Settlers Online Combat Tactics PART TWO

SETTLERS ONLINE COMBAT TACTICS PART TWO

Hi everyone,

Today we will be looking at all the units we can build within Settlers Online and their respective characteristics. We will group them by main traits and do a brief analysis on them. Then we will see how a combination of different units can help us defeat a single (but very tough) opponent: Wild Mary.

On the next post we will try and see which allied units are effective against enemy units - and try and find some exceptions to those rules! Afterwards, on a subsequent post we will look at all enemy units present in a single adventure - and try out a few setups for a couple of camps.

There are currently 9 units that we can build in Settlers Online:

Recruit (R)

Militia (M)

Soldier (S)

Elite Soldier (ES)

Cavalry (C)

Bowman (B)

Longbowman (LB)

Crossbowman (A, X or XB, depending on the guide, we will be using XB here)

Cannoneer (K)

Unless stated otherwise, the unit will be a NORMAL UNIT, which means, it will strike AFTER First Strike Units (or FAST Units) and BEFORE Third Strike Units (or SLOW Units).

Let’s look at the characteristics of each of these units individually:

Recruit (R) Attributes HP 40 Min. damage 15 Max. damage 30 Experience 2 Accuracy 80% Value 1.25 Costs Beer (5) Bronze sword (10) Settlers (1)	Militia (M) Attributes HP 60 Min. damage 20 Max. damage 40 Experience 9 Accuracy 80% Value 3.375 Costs Beer (10) Iron sword (10) Settlers (1)	Soldier (S) Attributes HP 90 Min. damage 20 Max. damage 40 Experience 10 Accuracy 85% Value 6 Costs Beer (15) Settlers (1) Steel sword (10)
Elite Soldier (E) Attributes HP 120 Min. damage 20 Max. damage 40 Experience 20 Accuracy 90% Value 11.875 Costs Beer (50) Settlers (1) Titanium sword (10)	Cavalry (C) Attributes HP 5 Min. damage 5 Max. damage 10 Experience 8 Accuracy 80% Value 3.375 Abilities First Strike Attacks weakest target Costs Beer (30) Horse (40) Settlers (1)	Bowman (B) Attributes HP 10 Min. damage 20 Max. damage 40 Experience 3 Accuracy 80% Value 1 Abilities Towerbonus Costs Beer (10) Bow (10) Settlers (1)
Longbowman (LB) Attributes HP 10 Min. damage 30 Max. damage 60 Experience 8 Accuracy 80% Value 2.875 Abilities Towerbonus Costs Beer (20) Longbow (10) Settlers (1)	Crossbowman (XB) Attributes HP 10 Min. damage 45 Max. damage 90 Experience 20 Accuracy 80% Value 21.875 Abilities Towerbonus Costs Beer (50) Crossbow (10) Settlers (1)	Cannoneer (K) Attributes HP 60 Min. damage 60 Max. damage 120 Experience 30 Accuracy 90% Value 26.875 Abilities Last Strike Towerbonus Costs Beer (50) Cannon (10) Settlers (1)

There is also another unit, but this one cannot be neither killed nor built: the General (G).

General (G)

Attributes

• HP 1
• Min. damage 120
• Max. damage 120
• Experience 0
• Accuracy 100%

NOTE: I have found somewhere else that the General’s accuracy is actually only 80%. This doesn’t make much sense since with minimum and maximum damage being the same he will always deal 120 damage anyway. Still, and until I can verify this furthermore, I will leave it being 100% since to my understanding the wikia source is more reliable.

As far as I could find, all the various Generals have the same number of hit points and inflict the same amount of damage. The differences are that the special Generals (Veteran, Battle Hardened, Grim Reaper) travel faster both on the battlefield (which is a crucial quality for some blocks to be made possible) and coming in and out of adventures.

Also - and this is crucial information for those of you doing BLOCKS! - all the Special Generals fight twice FASTER than the Normal Generals. For this reason (and you will see it in the guides) we usually use Normal Generals when doing Blocks!

Of all the generals the Veteran General is the only one able to carry 250 troops. All others transport the usual 200 units.

There are a few things that can already be extracted from this:

• ALL SWORD units (R, M, S and ES) are NORMAL UNITS. The main difference between them is that, the more expensive the more ACCURATE they are and the more hit points they have. And, apart from Recruits, all others have the SAME inflicting DAMAGE.

