Defensive Combat Bug

That is correct

splash damage

factor x

lost dmg while passing it from one unit to another

plus smaller units gets always better scores than bigger units- IMHO it is some hardcoded behavior, the less defenders , the harder to kill them and they still deal a lot of dmg. Sometimes I killed 85 of 100 enemy units and they were still dealing half a dmg that 100 was giving me .... hardcoded to artificially prolong battles and give better experience to smaller players. Similar to Frank faction in Atilla TW. Dmg rises proportionally to casualties.

not sure what you are saying but I agreed that you are correct. Dividing is always better.

and system worked the same way since I remember in 2010, they tried to nerf it by hardcoding around 2014 , when they were also creating battle engine for COW, but the truth is that huge stacks were always at disadvantage, even after nerf. So if they havent managed to fix it in 2014 - it means it will never be fixed as it is spread all over the code.

I can only guess that original design idea was to have more mobile gameplay than static one with two stacks of 50 mln shooting each other for weeks. This is why you have cap limits of 50, this is why dying units always perform better. Talk also to players with top military scores, talk to devs and programmers from bytro as they should have info that you need.

if you can - send me those tests of yours for small units below 100, medium up to million and huge above million . Check also Petruz's damage bot to get additional info. I believe Petruz said that to have efficient smaller stacks they should in theory have 40% dmg power of a big stack. I would personally go for dmg of same size just as a rule. Talk to Petruz plz - he will explain you that behavior.

Petruz figured out in Theory how to divide stacks into smaller baby-stacks. He is convinced that having baby stack of 40% damage of enemy stack is quite optimal size.

I still think it is better to have more, like 1:1 dmg comparision with a big stack but it is my idea that I use without any argumetns behind. It just works for me with a new off a defensive values introduced in a last update.

But Petruz explained me that I have not understood your bug correctly as you are aware of size factor. What you are saying is:

1 .Bug puts in disadvantage single attacking stack fighting multiple defending armies.

2. Bug also supports multiple attacking armies vs one single stack even though they are smaller.

now my question is - have you tried that: :

A.Have you tested bug on home, enemy and neutral territories? I believe picking up enemy away from his provinces will get you much better results.

B. If we have multiple defending armies they should not attack attacker if they want to avoid losses- this means they cannot move. So if they are from one nation they should stand next to each other, keeping distance so they do not merge, which allows attacker to pick them roughly on by one

C. Same as B. but with different defending nations in one fort - I believe diplomacy could help here if they havent nerfed it.

D. If you are still not sure if you can make it - there is always possibility of blockade- you stand 30 mins from opponent blocking bis movement and both your troops and enemy troops are unavalaible for some time without takign any losses.

Hi

1. From your tests looks that both defendign stacks are gettign dmg so applying splash damage works fine. Lets focus where dmg is lost.

2. With every engagement there is a dice roll for a fight round- so the more dice rolls you have , the better chance you will get better scores. One stack has bigger chance to get worse scores.

3. I believe that when splash dmg is applied it has to be rounded down so it can be passed to the next stack in area in a convenient way . This is how you lose some dmg in my opinion.

4. Bytro lately supported idea of smaller units fighting better against overhelming odds and 1 inf can survive barrage from 50 arts. I believe it is hardcoded to prolong battles and give satisfaction to smalelr nations but I can be wrong. This would also affected dmg dealt by bigger stack to a shrinking enemy- less dmg every time enemy is smaller.

In that equation dmg is somehow proportional to enemy size: smaller enemy- less dmg....

I believe everyone can confirm that after last update.

I once attacked enemy force of around 10 kk with my stack divided in 20 smaller stacks of 500 inf 50 tanks 50 cars 50 cavs 15 HTs and some ballons . I had to help my guys with 4 k planes. But from what I saw smaller stacks where not so effective as i thought in an attack so I would risk statement that melee defending is a better option that attacking. my 20 meee mini-stacks had overhelming dmg but were killing not more 1.5-2 kk. Dmg got magically spread all over the map. While at the same time 18*50 arts were roughly killing 6kk-.7.5kk mln troops per round.

Ahh now I see

in field - you attack every group, in town - just one.

use the force LUKE and conquer town with a garrison first.,using my bug Then you will be sitting in a town and laughing .

but it also confirms that spreading defense overcomes enemy numerical advantage and should with smaller effect, but always with some bonus, help outside town too.

ow towns became more important for me - thanks Sckopen.

To explain this bug:

It has to do with the way size factors (SBDE) and splash damage are calculated. An army is always spreading its damage among all enemies in a 5km circle around the point of attack (splash damage). In turn also all enemies in that 5km radius defend back, and their damage values are added up.

The problem is that the size factors (SBDE) are calculated for each enemy stack individually instead of calculating the size factors after adding the damages together. The result is that SBDE limits are circumvented.

Example: Lets say the stack limit of a unit would be 50 and each unit deals 1 damage. If 5 stacks of 50 of these units are attacked in the same position, their return damage is 250 instead of 50, like it would be for a single stack of 250 of these units.

In fights where both sides attack each other (on paths for example) this is often alleviated a bit, because also the multiple stacks would attack the single stack and get return damage each time they attack, making the fights more even than fights where only one side attacks or defends.

This bug is also the reason for the "plane patrol exploit" (known more in the CoW community) or the "flower bouqet exploit". All share the same underlying reason.

So in order to fix this bug we would need to rewrite the combat calculation in a way that size factors are applied after adding up damage values. Or by making an attacking army attacking each army in an area individually instead of spreading its damage among all of them. It could also be alleviated a bit by removing the functionality that in certain situations only one side in a battle attacks and one only defends.

