HoMM2 units' personal Attack Skill is redundant...or is it?

[dudejo]

the way i see it, units' Attack Skill stat does the same thing as their damage stat.

Defense Skill only affects physical damage. so taking this out means that spells must work differently to remain viable.

Attack Skill affects your damage output in general. taking this out means you can accomplish the same thing by merely increasing damage to compensate.

it works fine as a stat handed down by the Hero but as a unit's natural stat, it's pointless.

that's my view on this.

[Darmani]

Say I have a hero with Titans with Bless cast on them, and I'm attacking an enemy hero with Black Dragons. I want to draw out a graph of how much damage, on average, my Titans will do to his Dragons, versus how much Attack skill I have over the enemy's Defense skill.

It starts out flat, where the enemy has much more Defense that I have attack and is achieving the maximum Defense bonus. It then climbs slowly until my Titan's effective attack equals the Dragon's effective Defense, where the rate of growth doubles for a while, until it again flattens when I achieve the maximum Attack Bonus.

If I modified the Titans to have increased Attack, it would shift this graph to the left. If I instead increased their maximum damage, it would be like I grabbed the top of the graph paper and stretched it.

If the attack bonus worked exponentially -- a Titan with 1 Attack always did 10% more damage than a Titan with 0 Attack, and a Titan with 101 Attack always did 10% more damage than a Titan with 0 Attack, and could track damage dealt to infinitely many decimal places, then you would be right.

As it stands now, changing Attack produces a very different effect from changing Damage.

[dudejo]

you're forgetting the other half of damage.

that being MINIMUM damage.

what if 20-30 was 25-30? or even 25-35?

[Darmani]

Yeah, I deliberately avoided discussing that. I started typing that post with me having Black Dragons and talking about "expected damage," but I switched it to Titans with Bless so I wouldn't have to explain what I meant. (Depending on who you talk to, "expected" is either a fancy word for "average," or a plain word for "Lebesgue integral.")

Since there's a range of damage we can deal, while average damage is a useful and easy-to-work-with, we care more about the probability distribution -- how likely we are to do how much damage. (This is, of course, not the end-all be-all; it's still a proxy for the knowledge of how to actually kill the stack.)

For any fixed levels of attack and defense, we can draw this probability distribution. For most creatures, it will be a flat line. For example, at equal attack and defense, for a creature which deals 11-20 damage, it will be a flat line at the 1/10 probability level from 11 to 20. If we model a creature with two attacks against a creature which has already retaliated, then the probability distribution will become pointed in the middle.

In the previous post, I talked about graphing damage versus attack; here I'm drawing damage versus the roll of the metaphorical dice. It may stretch your visualization muscles a bit, but we can view all of these at once in 3-dimensions. (At least we don't have millions of dimensions, as the machine learning guys often find themselves in.) For every attack-defense difference, walk that many feet east, and the probability distribution of how much damage you deal in the air.

You'll find the same things happen -- adding attack shifts the whole graph west, while adding damage stretches it. Of course, widening the range of damage makes the probability distribution flatter, while shortening it concentrates the realm of possibility (until you cast Bless/Curse and all your probability lives at a single point), but that doesn't really change the effect of adding Attack or adding (both min and max) damage. It's just that sometimes you get that 10% bonus on 11 damage, and sometimes on 20.

[dudejo]

[...]adding attack shifts the whole graph west, while adding damage stretches it.[...]

i think you got them mixed up.

so you're saying that Attack Skill letting you have higher damage without the wider probabilities of a modified damage range is good enough that units should have the stat for themselves?

why isn't it good enough to be a Hero-exclusive stat?

[Darmani]

No. I'm saying that, while both Attack and damage modify the damage dealt, they do so in different ways. Increasing a creature's minimum and maximum damage by 10% always increases the damage it does by 10%. Increasing a creature's Attack by 10% may have no effect on the damage it does, or it may triple it, depending on the defending creature and hero.

[Kristo]

If I may speculate wildly, I think it's because JVC thought it would make combat more interesting. Separating attack skill from damage allows the distinction between being good at causing damage and the amount of damage dealt. Similarly, separating defense skill from hit points gives each creature a different resistance to physical and magical attacks.

Theoretically, this allows for wild extremes in stats, such as a creature with 0 attack skill but 100 average damage, or perhaps 50 defense skill but only 10 hit points. Since we don't see much in the way of extreme stats in H2 (the Power Lich is probably the best example), I think it's fair to say that we could very easily simplify down to Damage and HP stats only.

[Darmani]

Let me give out a more detailed example.

