RANGED ATTACKS! - Secret Stats Warhammer 2

missiles and artillery integral parts of many of warhammer 2's armies we're going to look at exactly how these ranged attacks work in terms of damage range and accuracy as well as uncovering a few pretty nifty secrets that may actually change the way you use your missiles and artillery so let us begin so as you probably know there's lots of different types of missile units and artillery in the game we've got bow type units like these crossbows here these tend to have a high arc of firing and can fire over infantry hills walls but at the expense that arrows move quite slowly and then we have gunpowder type weapons like these hand gunners here and they fire bullets which have a low trajectory and can have trouble with line of sight but those bullets tend to be faster than arrows and are pretty much always armor-piercing as well you may have ranged units that are pretty explosive like these grenade outriders they'll have a decent firing arc but it'll be very short range but hey it's explosive and that hurts and then we have the same kind of thing in artillery units the mortar has a nice high trajectory but the missile travels slowly and is fairly inaccurate but it'll do a lot of damage if it does land including some explosion damage or you may have something like a cannon that functions similarly to the handgun has a low firing arc but travels fast and hits hard with armor piercing and is typically more accurate than those high firing arc units so how does the damage exactly work on all these different kinds of ranged weapons so quite simply it works the same as melee damage you can see this if you scroll over the weapon damage on your missile attack which will have a base damage and an armor-piercing damage in the case of these high elf archers that is 16 base damage which if you don't know means that's damage that can be blocked by armor it's a dice roll on how much damage you do you might do 16 base damage 9 5 2 or even 0 base damage potentially with a higher chance of blocking more damage if a unit has a lot of armor on and then you have the armor piercing damage which cannot be blocked no matter how much armor you've got so with every shot that lands on a model it will do at least three damage guaranteed from a high elf archer meaning that every shot fired from a high elf archer can do potentially 19 damage to any model it hits times that by the amount of elves in a unit which is 68 on large unit sizes meaning high off archers can do 1292 damage potentially per volley but that is basically impossible because that would mean that you hit 16 base damage every single time no missile misses a target and they don't get blocked by shields which is pretty much impossible but that's how missile damage works right that's how all missile units hand gunners bows artillery units as well they all have base damage and ap damage that works exactly the same as melee damage so that's fine you have a basic understanding of how missile damage works right that's no secret though you can see that on the unit card but what about that explosive damage that you'll see sometimes if you scroll over missile strength base explosive damage armor-piercing explosive damage you'll see this on a lot of different kinds of artillery the mortar the hellstorm rocket battery the hell cannon the screaming skull catapult flame cannons for the dwarfs and on some infantry and cavalry units like those grenade outriders deck hand bombers miners with blasting charges all these units have explosive damage which works like this explosive projectile comes in hits the ground explodes and then we have two circles an innermost circle around the explosion this is where maximum damage of the projectile is done anything caught in here is going to feel the full force of the projectile so if a mortar round does 200 damage anyone caught in that circle is going to take 200 damage each the damage isn't split like splash attacks everybody in that circle has taken 200 damage but it's not only those in that circle that take damage anyone outside of it in a certain radius will also take damage but it'll be more damage that they take the closer they are to that inner circle if they're on the edge of this second circle they won't take as much damage as someone right next to the inner circle but both will take less than somebody stuck in that inner circle so basically anyone in that inner circle is probably dead and anything in close proximity to the blast is gonna take a little bit of damage to some degree so that's how explosive damage works and of course there's basin armor piercing damage on that explosion so performance can vary between different types of artillery now for another factor coming into effect on a lot of projectiles is penetration cap how many models can a particular projectile go through dependent on the size of the entity it hits infantry cavalry monsters etc the larger a model is the harder it is for the projectile to penetrate through it come out the other side and hit another model this mostly just affects artillery let's take cannons for example as you probably know cannonballs are very large very heavy and hit very hard so naturally they have absolutely no problem penetrating through a good bunch of human-sized models cannonballs can even bounce once they've hit the ground to keep going to hit a few more as well so they can fly through infantry no problem they can penetrate that unit easy so safe to say the penetration cap is quite high on infantry but what about a big old cannonball again going through trolls this time how many trolls can it penetrate before it gets stopped one two three and on the fourth you see it bounces off the troll because it can't penetrate any more models four is the maximum for maybe monstrous infantry sized units we got one troll down there this second one got hit but didn't get knocked down he still would have taken the damage this one went down and then this one went down and went flying backwards but it stopped at this one as we can see the cannonball bounced off that troll so you can probably imagine what happens when you shoot something even larger like a giant the cannonball simply bounces straight off after one hit so it's not going to go through the giant and come out the other side and hit somebody else because that would be a pretty ridiculous cannonball although it has done enough to knock this giant to the ground the poor fella so penetration cap is there it's going to affect different artillery units in different ways and is mostly affecting those low fire arc type units now the cannonball comes in again hits the giant right in the ass this time bounces off and apparently causes rectal bleeding jesus christ just to do the same thing with the hell blaster volley gun here which is obviously not quite as powerful as a missile as the cannon comes in high numbers instead though