problem lies with the fact that the SB's still are able to tank hits from every single raw unit in the game after they nullify the range. Yeah they don't kill anything, but that doesn't matter while they are keeping the majority of their army alive in melee. The only real counter is a full melee army, which only really another dwarf can pull off. Knights and heavy infantry are too expensive/slow, elves and gnomes LOL, and orcs maybe with a massive shitpile of SW, but they train at 75% of the speed of SB so they will get outpaced in a protracted conflict easily.

Possible solutions:
1) Instead of a percentage nullification, have the SB's be able to absorb a set amount of ranged damage each. Say 10 or 15, on top of their defence.
2) Shield bearers defence reduced to a hard 5 (unupgradeable) in melee/take triple damage from mounted units while keeping the nullification. Would make sense they can't move their shields around to defend after they've absorbed 20000 arrows or 50 ballista bolts.
3) Increase the training time of SB's, if they are able to nullify cats, they should take at least as long. Probably needs to be mixed with some other fixes though.

I'm all for having races counter other ones, but dwarves are a hard counter to two separate races, and supposedly only really weak to orcs, but the one orc BR i've seen so far doesn't show that weakness. Plus when I look at the KHOF and see nearly half of the top 30 have the ability to just make my army nothing, it doesn't give me a good feeling. Especially since as an elf there's basically nothing I can do to fight back when they start hitting.

Lord Thane

Nolio it might seem that way at first, but it does increase their deaths at 2X the rate. They go from a base 20 down to a base 10 defense, so when they receive their allocation of damages it ends up killing twice as many units. The SB sent against you had the True Silver buff and is also buffed by the Plate Armor tech as well (I think, maybe), so they wouldn't have been quite as easy to kill as some other kinds of units that have lower defenses - but still they were twice as easy to kill technically.

I noticed what part of the discrepancy in your numbers was, it's due to the higher tier of Castle Based Defense Scaling you reached. You actually defended with only 70% of your forces, not 80%. That was a small bug though, because you should have been in the tier for 75% defense instead. I updated the logic for that to properly reflect the defense forces in the 20-29 castle tier. So with 20% healing, it makes sense you'd have around half your forces alive.

The final battle numbers looked like this:

Melee Phase
Attacker damage points: 40k
Defender damage points: 16k
Attacker Losses: 1: 963, 2: 250, 3: 262, 4: 23, 5: 163, 6: 296.
Defender Losses: 1: 876, 2: 0, 3: 0, 4: 0, 5: 0, 6: 1087.
Short phase
Attacker damage points: 223
Defender damage points: 0
Attacker Losses: 1: 0, 2: 0, 3: 0, 4: 0, 5: 0, 6: 0.
Defender Losses: 1: 4, 2: 0, 3: 0, 4: 0, 5: 0, 6: 6.
Range phase
Attacker damage points: 77k
Defender damage points: 85k
Attacker Losses: 1: 1811, 2: 1757, 3: 982, 4: 527, 5: 2800, 6: 1052.
Defender Losses: 1: 500, 2: 5982, 3: 7615, 4: 2165, 5: 7662, 6: 853.

Total Attacker Melee Points: 72k
Total Attacker Defense Points: 230k
Total Attacker Ranged Points: 77k
Total Defender Melee Points: 90k
Total Defender Defense Points: 152k
Total Defender Ranged Points: 85k

You can see in those numbers, if their ranged attack hadn't been buffed so much then a bunch of your 90k worth of melee attack could have survived into the Melee round to be able to kill more of the attackers units and also absorb damages for your cats/bals. Since the fodder units were wiped at Range, it left the cats/bals pretty defenseless against what was left of the formidable Dwarf army.

Nolio

Lord Thane That definitely fills in a lot of the gaps. I had no idea about the 70% or 75%, that 5% would still do a lot of defense and damage.

I take it that the report does not take into consideration the upgrades? You had mentioned that before, but I just want to clarify for this one.

I'll dig into those numbers a bit more and see where my discrepancies lay.

Thank you