• ALL MISSILE UNITS (B, LB, XB and K) have TOWER BONUS. They all have the same HP apart from K (which is 6 TIMES any of the others). Their inflicting DAMAGE steadily INCREASES from B to K. Finally K units also have the Last Strike ability.

• CAVALRY is a unit apart from all the others, being neither Missile nor Sword. It is the only one possessing the FIRST STRIKE (or FAST) ability. It also possesses another important ability which is: ATTACK THE WEAKEST UNIT. This means Cavalry will ALWAYS attack FIRST the WEAKEST TYPE of enemy units, irrespective of them being Fast, Normal or Slow units. This can be a great advantage sometimes - but not always!

• The GENERAL is also a unit apart from all others. His hit points are negligible but still he deals always some damage - which seems to be the same for all types of generals (Normal, Battle Hardened, Grim Reaper General and Veteran General).

So, in fact, we can say that there are ONLY 4 TYPES of units:

SWORD (R, M, S and ES)

CAVALRY (C)
MISSILE (B, LB, XB and K)

GENERAL (G)

If we divide them in terms of their strike order we get:

FAST UNITS	NORMAL UNITS	SLOW UNITS
C	ALL SWORD (R, M, S, ES) MISSILE (B, LB, XB) GENERAL (G)	K

Now let’s look at the example from the previous post: defeat WILD MARY.

We’ll post here this unit’s characteristics once more:

Wild Mary (DwW)

Attributes:

• HP 60000
• Min. damage 740
• Max. damage 800
• Experience 430
• Accuracy 50%

Abilities:

• First Strike
• Splash damage

We saw that simply sending 200R against her would not work.

Then what would happen if we sent 200 of any other type of units?

Here are the results:

200 R - TOTAL DEFEAT

200 M - TOTAL DEFEAT

200 S - WIN: 90 to 97 S losses

200 ES - WIN: 61 to 66 ES losses

200 C - TOTAL DEFEAT

200 B - TOTAL DEFEAT

200 LB - TOTAL DEFEAT

200 XB - TOTAL DEFEAT

200 K - WIN: 37 to 53 K losses

Thing is: we will only have ES and K very late in the game. So, it seems like we are stuck with using masses of soldiers, right?

Well... not quite.

We have 200 units available right? So why not use a combination of units? Clearly it seems that both sword units and missile units CAN do some damage on Wild Mary. So perhaps a combination of both would be best, right?

ESPECIALLY if we could send some weak units to soak up the extensive damage that Wild Mary will deliver and use te tougher units to take her down.

This is a technique we can call SHIELDING, which means you use weaker units to protect stronger units. Cannon fodder in other words.

Since we don’t have K yet, let’s see if we can use LBs instead. Let’s see if we can use a combination of R (to soak up damage) and LB (to deliver damage).

Let’s do 100R and 100LB.

Simulator says that we can’t make it this way. Total Defeat.

Let’s try 100M and 100LB

Still Total Defeat.

But what about 100S and 100LB?

Now we win!

And the losses?

Between 65 and 71 S. Which is a lot better than what we had using simply 200S.

But what if we use some R mixed with S?

Let’s try 50R and 50S along with the 100LB, what do we get?

Well, we may win this way but victory is not certain... Clearly we need more Soldiers and less Recruits.

Lets try 25R, 75S and 100LB

VICTORY!

Now, we lose 25R as well as something between 62 and 68S. Already an improvement from the previous best setup.

We can continue (and we should continue!) tweaking these numbers in order to get better and better setups.

Here’s a list of the VICTORY setups thus far as well as a couple of other suggestions:

SETUP 1: 200S - 90 to 97S losses

SETUP 2: 100 S, 100LB - 65 to 71S losses

SETUP 3: 25R, 75S, 100LB - 25R and between 62 and 68S losses

SETUP 4: 35M, 50S, 115LB - 35M and between 42 and 47S losses

SETUP 5: 27M, 58S, 115LB - 27M and between 47 and 53S losses

SETUP 6: 3R, 29M, 51S, 117LB - 3R, 35M, and between 45 and 50S losses

As you can see here, you have many possible combinations to defeat Wild Mary. What you choose is up to you, of course. But you may want to consider a combination that is cost effective. Or perhaps a combination that allows you to simply use the units you already have built. Or one that is aimed at the resources you produce or can obtain easily through trading.

In any case, and if a suggestion can be made, we would say it is always useful to plan things somewhat, to see what camps need to be taken down first and what we will need to take them down so that efficient settings can be achieved for as many camps as possible.