these will penetrate infantry well enough but when it comes to anything larger cavalry or above they simply bounce off you see a projectile come in here bounces off the first ball that it hits so the penetration cap for shooting cavalry is one for a hellblaster volley gun which also means they won't be able to penetrate anything larger most likely like trolls or a giant for the most part though this doesn't really affect us and you don't really need to change your targets or anything depending on the penetration cap artillery will usually do good work at whatever it shoots at and of course on missile infantry like normal sized arrows and handgunner bullets those aren't penetrating anybody no arrow is gonna go through one man and into a second one is it now that would be a little bit ridiculous so penetration cap is there but it's not something that greatly affects us but it will affect how much damage we might potentially do so that's damage anyway let's move on now to the intricacies of range as you know all missile units and artillery have a little cone of vision like this where when anything walks inside it they'll be able to shoot at it but this little cone harbors a deep dark secret that may actually affect how you choose to use your missile units so what exactly is going on with that cone of vision well here we have some empire handgunners and every individual man will have a little cone of vision that looks like this you notice the cone is narrower towards the unit and as it moves away it gets wider and then at a certain point it gets even wider for some reason this reason is a stat called calibration distance this is the point in your missile or artillery units range where their chance to hit steeply declines naturally when you shoot at something it's easier to hit it when it's closer to you so distance is always going to apply a penalty to your accuracy and your chance to hit but that penalty is far greater after your unit's calibration distance so in this case for hand gunners their max range is 145 and their calibration distance is 100 so after around 100 of range they're going to start missing a lot more than they do below 100. the other part of this is calibration area this is the predicted target area where your missile will land potentially hitting a target and like i just mentioned closer to you at around 50 range you're gonna have a much smaller calibration area meaning a higher chance of landing a shot that will increase in size as you get further away up to around the calibration distance where you'll still get a reasonable target area but if we're to shoot at something right at the edge of our range in the case of these handguns at 145 we'll see the target area is considerably larger meaning a much greater chance of missing now this is just a rough illustration this isn't exact or anything but you get the idea when you're right at the edge of your range you're gonna miss a lot compared to when you're around or below your calibration distance and the closer you are to whatever you're shooting the more hits you're gonna land so if something is stood point blank right in front of you you're gonna land most of your shots make sense here's some of your favorite missile units their max ranges and calibration distances hand gunners weigh watchers sisters of avalon gezelles deck gunners dark shards and chameleon skates these are all their max ranges that we can see on the unit card here's what we can't see though the calibration distance when the unit starts shooting something past these numbers the calibration distances they start to miss a lot more than when they're below it most of these seem to sit around 55 to 65 percent of their max range some of them are better though the dark shards as you can see 90 of 125 so their target area will stay relatively good for most of their range whereas all the other ones will be digging shots all over the place for about the last third of their range and we can actually see this in action in game if you grab an artillery hold down alt so you can manually choose where to aim the artillery you'll see a circle appear this is the rough target area of where our projectiles will land watch what happens as we get further away though the circle gets bigger this is everything we just talked about in action you can see the target area gets much much bigger the farther away we get from that mortar so the closer we are the smaller the area is increasing our chance of hitting like here whereas if we move it away we'll see it get bigger and bigger and bigger and then it is subtle but you can see that it gets a little bit bigger faster as you get towards the end of the range and if you sit there and watch where the projectiles land depending on how big the circle is you'll notice that they land pretty much in the area where shown they don't land necessarily completely inside the circle just around that area they're not perfectly accurate but you get the idea of what's happening here when you shoot at things right at the edge of your range you're gonna miss way more than if you're considerably closer this goes for artillery and missiles let's put it to the test then here i've got three units of skaven gezelles shooting at chaos warriors with great weapons this first unit is but about 20 meters in front of the gezels so easy pickings for them this second unit is around at the calibration distance of the jezels roughly around the 150 and then the last unit is right at the edge of the gezel's range this is where in theory you will miss a lot more than you do at around half of the range so let's see what happens we're going to let them fire and check every few volleys to see how things are going first volley comes off we'll wait till everyone's finished firing the close unit not really missing any shots here at all maybe landing all of them there's the first volley done about now let's see how much damage they've done this unit down to 7 100 health the second unit down to 7 200 health and the farthest away unit still at 7 300 health so only about 100 health in it but it's staying true to what we should expect second volley coming in now let's get a few volleys off there's one more two more one more three let's let him finish there we go okay let's have a look now so three more volleys this is four volleys in total 200 for the close unit so they're hitting them well 5 400 for the middle unit and 5 800 for the farthest away unit so that gap is getting bigger with the more volleys let's do a few more one volley there two three more four one more five more volleys let's have a look at the damage now the health bars are looking quite different the closest unit has 2 300 health left the middle unit has 3 300 health left so that's a thousand different and the farthest away unit still has 4 000 health so that is quite substantial there's a lot of ammo being wasted shooting at this farthest