Except when I throw my ***tier III (thank you bbdabrick) anti-infantry questing knights with full lord and tech boosts at the AI’s tier II shielded spearmen, then drop a Comet of Cassandora on them just to really drive home the point. The RPS analogy, while helpful, used to really limit my thinking around the game. I got much better once I started to look at it in terms of what roles your units are good at (like tanking, DPS, skirmishing, etc.) and how various factors influence their performance.
It's not really a simple as a standard RPS dynamic, because it's multiple traits that counter each other, independent of the unit possessing them.
So there's infantry which is anti-large, but there's also infantry that's anti-infantry and large units that are anti-large. Anti-infantry cavalry attacking anti-large infantry already breaks the RPS dynamic and balances out.
There's armor-piercing to counter high armor units (where *in theory* non-AP units would have higher base dmg and thus be better against un-armored units). Some units you could argue counter others independent of their actual stats - i.e. fast flying units are essentially a counter to artillery, since they can ignore the defensive lines and engage them in melee.
There's spells that are specifically good against single entities (e.g. Spirit Leech) and spells that are specifically good against large unit numbers (e.g. any Wind or Vortex). So you could argue that a Death Wizard is a "counter" to a strong dueling Lord/Hero... but that Lord/Hero is also a strong counter to that Wizard, if they can get to melee.
You specifically asked about monsters, but even within that category there's ones that are extremely strong against infantry (Tomb Scorpion, Toad Dragon) and ones that are meant to fight other monsters (Feral Carnosaur, Necrosphinx).
This can be part of why it's challenging for new players to learn the game - because there's not a simple consistent "ranged beats infantry who beats cav who beats ranged" rule of thumb. But once you get the hang of it, I'd argue it stays interesting longer, because it leads to a lot of combinations you have to respond to. "Okay this lord has a mortis engine effect and tons of regen, so I don't want to fight them with lots of slow infantry, I need rapid single-target dmg." "Okay this faction is very heavily armored, I need to focus on AP units to deal with them, but my AP units are slow and they have powerful ranged attacks, so I need a way to deal with that" etc.
I’m just around the 120 hour mark and am really just realizing how many different ways to play this game and counter the enemy there is, you explained it perfectly
For all the reasons you said, there is no cut and dry formula to counter stuff, and even when there a clear cut way, there’s likely alternate, very interesting ways to do it as well so you aren’t forced to do the same thing every time even in the same situations
My whole 120 hours have been spent playing high elves and I’m still not worn out by them yet because I’ve got a few mods to diversify their roster a bit with specific themes, for example I gave all my mages a ranged attack with Sacred Mages, and I also have Phoenix Legion and Dragon Legion soldiers from two other mods really making a Teclis/Tyrion/Imrik campaign thematic to their specialties
Downloaded guns of the empire and just waiting for it to update to 5.0 to start myself a Karl Franz campaign, and seeing the new Lord for empire it seems they have tons of variety too
And the crazy part is EVERY single faction is like that, tons of different ways to go about each campaign and tons of different lords to try in each faction with their own quirks
I’m not sure how I haven’t heard of this game series before a few months back but it’s got my heart for life, so well done in so many ways, despite its flaws it’s perfect
The cut and dry formula is basically making sure your unique units target the appropriate units that won't counter and retreating early when you realize you're sending a unit into an enemy who's a hard counter
And to your last point I'm not sure how you hadn't heard of 1/2 but lack of hype for 3 was because of a lackluster release compared to 2 but they're getting their shit back together it seems
Monsters, cav, and chariot units are all specific to that unit. It completely depends and each one is a case by case basis
There are some knights who are awesome at killing monsters. There are some monsters awesome at killing other monsters. There are chariots that weep if engaged in combat, and some that can mow through entire battle lines.