There is no immediate solution in sight and I won't make any promises here if or when and how this will be fixed, although we will certainly talk about it again in the team and may put it on an agenda to investigate this again in detail.

Until this is fixed I personally would argue for allowing to use this bug (but that call should be made by the CMs & support staff), as it is too hard to judge if someone is using this intentionally or accidentally (e.g. you cannot really punish someone just for defending an allied city together with his ally, most people don't even know that this triggers the bug). Plus for example the plane patrol exploit is also not banned in CoW although it has the same reason, and we already allow even more decisive bug usage like Shoot'n'Scoot.

All units deal attacking damage and defending damage, you can check that in the unit details panel. Normally during battles on paths, both sides attack each other using offensive damage, and also return defensive damage (basically 2 ticks in parallel). In cities or during disembarking or when a single patrol tick happens one side is only defending with its defensive damage and one side is only attacking with its attacking damage (only 1 tick happens then).

So when meeting on a path both sides attack both ways and also defend both ways, which often times nullifies the advantage of multiple stacks. That's because each smaller stack attacks the bigger stack and each time gets defensive damage in return, just like the bigger stack gets defensive damage from each of the smaller stacks.

That's why the bug is most often only noticeable when the side with the multiple stacks is defending only, due to the behaviour I explained in my previous post.

Splash damage is there to prevent the exploit of splitting up stacks in alot of smaller chunks so that artillery shots or plane attacks are wasted for example, so just removing it is also no solution. And yeah removing the behaviour that troops only defend in certain situations should also solve most of these situations (though maybe not all edge cases). And although there would be several ways to fix this that sound easy on paper, implementing that is a different beast because the combat system is a giant knot with alot of possible edge cases, and changing it can break alot of things. We plan to touch the combat system anyway in the upcoming months and I will make sure that investigating this issue again is on the agenda for that.

As for allowing players to use it until it is fixed: With shoot'n'scoot players already actively use an unintended bug that wields far greater advantages, with which its possible to defeat hundreds of enemy ranged units without losing any ranged units on your own. Allowing this but not allowing the splitting bug would be a little hypocritical in my eyes. It would also create alot of player reports that need to be checked and many of them probably cannot be proven, creating alot of support work, witch hunts and frustration. That's why I back the CM's statement that bug usage is allowed unless we announce it globally as a banned exploit or until we fix it. In this case it is "until we fix it".

so when we can expect decontamination of supre from S&S ( Hnr) zombies?

huh?? nah neva i hope

Quote from Sckopen

I was refering to the fact that the bugged troops appear as if they weren't in combat. The troops that defend a city appear as being attacked, but the bugged ones never do, so was wondering if it was clear why they stay like that as I thought it was what triggers the bug.

If an army is standing inside a city and is attacked, it won't have the combat symbol displayed and it will also not have the "next attack in ..." tooltip, and inside the army bar you will also not see "attacking XYZ". Instead, you will only see "is attacked by XYZ" in the army bar. When now 2 armies are standing in the same province, only one of them is directly targeted, because every army can only target 1 other army at the same time. That means that only one of the armies has the "is attacked by" written in the army bar. The other army however received splash damage of the attack, so effectively both armies are attacked and share the incoming damage, but only one of the armies is targeted so to say.

So yeah the bug would likely also be solved if multiple units in the same attack location are directly targeted and all armies receive the full amount of damage, instead of the damage being split via splash damage. It would also make ranged weapons very strong against split stacks though, which may be an unwanted side effect. Maybe then another check would need to be implemented to only apply the new behaviour for close combat attacks. On the other hand maybe fixing the calculation of how defensive damage is returned is the more balanced solution, but it could have other pitfalls. Every solution has some tricks or edge cases, so we would need to investigate first how to best solve this, and then the fix itself will also be complicated and take quite some time, including through QA. That's why it wasnt done until now. We will see about the future.

Maybe remove splash damage from all non bombardment attacks? Then to circumvent an attack wasting bug, you could make melee attacks reserve their damage until all of their damage is dealt to any and all units.

So for example if my 10 stack has 10 potential damage and you rush 10 stacks of 1 at them, my stack would damage and kill all of the 1 stacks until it is out of damage to give. And no matter what, once the next attack round starts, my stack would have it's full potential damage again.

Golden Frieza and I currently have a map in which we both have 20k x 1000 units easy enough to test this Bug under several scenario's (land/air/sea) to save data and to give screen shots... I have not heard Skopen mention mixing stacks as means to disburse damage, but seems someone mentioned multiple stacks are each individually doing defense damage against larger stack but still this does not explain the disparity in k/d also, splitting stacks is not supposed to make a difference as damage is capped at 50/40/30/etc...depending on the unit/mech involved in the melee....

I am open to suggestions on how to properly document and reproduce this bug for purpose of future fairness in melee among players.

Quote from Hastings TNT

I am open to suggestions on how to properly document and reproduce this bug for purpose of future fairness in melee among players.

Easy, you need 1 attacker and at least 2 defenders. Get 100 infantry to attack 1 city where it has 2 defenders, one of them being the owner and the other one and ally of the owner, they'll have 50 infantry each.

Do that a few times and if you want to see even more disparity, add different defenders keeping the same total amount of infantry, if there are 4 defenders and the total is 100, then 25 each.

Run some tests.

In order to compare the results, do the same outside a city, in plain road.

Allegledly, you should see a big difference in results.

No need for any fortress or buildings in the city