Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: Rood

I'll try to give an explanation for all your questions which are all related.

First if you go to the Library (F1) and go to Terrain you will see a column 'Special properties' which lists which terrain type uses the 'Close defense' value when a unit is attacking another unit (not just armor) which is in such a hex.

Depending on the 'Target Type' Either the soft or hard attack value is used. And depending on the terrain in which the defending unit is either ground or close defense is used.

In regards to the screenshot.
- every unit has a initiative, intitive can be capped by weather and/or terrain (see the library again). For example a tank attacking an infantry unit inside a forest hex will not use the initiave of the tank but that of the terrain (which for forest is 2).
The difference between the initiative (the effective initiative that is so after the dice roll) will tell how many shots (percentage) the defending unit can return.
The formula is (for ground combat for air it's different) that for every point in difference 20% of the defending unit cannot shoot back.
So in this case the difference is 3, therefore 60% of the defending unit cannot shoot back. In this case the strength of the defending unit is two, 0.4 * 2 = 0.8 and the game rounds this up to 1. However if the defending unit was 10 strenght then only 4 units could shoot back. This is shown on the lower right side where it says 'Unsurpressed strenght: 1'
- The defending unit is an infantry unit so the soft attack value is used, also the defending unit is in a forest hex so the close defense is used
- When the defending unit is shooting back it also uses his soft attack value and the close defense value of the attackers.

Based on the attack and defense values a sort of combat results table (CRT) is made and then for every point of strenght of the attacking unit a die roll is made**.
The kill change is 53% and therefore the attacker needs to roll 47 or higher for a kill. As you can see there are 10 rolls made, and 6 are higher than 47 so the defending unit is totally destroyed. Then the defending unit shoots back and it needs to roll 51 or higher for a kill but it rolls 47 which results in a surpression result.

** for artillery there's another factor which is the rate of fire (RoF), basically the lower the RoF the less dice are rolled.

I hope I have explained it correctly and you can understand what I wrote.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Rood

Clear, Countryside, Airfield and Fortification use the ground defense values.
So do rivers but you don't want to attack (in most cases) from a river hex as the defending unit gets a bonus to his defense value.
The rest all use the close defense value.

Basically if it costs you more than 1 movement point to enter (except cities) than it uses close defense values.

The reason for this - and that initiative is capped - is that there's limited visibility, at least there's only short range visibility. So long range guns don't work well at all since you cannot see/target very far anyway because all kinds of obstacles (houses, trees, hills etc).

quote:

ORIGINAL: jonpfl

All,

I found this screenshot in the forum, can someone go over it step by step and explain to me?

Thx
jonpfl

quote:

edit 23 june 2013: below is the original post which may not be accurate anymore, below the quoted text is the information I've posted on the slitherine forum which should be up to date.

As to who shoots first, yes initiative does decide who shoots first.

After the effective iniative has been calculated either the attacker or defender will shoot first.

If the attacker has the highest initiative then it will shoot with his available strength, then it's calculated by using the initiative of both units and some other factors how many units (= dice rolls) of the defender shoot back.

If the defending unit has a higher initiative then it will shoot first and with it's full available (unsurpressed) strenght left. Then after the defender has fired the attacker will shoot back using the same calculation (i.e. 20% doesn't shoot back for every point in initiative the defender has more than the attacker).
You usually want to avoid this, either reduce the defenders unit's strenght and/or supress it with artillery and air attacks.

As to the dice roll that is shown. For every attack a dice roll from 0 to 3 is made. This is a random variable that is used to make the results, well, more random .

So even if you have all the factor's there's still a matter of luck/randomness involved. So even if you attack and you have a initiative of 7 and the enemey has 2 then you don't expect any losses since the enemy will not be able to return fire. However if you roll a 0 and the enemey rolls a 3 then it will defend with 60% of it's strength.

Note that this dice roll is always added last and after the other factors have been used, so for example when attacking a unit in a forest which terrain has a cap for initiative of 2 then a dice roll is made and if that is 2 for example the effective initiative will be 4, so higher than the cap.

And btw, there's still more to be said about initiative since some attacks have special rules, for example when an AT unit is attacking a tank or recon it gets a bonus to it's initiative of 3.

And I'm not sure if I have told that for every unit that you have adjacent (and has not fired yet) to the unit you are going to attack the defending unit will get a -1 penalty for it's initiative.
So when you have 3 unit's adjacent that have not fired yet and you attack with one of those units the defender will get a -2 penalty to it's initiative calculation.

Edit: wrote wrong info, it's correct now (I hope )

quote:


It is not quite like this. Initiative advantage of 4 means that 80% of damage is caused to the enemy before he has a chance to react. In this particular case your attack has caused 3 kills and 1 suppression. From these, 80% are applied upfront:
- 80% from 3 kills is 2.4 kills, rounded to 2.
- 80% from 1 suppression is 0.8 suppression, rounded to 1.

So, a total of 3 points of enemy's strength were disabled before he could shoot back. So he only responded to your attack with 7 points of strength out of 10.