I have a stack of Phoenixes, with an attack of 12. My opponent has a stack of Boars with a defense of 4 and a stack of Golems with a defense of 10.

If we only look at the HP, the Golems have twiceas much HP as the Halflings, and would thus be twice as hard to kill.

However, due to the attack bonus, my Phoenixes will do 6/5 the normal amount of damage to the Golems. As far as the Phoenixes are concerned, the Golems are as easy to kill as if the Phoenixes did their normal damage but the Golems had 5/6 as much HP (25 HP). Meanwhile, the Phoenixes will be doing 9/5 times their base damage to the Boars, which is the same effect as if the Phoenixes did their normal amount of damage but the Boars had 5/9 as much HP (8.3333 HP). From the Phoenix's point of view, the Golems are actually 3 times as hard to kill than as Boars!

Now, say I gain a few levels and pick up an Ultimate Sword of Dominion. Now I'm gaining the maximum attack bonus against both creatures. As a result, the Golems are only twice as hard to kill as the Boars.

[dudejo]

is the Attack Skill bonus capped at 100%?

[ThunderTitan]

The Attack Skill ensures that you don't do the same damage against different creatures (creatures with different defence values)... and that each creature does different damage to the same enemy, that's why it's there. And it's a very good idea to have that.

/thread

[dudejo]

isn't that what damage range does to begin with?

if the game picks a random number between x and y, won't that prevent you from dealing the same damage every time?

[ThunderTitan]

Nope, the dmg range isn't specific to other creatures... thus there's no difference between attacking a Dragon or a Peasant, you'll always get a random number between the damage ranges...

The mdg range is there for randomness of dmg, while the Atk is for the interaction between different units being different.

[GreatEmerald]

Would be pretty neat if the game had a DamageFilter system like in Unreal II - units could be assigned to a filter and thus take less damage from one type of attack and more from another. Like water elementals taking extra damage from fire elementals and dragons. Of course, there's the Hatred system, but it's not flexible.

[Darmani]

I've not seen this documented anywhere, but water elementals actually already take double damage from fire elementals, and vice versa (although this works by the hatred system).

[ThunderTitan]

Yeah, but that would be on top of Atk/Def.... the hero giving extra Atk/Def is also an important part of the game if they're still relegated to the sidelines instead of actually fighting like in H4.

[dudejo]

Nope, the dmg range isn't specific to other creatures... thus there's no difference between attacking a Dragon or a Peasant, you'll always get a random number between the damage ranges...

The mdg range is there for randomness of dmg, while the Atk is for the interaction between different units being different.

if a peasant deals 1-1 and a dragon deals 25-50, isn't that different enough?

and if you attack a Dragon or Peasant, don't they still have Defense Skill to help their HP?

[Darmani]

If I'm reading that post correctly, you understand that Attack and Damage affect the damage creatures do in different ways. You have thus retreated to saying "But we can already make creatures different -- why do we need to make them more different?" Is that something you would have said before making this thread, or do you see our arguments as soldiers to be grudgingly retreated from?

Remember, it's okay to be wrong. In Heroes II, a sound plays when you level up. In real life, that sound is "Oops!"

Unless, of course, you actually don't understand how Attack and Damage differ in effect, in which case you should tell us what in our previous posts you don't understand or think is wrong.

[GreatEmerald]

You should draw those graphs. Visual information is always better.

[dudejo]

i know what the stats do. i've always known.

my main stance is that units having their personal Attack Skill rating along with damage is pointless.

no other series work that way.

you have two stats that affect the same result. that result being the unit's melee output against all targets.

take one out and increase the other, you'll ultimately have the same end result, that being melee damage.

unless you're saying that without Attack Skill, a unit's Defense Skill + Hero's Bonus could modify even a 1000 damage strike down to 100.

[ThunderTitan]

if a peasant deals 1-1 and a dragon deals 25-50, isn't that different enough?

and if you attack a Dragon or Peasant, don't they still have Defense Skill to help their HP?

But that's just it, it's not about a peasant and a dragon doign different dmg, is a bout a peasant doing different dmg against different targets...


As for the defence skill, sure, you could base it just on that, but then the creature would always receive a fixed amount of dmg reduction instead of it fluctuating depending on the Attack skill of the attacker. So if 2 units had the same dmg range they'd do the same dmg against a dragon, but having both a dmg range and Attack skill make the units more different, and allows for more variety.

And of course the fact that the hero give Attack help too.

If it was just adding dmg straight up eventually it would be too much, but with the Attack skill they can use advanced math to make sure dmg never gts out of hand.