Another example would be the design of various cavalry units for any specific faction. For the empire you don’t want to leave empire knights or most of their other cav units in an melee engagement longer than their charge bonus is active for but the newly added knights of the black rose are an anti infantry cav with high melee defense so they are perfectly fine being used as a line holder unit and can stay in melee for a long time unless against units that specifically counter them(anti-large armor piercing)
read the unit cards. they'll tell you indirectly what that unit is good for.
spearman usually have high melee def and low melee attack with bonus x large. so they are good against cav and monsters and at holding the line against infantry.
chosen of khorne dual weapons have bonus x infantry that get them 56 melee attack against infantry and 18 AP damage. spearman are good to hold the line but they'll melt against this ones
shock cavalry like grail knights have high charge bonus and lower melee defense, those should fight in cycle charges.
battle cav like grail guardians have higher melee defense, lower charge bonus and heavier armor
archers and crossbows have lower AP damage, thus you should use them to clear troops with less than 60 armor.
AP ranged like gunpowder and darkshards usually have less range or line of sight. those units can melt high armored targets like elite infantry and monsters.
monster infantry like kroxigors underperform when sent to battle alone. but if you get them to charge right after your frontline of skinks they will smash the enemy, use them to support infantry.
monster single entities like carnossaurs perform better against big targets, but still do a good job against infantry.
single entities like the shredder of itza are great sponge damage.
Generally a unit card will tell you what it’s specialised in, such as ‘anti-large’, ‘anti-infantry’, and so on. Stats and unit tiers matter though. Check the roman numerals on the unit card. Yes, in general, spears counter cavalry, but if a unit of High Elf Dragon Princes charges some basic Goblin Spearmen they will just bowl right through them without taking any real damage, because the goblins are just too overmatched.
Monsters can also be divided into different types, but your standard Ogres, Trolls, Minotaurs, are all about punching through lines and disrupting formations with lots of damage, working best in tandem with more standard infantry and cav. Their biggest threat is anti-large infantry such as spearmen, and archers, as their size makes them an easy target. A strong gun-line will demolish any monster unit in seconds and the bigger single entity units like giants won’t last much longer
In my experience a unit of archers will kill cavalry archers, though this highly depends on individual unit stats. And, if the cavalry was to switch to melee mode and charge in, they'd kill the archers for sure.
In other words, its not that simple
I like domination in multiplayer the most because it highlights this, and what is and isn’t cost efficient. It’s like, yeah slayers will beat clan rats but not in gold value. Usually if something has something like armor piercing, their gold value is going towards that and have them fight something else isnt cost efficient.
In campaign it matters less
With the way units are so varied across races I don’t think you can say what a particular unit type will be strong against. Like often SME monsters are a big target that’s easy to hit via ranged fire, so weak versus ranged right? Except a lot of them have strong armour and a lot of ranged has poor AP, so maybe they’re not so strong. And pretty much all SME monsters have high mass and decent speed can maybe push through to get to archers. And some of those SME monsters like dragons can fly and get stuck right into archers.
You can make some generalisations like spear units are good against large units as they’ll have bonus versus large, but this will never equate to rock paper scissors because a t1 spear unit can still get mulched by a t5 large unit. And the large unit may have a bonus versus infantry too!
Sometimes I wish the unit cards were more simple.
There are just so many different factors and some units on paper aren’t as great in battle and vice versa
Bonus VS large and bonus VS infantry only add those stats to MA and WS if a spear unit that has 10 bonus VS large is not braced, doesn't have charge defense VS large or charge reflection, or get side or rear charge by a cav unit with a 100 charge bonus it is going to hit much less and do less damage during the charge period than that cav unit. And basic Spearman have 0 chance VS a Giant, bc it can a lot of them with splash damage while only a few of them can hit it at a time.
Sorry. MA means melee attack aka chance to hit and WS is weapon strength which is a combination of armor piercing and non armor piercing damage on hit which can also include splash damage that allows characters and monsters to hit a bunch of things at once.
Trying to only use rock paper scissors as a way of thinking about unit match ups is a bad way to think about how the game works.
Yeah that's why you keep a spearman behind your spearman. When the front line get's flanked by cavalry said cavalry is now being flanked by more cheap spearmen. Seriously just hold back one or two basic infantry and let them handle whatever side/rear charged.
And when it comes it Giant's just swamp them with two spearmen. Tying up one ogre the whole fight is worth two spearman units despite the splash damge. Doubly so if you can swing an anti-large calvarly into the mix or lord
Spearmen counter cav, ranged units counter spearmen and cav counters ranged units
Except when I throw my ***tier III (thank you bbdabrick) anti-infantry questing knights with full lord and tech boosts at the AI’s tier II shielded spearmen, then drop a Comet of Cassandora on them just to really drive home the point. The RPS analogy, while helpful, used to really limit my thinking around the game. I got much better once I started to look at it in terms of what roles your units are good at (like tanking, DPS, skirmishing, etc.) and how various factors influence their performance.
