hey guys Spirit of the law here in this video we're going to look into a topic that's actually
a patreon request there was a post on the Age of Empires 2 reddit questioning the Obscure plus one
attack bonus that Elite mamelukes have against themselves so I thought we'd talk briefly about
that as well as take the opportunity to look at other examples of odd bonus damage in the game
that could mean either things that are similar in being quite Niche or in other cases ones that
are actually quite large but just unexpected bonuses the classic example of weird bonus
damage of course is the Chu ko nu extra arrows dealing zero melee damage in addition to their
usual Pierce attack which sounds like it should have no effect on anything as it turns out though
it interacts with the Rams negative melee armor indirectly giving chu ko nu a bit of surprise
bonus damage against Rams I'll be trying to step away from some of the better known examples like
that one though and include a few that even if you know the game's bonus damage values pretty well I
think it's unlikely you'll know all of these with that though let's jump back to the elite mameluke
now Elite mamelukes are by no means unique unique for having bonus damage against themselves and in
fact the list of units for which that's true is very long it's easy to come up with 10 examples
in fact on the spot but what's so unusual is that it's just plus one which hardly seems worth the
effort especially when you consider how often mamelukes are even fighting each other it would
either require conversions or two saracen players both making their unique unit against each other
for that situation to even come up my guess though is that it's just a sneaky way to encourage the
elite upgrade in Mirror games as now if you're in a saris and mirror matchup and making mamelukes
head to head getting the elite upgrade not only gives you the regular benefits but also the secret
plus one damage now why mamelukes even have a special type instead of just being camels is an
interesting question originally in Age of Kings they were a Cavalry slash infantry unit taking
bonus damage from hand cannoneers and anti-cavalry units alike later in the conquerors expansion a
lot of things happen at once First mamelukes lost their infantry armor instead gaining Archer armor
making them weaker to skirmishers they then receive a brand new camel and ship Armor class
that was given to all camel units though at the same time they didn't lose Cavalry armor instead
gaining a bit of resistance against it while having lots of different armors might sound
like a good thing in this case that just means they take a lot of bonus damage finally on top
of all that they received a special mameluke armor which is actually pretty unusual for a unique unit
and most don't get a unique armor type so why go to the treble for this one specifically the
answer is because the devs thought they were too good against their counters to give an example the
spear line units do plus 15 22 and 32 to Cavalry as you go through their upgrades now camels are
quite a bit weaker than heavy Cavalry when it comes to their Baseline stats so to help them
out the spear line actually do reduced damage to camels though obviously it's still quite a
bit against mameluke specifically though they didn't seem to think that that was quite enough
so the spare line has a bit of extra bonus damage against that specific unit which together means
they do even more bonus damage against mamelukes than against regular Cavalry and obviously much
more than against camels in fact the full list of units with bonus damage against mamelukes
is pretty short and is just the spear line camel Riders after their heavy upgrade Cannon galleons
for some reason Elite kamayuks and of course Elite mamelukes themselves as we'll see this is far from
the strangest of the Hidden attack bonuses though and that's actually the main Direction I wanted to
go here so now let's move on to other units making our first stop at cheap we'll start off here with
the observation that villagers have three attack sheep have 7 HP and yet a villager kills them in
one hit so obviously something strange is going on it turns out sheep and related herdables along
with a couple of other animals are sort of unusual for taking incredible amounts of bonus damage the
way things work every attack from a unit carries information about what different types of attack
they're doing and a corresponding value for each the elite skirmisher here for example has seven
Pierce attack but another four Archer attack three spearmint attack and two Cavalry Archer attack by
default units have a thousand armor against everything except melee and Pierce damage so
most incoming types of bonus damage is negated the skirmisher is still technically sending
its anti-archer bonus damage at a champion it's just running into a thousand armor against it if
instead the unit is meant to take a certain type of bonus damage though like an archer in this case
then its Archer armor is set from the default of a thousand down to zero so it's not able to resist
the incoming anti-archer damage sometimes it's a negative number or sometimes slightly positive to
give some resistance like cataphracts you have Cavalry armor set to 12 instead of a thousand
but in the vast majority of cases for hidden armor it's either a thousand or it's zero cheap
and a few other animals though are unusual for having their base armor set to Zero by default to
everything effectively that means they take every bonus damage in the game when Scouts hit them with
seemingly three attack notice a sheep with 7 HP still dies if we give it more HP so it'll
actually survive we can see the Scout is doing 9 damage so where does that number come from it's
actually because they're not just taking the melee damage of the scale out but also the scouts plus
six against monks that's also why shepherds are able to kill sheep in one hit despite seemingly
not having enough attack to do that you may have assumed that's because they have anti-sheet bonus
damage but there's no such thing instead it's thanks to their plus three against buildings and
plus six against Stone defenses a shape working in a monastery I can definitely understand but at
this point it's getting a little weird for an even more extreme case petards have a wide variety of
anti-building bonuses and using this roided out sheep with 2000 HP you can see it's taking all
of it basically sheep are wrecked by everything except funny enough camel Scouts until feudal
age they don't have any bonus damage since that would mean that they're able to dominate early
Scout battles and a side effect of that is it means they need four hits in order to blame a
sheep next though let's move on to another strange but sort of related example with organ guns and
hussite wagons their extra projectiles use attack type 33 which is an armor type that nothing in