In the long run, it is important to save troops as much as possible, to save the resources you need to build them with. Recruits and Bowmen are cheap to build and so serve as good cannon fodder. Soldiers and Longbowman are much more expensive and as such (as a rule of thumb, so to speak), one should try to preserve them as much as possible - particularly the LBs.

In any case, how you decide to attack is, of course, entirely up to you. The idea behind these posts is not to tell you what to use in each situation but rather how to INTERPRET each situation and ADAPT to it.

On the next post we’ll look at a specific adventure, look at all the enemy units therein, at the various ways we can attack the several camps in order to complete the adventure and some possible setups for each of them.

We hope this has been useful to you!

Settlers Online Combat Tactics PART ONE

SETTLERS ONLINE COMBAT TACTICS PART ONE

There have been enough of us asking more about combat and camp composition and troop setups in the chat to justify creating this series of posts.

To be perfectly honest: I don’t know so much about the combat system myself. I use the guides, tweak them a bit with the combat simulator when needed and that’s about it.

But how does it really work? Can I do better? Or at least find an alternative solution that still works and that suit my troop limitations at the moment?

I had thought about doing some research but... never had the real motivation. Then enter Brayarg, some teasing about it (and he knows a great deal more than me) and we ended up deciding to give it a go in hopes that everyone will benefit from this.

There’s a lot of ground to cover so we’re going to break this into several posts.

For now we will start with the Basics.

THE BASICS

In this section we will examine the basics of combat within Settlers Online.

What is a round? What are the attributes of each unit? And how do these combine to form a simple attack - and expected outcome.

(following this we will look more in depth at more units and various enemy setups together with various allied combos to defeat them)

What is a Round?

A round is a combat cycle in which all units, enemy and allied participate. If, at the end of the round there are still units alive on BOTH sides, another round will begin. Rounds (combat cycles) will continue until one of the sides has lost ALL units - and thus lost the battle.

Combat Replays

When we see the replay of a combat we see that Allied units always attack first, only then having the Enemy units “respond”. This IS NOT how it actually happens.

In reality the Allied attack and the Enemy attack takes place at the same time (following the Initiative classes of the units - see below for more info). It is only displayed in this way so you can see first the damage Allied units give, followed by the damage inflicted by Enemy units.

We will make this clearer when we create a very simple attack scenario and see how it happens, stage by stage.

Unit Attributes

If you go onto the Combat Simulator you will see that a Recruit has the following Attributes (and costs):

Recruit (R)

Attributes:

• HP 40
• Min. damage 15
• Max. damage 30
• Experience 2
• Accuracy 80%
• Value 1.25

Costs:

• Beer (5)
• Bronze sword (10)
• Settlers (1)

What does each of these things mean?

HP - Hit Points or Health Points

It tells us how much damage the unit can take before it dies. The higher the HP the stronger the unit. The lower the HP the weaker the unit.

Min. Damage - Minimum Damage

This gives us the minimum amount of damage this unit can dish out. This is the least the unit will inflict IF it engages with the target.

Max. Damage - Maximum Damage

Conversely, this gives us the most damage this unit can inflict. Again, only if the unit actually connects to the target and hits it.

One note about min and max damage:

A striking unit will only give either one or the other, there are NO values in between. So a Recruit will only give either 15 hit points damage or 30 hit points damage - never 17, 20 or 25. There are only 2 values at play here.

Experience - XP

This gives you how much XP you would get from defeating the unit. This is not important with our attacking units - but it is important with enemy units if you want to know how much XP you are likely to get from a particular camp or attack.

Usually tougher units will yield more XP as they will be more difficult to kill.

Accuracy

This gives you the probability for an attack (for that unit) to give maximum damage. So, 8 times out of 10, on average, a Recruit will inflict 30 damage.

This doesn’t mean that if you were to attack 10 times, 8 times the Recruit would do 30 damage. It’s an average, something to be expected but not definite. Settlers Online mechanics are not completely rigid in this aspect in order for battle outcomes - even with exact same setups - yield slightly different outcomes pretty much every time.

Value

Is how much the unit is worth in terms of gold coins. This is not necessary to the combat itself, but it is useful if you want to use a cost effective setup to take down a particularly difficult camp. It helps give you an idea how much an adventure can cost you resource wise - and compare that to how much you can get from it.

There are two, very important things, that are not mentioned above, and those are Initiative and Abilities.