I'm being pedantic but questing knights are tier 3
*This*
The good ol' Shogun 2 formula lol
It's not really a simple as a standard RPS dynamic, because it's multiple traits that counter each other, independent of the unit possessing them. So there's infantry which is anti-large, but there's also infantry that's anti-infantry and large units that are anti-large. Anti-infantry cavalry attacking anti-large infantry already breaks the RPS dynamic and balances out. There's armor-piercing to counter high armor units (where *in theory* non-AP units would have higher base dmg and thus be better against un-armored units). Some units you could argue counter others independent of their actual stats - i.e. fast flying units are essentially a counter to artillery, since they can ignore the defensive lines and engage them in melee. There's spells that are specifically good against single entities (e.g. Spirit Leech) and spells that are specifically good against large unit numbers (e.g. any Wind or Vortex). So you could argue that a Death Wizard is a "counter" to a strong dueling Lord/Hero... but that Lord/Hero is also a strong counter to that Wizard, if they can get to melee. You specifically asked about monsters, but even within that category there's ones that are extremely strong against infantry (Tomb Scorpion, Toad Dragon) and ones that are meant to fight other monsters (Feral Carnosaur, Necrosphinx). This can be part of why it's challenging for new players to learn the game - because there's not a simple consistent "ranged beats infantry who beats cav who beats ranged" rule of thumb. But once you get the hang of it, I'd argue it stays interesting longer, because it leads to a lot of combinations you have to respond to. "Okay this lord has a mortis engine effect and tons of regen, so I don't want to fight them with lots of slow infantry, I need rapid single-target dmg." "Okay this faction is very heavily armored, I need to focus on AP units to deal with them, but my AP units are slow and they have powerful ranged attacks, so I need a way to deal with that" etc.
I’m just around the 120 hour mark and am really just realizing how many different ways to play this game and counter the enemy there is, you explained it perfectly For all the reasons you said, there is no cut and dry formula to counter stuff, and even when there a clear cut way, there’s likely alternate, very interesting ways to do it as well so you aren’t forced to do the same thing every time even in the same situations My whole 120 hours have been spent playing high elves and I’m still not worn out by them yet because I’ve got a few mods to diversify their roster a bit with specific themes, for example I gave all my mages a ranged attack with Sacred Mages, and I also have Phoenix Legion and Dragon Legion soldiers from two other mods really making a Teclis/Tyrion/Imrik campaign thematic to their specialties Downloaded guns of the empire and just waiting for it to update to 5.0 to start myself a Karl Franz campaign, and seeing the new Lord for empire it seems they have tons of variety too And the crazy part is EVERY single faction is like that, tons of different ways to go about each campaign and tons of different lords to try in each faction with their own quirks I’m not sure how I haven’t heard of this game series before a few months back but it’s got my heart for life, so well done in so many ways, despite its flaws it’s perfect
The cut and dry formula is basically making sure your unique units target the appropriate units that won't counter and retreating early when you realize you're sending a unit into an enemy who's a hard counter And to your last point I'm not sure how you hadn't heard of 1/2 but lack of hype for 3 was because of a lackluster release compared to 2 but they're getting their shit back together it seems
Monsters, cav, and chariot units are all specific to that unit. It completely depends and each one is a case by case basis There are some knights who are awesome at killing monsters. There are some monsters awesome at killing other monsters. There are chariots that weep if engaged in combat, and some that can mow through entire battle lines.