the game has remember to take anti-archer damage for example you need Archer armor and making the
projectiles use type 33 is then a bit mysterious theoretically everything should just block that
damage and that's actually what the devs were counting on with organ guns and hussite wagons
having 1000 into attack of type 33. keep in mind the default against something that isn't one of
your units types is a thousand so it's an easy way to make sure everything takes two damage
from their secondary projectiles regardless of any armor well not everything I suppose as sheep are
still going to take all one thousand and two the next one you may already know if you've watched my
previous videos and it's the unusual bonus damage that Towers take from extra arrows what's strange
is the main Arrow just as regular Pierce damage to other defensive buildings while any extra arrows
carry 5 bonus damage that means garrisoning a villager to make a tower shoot two arrows doesn't
double their attack against another Tower it does six times the damage admittedly this one isn't all
that obscure but it is a very good example to know know if you're ever in a tower War keeping with
defensive buildings let's circle back to the topic of camels where they have their own unexpected
interaction we already saw how camels were given their own class and take less bonus damage from
Spears Etc slightly less well-known is they also take a bit of bonus damage from Towers castles
and even Town centers this is a holdover from way back when ships and camels shared the same armor
class and part of making defenses stronger against ships meant camels unfortunately suffered as well
even taking extra damage from heated shot in the African Kingdom's expansion camels and ship armor
went their separate ways but presumably everyone was so used to camels taking bonus damage from
defenses that a bit of that stayed in the game though not to the same degree it's among the
reasons that camels aren't a very good rating unit compared to Knights not only do they have two less
Pierce armor but there's a bunch of defensive buildings doing a bit of secret bonus damage
against them as well now that said it wasn't just camels that got hurt by the shared unit type less
with though ships have also picked up a few X extra counters in that Arrangement namely
spear units camels but even Eagle Warriors and genoese crossbows have some bonuses passed over
to ships as well they tend to be less than their anti-cavalry bonuses and in the same ballpark as
their bonuses against camels it seems unlikely to me that these would have been included in
the game if not for camels and ships sharing an armor class for so long and at this point it's
just a feature of the game unexpected interactions between Land and Sea units don't stop there though
with Canon galleons in addition to massive bonus damage against buildings and high base attack they
have an extra plus 15 against infantry Cavalry and archers as well as an extra plus 4 against
mamelukes that I mentioned earlier or who knows what reason now this seems pretty odd on the face
of it and I assume they wanted to just give them 50 melee attack instead of 35 but that made them
too good against other ships the compromise seems to have been that they gave them lower base attack
but then just brought them up against basically everything on land jumping back to land when it's
easy to overlook is that gunpowder units have an obscure plus 4 extra damage taken from the winged
Hazard whereas the regular Hazard has no bonus damage against them this is just a little extra
thing for lithuanians and poles that can catch an opponent off guard and in fact bonuses against
gunpowder units are incredibly rare with the condo tarot being the only other example in the game in
the reverse hand cannoneers and slingers have a strange bonus of their own where they do plus
10 against infantry but an extra plus one against the spear line in particular just for good measure
in fact Spirit units take extra damage from just about every type of Archer as well as skirmishers
genitour Cavalry archers with even more after parthian tactics as well as Stone defenses it's
actually kind of rough out there being a spear unit and they have to feel at times like the whole
world's out to get them in a similar vein Eagle Warriors also have a pretty rough go of things
taking plus one from pretty much every infantry unit including spearmint as good as the Eagle's
stats may look side by side with another infantry often the deck is subtly stacked against them
but now let's look at a couple of examples for Siege which we haven't really talked about too
much yet the first one we'll look at is Rams who take a very unexpected bonus from conquistadors of
all things remember bonus damage is independent of Pierce armor so you're getting decent guaranteed
damage with every shot presumably this is to make up for their slow reload time as they would
otherwise take a long time to bring down ramps which would also explain why hand cannonneers have
their own secret plus 2 bonus damage against them as well scorpions also have slight bonus damage
against Rams on top of doing zero melee damage meaning they get the same benefit of the Ram's
negative melee armor similar to the chu ko nu another similar situation where zero bonus damage
ends up being very helpful is the step Lancer which has a secret plus zero against siege that
doesn't help against ramps but ballista elephants have negative two Siege armor so it's just an
unexpected extra 2 damage that step Lancers do to ballista elephants in particular your guess
is as good as mine why they would add this bonus to step Lancers solely to help in that one matchup
another interesting siege unit is the petard we already saw all the bonus damage they do to sheep
thanks to several different bonuses stacking but that also leads to some implications about
what they should Target they start with plus 500 against buildings add another 100 against castles
and another 900 against walls and Gates that's why despite having triple the HP petards are about as
good at breaking through stonewalls as they are house walls in contrast the heavy demolition ship
only has plus 280 against buildings so even with an entire boatload of explosives they do about
half as much damage to docks as petards but now we'll end on my personal favorite obscure bonus
damage which is for a unit you may not even notice in the game called The Ninja now this
is just a scenario editor unit so you won't run into it very often but it has a very specific
bonus there's actually a special armor type called class 36 that is only used on kings
queens and heroes the ninja is completely unique for having a plus 9 Bonus against
that class personally I think it should have been plus 2 000 for a guaranteed insta kill but I still
think it's a cool Easter egg so that's been a list of some of my favorite obscure bonuses with
a few more practical ones sprinkled in as well thanks for watching and I'll see you next time