Initiative

Each unit can have one of the three types of initiative:

Fast - First Strike

Normal - Second Strike

Slow - Third Strike

Fast - First Strike

This means this type of unit, within a round, is the first (fastest) to engage in combat (to strike).

Normal - Second Strike

Normal units attack secondly, after first strike units (if they are present, on either side).

Slow - Third Strike

Slow units are the last ones to attack. They wait for First Strike units to attack, followed by Normal units, only then having their turn.

Using a combination of different types of units to respond to a particular enemy camp composition is usually the best strategy.

There are also three extra characteristics, called Abilities that each unit can possess as added to Initiative. These are:

Attack the Weakest

AC Bonus In Tower

and

Splash Damage

Let’s see how they work.

Attack the Weakest

The name says it all. A unit that has this type of Initiative characteristic will, when it’s time comes, attack whichever units are the weakest on the opposite camp. If they kill them all but still have more attacks, they will go after the next weakest unit, until their attack ends.

We will examine the consequences of this - and how to adjust accordingly - in a subsequent post.

Another characteristic that you will see on some units is AC Bonus in Tower.

AC Bonus In Tower - Armor Class Bonus In Tower

This means if the unit is inside a tower (building) during an attack, it automatically acquires DOUBLE hit points.

For allied units this does not matter (unless through PvP - player versus player attacks - only these are not implemented yet) since they will always be inside garrisons and being the ones attacking enemy buildings (camps, towers, castles, etc).

But it matters for Enemy units. In some adventures (Stealing From The Rich and Traitors if memory serves) you have a few camps that are Towers, that are needed to be destroyed in order to successfully complete the adventure. The units within, of course, will have this ability, which makes them twice as tough as normal (usually archers). This means our troop composition must account for that extra factor.

Still, if you’re not attacking a camp which is in fact a tower, you do not need to worry about any of the Enemy units having this characteristic.

Splash Damage

In regular combat when Unit A attacks Unit B, the damage Unit A inflicts may be greater than Unit B’s Hit Points. This means Unit B dies. But what happens to the excess damage?

Well, with normal units this damage is LOST.

But, in units (usually Boss Units, the toughest ones), that have SPLASH DAMAGE characteristic that will not be the case...

What will happen is that excess damage will be carried on to the next unit.

And the next.

And the next.

UNTIL either all the damage the Boss Unit could throw gets used up

OR

You run out of that type of units that are soaking the damage...

.

Splash Damage means whatever this Boss Unit throws at you will never be wasted and just keep hitting your units until the damage inflicted runs out.

COMBAT EXAMPLE01: WILD MARY

Let us imagine you are facing Wild Mary. A single, very powerful unit facing the entirety of your 200 unit strong army.

Here are her characteristics:

Wild Mary (DwW)

Attributes:

• HP 60000
• Min. damage 740
• Max. damage 800
• Experience 430
• Accuracy 50%

Abilities:

• First Strike
• Splash damage

Let us imagine we are going to put 200 Recruits facing her. What would happen?

Well, since Wild Mary has First Strike, she would be the first to attack. She would at least give 740 damage. Which means (considering each recruit has 40 Hit Points) she would take down 18 recruits, minimum, just in her first strike.

For the sake of illustrating the point we’re trying to make with this example, let’s say that every recruit always has 100% accuracy (instead of their real 80% accuracy) and that, as such, they always hit the target with maximum damage.

This means 182 recruits will do 18*30 damage, which is, 5 460 damage.

Only Wild Mary has 60 000 hit points...

First round finishes, what do we have?

182 recruits on one side (one at half health) and Wild Mary with 54 540 hit points still to use.

Second round. Same as before. She gives minimum damage - and takes 19 recruits this time (remember one was at half strength) and gets maximum damaged from the remaining 163 recruits: 4 890 damage.

So at the beginning of the third round Wild Mary still has 49 650 hit points to spare.

Well, I think you are seeing where this is going...

After 11 rounds Wild Mary will be standing and there will be no more recruits left to attack.

And because Boss Units RECOVER, next time you hit the camp, she will be there, waiting, in full health, the full 60 000 hit points all over again...

So, how do we do this? How do we defeat this seemingly impossible unit?

Well, clearly we will have to use something more than just Recruits - perhaps a combination of things? That’s just one of the things we will see in our next post about SETTLERS ONLINE COMBAT TACTICS.

We hope you’ve enjoyed it so far!