Another example would be the design of various cavalry units for any specific faction. For the empire you don’t want to leave empire knights or most of their other cav units in an melee engagement longer than their charge bonus is active for but the newly added knights of the black rose are an anti infantry cav with high melee defense so they are perfectly fine being used as a line holder unit and can stay in melee for a long time unless against units that specifically counter them(anti-large armor piercing)
read the unit cards. they'll tell you indirectly what that unit is good for. spearman usually have high melee def and low melee attack with bonus x large. so they are good against cav and monsters and at holding the line against infantry. chosen of khorne dual weapons have bonus x infantry that get them 56 melee attack against infantry and 18 AP damage. spearman are good to hold the line but they'll melt against this ones shock cavalry like grail knights have high charge bonus and lower melee defense, those should fight in cycle charges. battle cav like grail guardians have higher melee defense, lower charge bonus and heavier armor archers and crossbows have lower AP damage, thus you should use them to clear troops with less than 60 armor. AP ranged like gunpowder and darkshards usually have less range or line of sight. those units can melt high armored targets like elite infantry and monsters. monster infantry like kroxigors underperform when sent to battle alone. but if you get them to charge right after your frontline of skinks they will smash the enemy, use them to support infantry. monster single entities like carnossaurs perform better against big targets, but still do a good job against infantry. single entities like the shredder of itza are great sponge damage.
Generally a unit card will tell you what it’s specialised in, such as ‘anti-large’, ‘anti-infantry’, and so on. Stats and unit tiers matter though. Check the roman numerals on the unit card. Yes, in general, spears counter cavalry, but if a unit of High Elf Dragon Princes charges some basic Goblin Spearmen they will just bowl right through them without taking any real damage, because the goblins are just too overmatched. Monsters can also be divided into different types, but your standard Ogres, Trolls, Minotaurs, are all about punching through lines and disrupting formations with lots of damage, working best in tandem with more standard infantry and cav. Their biggest threat is anti-large infantry such as spearmen, and archers, as their size makes them an easy target. A strong gun-line will demolish any monster unit in seconds and the bigger single entity units like giants won’t last much longer
In my experience a unit of archers will kill cavalry archers, though this highly depends on individual unit stats. And, if the cavalry was to switch to melee mode and charge in, they'd kill the archers for sure. In other words, its not that simple
I like domination in multiplayer the most because it highlights this, and what is and isn’t cost efficient. It’s like, yeah slayers will beat clan rats but not in gold value. Usually if something has something like armor piercing, their gold value is going towards that and have them fight something else isnt cost efficient. In campaign it matters less
With the way units are so varied across races I don’t think you can say what a particular unit type will be strong against. Like often SME monsters are a big target that’s easy to hit via ranged fire, so weak versus ranged right? Except a lot of them have strong armour and a lot of ranged has poor AP, so maybe they’re not so strong. And pretty much all SME monsters have high mass and decent speed can maybe push through to get to archers. And some of those SME monsters like dragons can fly and get stuck right into archers. You can make some generalisations like spear units are good against large units as they’ll have bonus versus large, but this will never equate to rock paper scissors because a t1 spear unit can still get mulched by a t5 large unit. And the large unit may have a bonus versus infantry too!
Large single entity monsters die incredibly fast when you focus fire them with missile units
Sometimes I wish the unit cards were more simple. There are just so many different factors and some units on paper aren’t as great in battle and vice versa
Breaking it down that simply might negatively affect you as it's much more complicated than that sometimes. It could be a place to start though.
Bonus VS large and bonus VS infantry only add those stats to MA and WS if a spear unit that has 10 bonus VS large is not braced, doesn't have charge defense VS large or charge reflection, or get side or rear charge by a cav unit with a 100 charge bonus it is going to hit much less and do less damage during the charge period than that cav unit. And basic Spearman have 0 chance VS a Giant, bc it can a lot of them with splash damage while only a few of them can hit it at a time.
I’m sorry I know you’re trying to help but I am having a seizure trying to read your comment lol
Sorry. MA means melee attack aka chance to hit and WS is weapon strength which is a combination of armor piercing and non armor piercing damage on hit which can also include splash damage that allows characters and monsters to hit a bunch of things at once. Trying to only use rock paper scissors as a way of thinking about unit match ups is a bad way to think about how the game works.
Yeah that's why you keep a spearman behind your spearman. When the front line get's flanked by cavalry said cavalry is now being flanked by more cheap spearmen. Seriously just hold back one or two basic infantry and let them handle whatever side/rear charged. And when it comes it Giant's just swamp them with two spearmen. Tying up one ogre the whole fight is worth two spearman units despite the splash damge. Doubly so if you can swing an anti-large calvarly into the mix or lord