What is combat?
The Combat is the fighting skill of any unit. Combat determines how well a unit wield it's swords, lands it's fists or targets it's bite. When two or units fight in melee combat, the Combat stat decides how well the unit can land it's attacks. In melee combat the game acknowledges both units' combat and, calculating the combat difference, allows the unit with the highest combat to deal the most critical hits.
What does Combat do?
As you may or may not know, in Warlords Battlecry 3 there are three types of hit types:
- Miss: When your unit's attack gets blocked or doesn't land well, deals one quarter of the unit's damage.
- Marginal Hit: Your unit's attack hits gets parried or doesn't hit a important spot. Maybe at best it cuts an enemy's finger, dealing half of the unit's normal damage.
- Successful Hit: A successfully landed hit that deals normal damage.
- Critical Hit: A well landed, powerful hit. These hits deal double damage and cause your unit to inflict a special effect on the target. If your unit wields a mace, it will be stunned. If he wields a flaming weapon the enemy will be set on fire and so on.
- Deathblow: Your unit hit a critical spot, leaving the enemy weakened. This attack will cause a special effect, quadruple damage and your unit will scream a victorious battlecry.
Combat decides how often your unit lands these hits. The more combat your unit has the most likely it is to land more successful hits, whereas a big combat difference between your unit and his target will cause him to constantly miss his attacks.
How does Ranged Combat work?
Ranged attacks in Warlords Battlecry are different than in any other games. For example, in Warlords the missiles never follow the target. After the missile is launched, the engine doesn't care if it hits a units, the missile will just follow it's path. If the units moves, it will hit nothing, or if there is a unit in it's way it will hit that unit.
Combat for ranged units works completely different. Whereas in melee combat, the Combat stat decides how well the unit fights, in Ranged Combat the Combat stat decides if the missile hits it's target. Before the missile is launched, the game calculates the chances of the missile hitting it's target and launches it. The missile has a chance to go past the target or land around it, but that's not always a bad thing. In clustered, large armies, a missile may hit it's target or it will hit the target next to it.
When a melee unit approaches a ranged unit the combat is calculated like melee. However it is not as easy to wield a ranged weapon in melee combat and fight well with it. Ranged units loose half of their combat when fighting in close range as a penalty.
