NWP: Weapon abilities

WSNPP: NWP - #9 Weapon Abilities

So what do I mean by weapon abilities? Well just to give an example, “drain”. Yup that’s right I’m talking about the ‘Special’ abilities that only certain units have such as horsemen, ghosts and drake arbiters.

Weapon abilities are conditions that follow the initiate attack of any battle. It can prove to be useful, or your downfall. Either than knowing how to use such special abilities properly, it’s pretty basic: they’re tooltips to help you know what ability does what as well as nifty code that now calculates the ‘hit chances’ and ‘damage per hit’ (With the special abilities) before you initiate battle.

For those who don’t know any special abilities or have not realised that you’ve used one I’ll give a few examples:

- CHARGE – Doubles damage of unit per hit… also doubles the damage of the target

- MAGICAL – 70% hit chance all the time when using this attack

- FIRSTSTRIKE – The unit with this ability always get’s to attack first in battle

Now that you have an idea of some abilities, let’s answer the question:

“When and where do you use these abilities?”

So truthfully, almost half the units per race have some sort of special abilities and really, just use them whenever you want. Just because a unit may have a special ability doesn’t mean you should run away from the enemy or change all your plans. The ‘Weapon abilities’ are there to help you complete your plan.

Thus use it when you can deal the most damage and take little damage back. For example, fencers (With 70% defence on terrain like mountains) are hard to hit but mages with their ‘Magical’ attacks ignores this high defence. So to put it simply, mages > fencers. However don’t forget to consider other factors that may change your decision such as:

- Does the mage have low defence in the surrounding terrain?

- Are you outnumbered?

- Can your mage kill the fencer this turn, even though the mage is on low hp?

And a whole heap more. So if we were to analyse and simplify the question “When and where do you use these abilities?” into simple terms. Basing on the Wesnoth system the new question is: “Do I take the risk?” cause as we all know, and I probably have expressed this far too many times, Wesnoth is based on a luck/ hit CHANCE system.

Let’s use the fencer and mage and chuck them in a scenario.

- Say the fencer was on a mountain (70%def) and the surrounding terrain were plains (40%def for mage) The fencer has 27hp and the mage has 8hp.

- The mage has 9 – 3 (magical) and the fencer has 4 – 4

Round 1: Mage attacks fencer with a 70% hit chance… chances are, the fencer will live. On average the fencer would take two hits, taking 18dmg. Fencer then attacks the mage with a 60% hit chance. In this case the fencer only needs to score 2 hits to kill the mage. On average, the mage will die.

Yes special weapon abilities are useful and help a lot but the question is “Where and when to use them,” or “Is the risk worth it?” The example above is very common in many games, now let’s look at another example… and to be honest you have to be an idiot (no offence) to do this.

Let’s take a horseman and a Drake Arbiter, put them in the middle of nowhere (just plains) in the middle of the day (+25% dmg bonus to lawful units, in this case for both units)

Say that the horsemen and Drake arbiter both have strong and intelligent traits. And now let us assume that it’s the horsemen’s turn.

Horseman with a 10 – 2 (trait bonuses)… with daylight and the charge bonus it increases to 24 – 2 and have roughly 38hp.

Where as the Drake arbiter has 18 – 2 (trait bonuses)… with daylight it increases to 20 – 2 and has 62hp.

So you may think, but the horseman is only level 1 and the arbiter is level 2 so the horsemen will always die. Yes this is true the horseman will die around 90% of the time but not because of the level differences.

If we not include resistances, the horseman damage decreases to 22 – 2, but the Drake Arbiter’s damage increases to 24… add charge bonuses and the Drake Arbiter’s damage then increases to 48 – 2. But it doesn’t stop there, the Drake Arbiter has firststrike meaning that the unit get’s to strike first and as we know previously the horseman only has 38hp. See the picture? If not get someone else to explain the Result ;)

So what I’m also trying to express here is that weapon abilities, can also be your disadvantage as shown in the last example. Once again the question “Do I risk it or not” comes to mind. Even if the Drake Arbiter was on 20 hp, (meaning the horseman can 1 hit kill it), IS the risk of dying on the first round worth it?

Next Edition - #10 “Special forces. On my mark!”

Previous Edition - #8 Traits

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