Hey guys, Spirit of the Law here. In this video, I'm gonna take a quick look at the Tatar civ bonus,
giving them an extra 25% damage when firing from higher elevation.
It's been a long time since I looked at the effect of elevation and cliffs,
and is this bonus really double an already strong effect?
Doing a quick check of how the 25% damage is calculated normally,
I have an outpost with no armor, and a unit with a hundred attack.
You can see it's doing 25% more than usual.
With another unit with 20 attack against a building with 7 armor;
it's easy to work out it's doing 16.25 damage over time.
Right away that tells us a few things.
Not only do buildings keep track of hit point decimals and round down when it's shown to you,
but more technically, it works by doing all of the armor subtractions first,
and then the bonus damage is applied as a multiplier at the end.
That being said, if the unit's attack is completely negated,
it does the minimum damage of 1 without the hill bonus.
So what I want to know now is how is that different for the Tatars?
Repeating the 100 attack test, you can see it does 150 damage.
That means it's a 50% combined increase, and not just multiplying by 1.25 twice.
Technically, there is a distinction, and I can't be the only one
that immediately wondered about that when I saw the bonus.
But what about bonus damage? In this example,
a Spearman with 3 attack and 15 bonus against cavalry is doing 24 damage,
meaning the bonus damage is being enhanced as well.
Now firing down cliffs also adds 25% to attack,
though it's worth knowing that doesn't stack with elevation.
The civ bonus mentions only elevation, and not cliffs, but it turns out it works for them, too.
Basically, if you're firing from behind a cliff, you don't have to think about elevation at all.
Before you ask, the Tatar bonus even applies to boats,
with an extra 50% damage, on top of already having +8 against buildings.
I know that's kind of obscure, but this guy said I left it out in my last video I made about cliffs, so, it's for him.
So that's all the underlying technical stuff, but I thought it might be helpful
to see what it looks like when applied to units with some normal stats.
To start with, remember that units firing down hill do 25% more damage;
but also the unit firing uphill does 25% less.
Mathematically speaking, the uphill unit should end with about 40% of its HP remaining,
and that's roughly what we get in practice.
On the other hand, for Tatars you can see they end with about 50% of their HP left,
which is not super impressive when we compare it to the regular 40%.
If you're wondering why it's such a small improvement,
remember they're not getting double the normal effect of a hill bonus;
because while the attack from the hill is twice as large, the damage negation part of the bonus isn't double.
Likewise in large battles with balanced armies, you should end with an easy victory
and it's a noticeable improvement over not having the bonus.
But again, it's not twice as good. Which is especially evident
when testing Crossbows against Elite Skirmishers.
On flat ground these Skirmishers normally win with 80% of their HP left,
whereas when they're fighting uphill against a generic civilization,
they end with 62%, which is about the same as against Tatars.
Now that being said, every once in a while a small change to the numbers can just happen to work out
so you get a big difference in the result. Cavalry Archers, for example,
normally take out fully upgraded Knights in 30 shots.
For generic civilizations up on a hill, that changes to 24.
With a group of 10 Cavalry Archers, that means three rounds of firing either way.
On the other hand, with Tatars, their extra hill bonus suddenly means that it only takes
20 shots to bring down a Knight. The same group of 10 cavalry archers
can now take out Knights in two rounds of firing, instead of three.
That's obviously a very specific example, but I think it shows why it's hard
to generalize how strong something like this is in practice.
Another example of where this bonus can help a lot is with their Trebuchets,
which also have a unique tech for +1 range.
Like all units, Trebuchets benefit from elevation bonus, and even more so when it's a Tatar Trebuchet.
At the end of the day, it's an interesting bonus that's gonna make hill advantages
just that much more important when playing the Tatars.
But I wouldn't actually say it's overpowered. Many times the damage negation of hills
is doing just as much work as the extra attack, and at least on paper, it's not double the normal bonus.
That's all for this one though. Thanks for watching guys, and I'll see you next time.