away unit nearly 2 000 damage worth of missed shots so what can we learn from this well the obvious answer is stop shooting at things that are right at the edge of your range however is that a good idea because then you don't get so much time to fire but there it is it's up to you what you do with that information i think if it's a really expensive unit like jezebels or sisters of avalon or weigh watchers trying to get that little bit closer so you miss less is probably a good idea because that ammo is worth a lot because it's powerful if it's just a crappy unit of goblin archers it probably doesn't matter so much but up to you one of the simplest ways to make use of this could be to take your powerful missile units shooting at important enemy targets and just try to move them closer sometimes even if it's only 20 or 30 meters that could help you be way more accurate at landing hits on your target albeit at the risk of safety of course now to another couple of stats that affect all this calibration malarkey accuracy and marksmanship bonus let's start with accuracy which is often misconstrued and misunderstood accuracy is not a step that determines how accurate a unit really is that is mostly calibration distance and calibration area those two numbers determine how far and how accurate units are over their given distances what accuracy does is it modifies those two base values calibration area and calibration distance effectively improving them and basically just making that little area smaller so you're more likely to hit your target through each point of the calibration all the way up to your max range we can see this in action in game as well the dwarf master engineer he has an ability ballistics calibration which increases accuracy and reload skill reload skill simply makes them reload faster and accuracy will make their target area smaller as we can once again see by holding alt on an artillery so here we have a couple of dwarf cannons this one is currently being buffed by ballistics calibration and if we look at the target area by holding alt we'll see it's very small and as we move further and further away it still stays pretty damn small because that accuracy is up the calibration distance in the calibration area have been changed to give it a much better accuracy and if you look at the normal one well you can see the difference the circle is absolutely huge this is the normal canon versus a master engineer buffed cannon so this is what accuracy skill does it changes those two values it's not the single step that determines how accurate a unit is accuracy is just a property of the two calibrations and the same thing happens if we add chevrons onto ranged units every chevron adds three points of accuracy to a ranged unit so we'll see the same thing happening that we just saw happen with the dwarf cannons these are empire mortars one is fully upgraded to rank nine you can see the circle is really small up close but that's going to be the case on both of them so target area is nice and small up close as you would expect better accuracy the closer something is but as we move away when we look at the triple gold chevron version that circle is still tiny even a good distance away whereas the unchevron mortar has a much bigger zone as we can see there so the same thing is happening the target area gets smaller overall with the more accuracy we add on whether that's with abilities whether that's with chevrons ultimately increasing our chance of landing shots with our chosen ranged units so that's what accuracy does marksmanship bonus basically does the same sort of thing it's accuracy again but it's inherent to the weapon that's being used a bow a musket a cannon the different weapons have their own different accuracies rather than the accuracy of the unit itself so it's just another factor in the calculation on how small this little target area is honestly it's even more complicated than this there's a whole bunch of other stats that go into it i don't fully understand it by any means but all we need to know is that accuracy makes the target area smaller simple or is it i got to wondering whether this accuracy improvement really does make a difference having that much smaller target area so i did some testing in the only way i know how by blowing up some dwarfs so i've got two empire mortars here one completely unranked just a normal mortar and one triple gold chevron up we're gonna blow up some dwarfs until these dwarfs reach us and see which one can do more damage first volley's coming in the rank nine mortar lands his first few shots on the right unranked on the left pretty similar performance on the first volley but let's fast forward this could take a while with their tiny legs this is against the ai so they're kind of trying to dodge it but both units are doing that so it's kind of fair i guess i'm gonna run this a bunch of times as well but we'll see how it ends up on this first run okay we're out of volleys now i think let's have a look at who did more damage so we got 2400 left for the dwarfs being shot by the ranked up mortar and 2 700 for the ones being shot by the unranked mortar so only a small difference in performance a few hundred health i ran this three or four times to see the difference and this is another run you can see they're both taking a fair amount of damage so far even though the ranked up mortar's target area is going to be much smaller there didn't seem to be a great deal of difference in performance maybe this is just mortars being massively inaccurate generally but the unranked mortars target here down to 800 health while the ranked up targets down to 1600 health so the normal mortar performing better in this case one more time then in this one the rank 9 mortar manages to break its units quite early but this last volley's coming in for the unranked one here and it does more damage again 1200 left for the one being shot by the fancy mortar and only a thousand health left for the dwarfs being shot by the unranked mortar so it seems really hard to get conclusive evidence that that smaller target area is really making a big difference so i thought maybe it's just the inaccuracy of mortars let's try it with something really accurate good old jezebels let's have them shoot some unshielded dwarf warriors and see which one can do more damage again i ran this test a bunch of times i'm just going to show you this one though you may notice that the ranked up gels are firing a bit faster they actually get off one more volley than the unranked version as well i think they get nine volleys to the eight volleys of the normal one so they get one extra volley over the unranked version yet still they weren't able to do any more damage really than the unranked version we'll give them one more volley here ranked up ones with their last volley unranked with their last volley and we'll pause and let's look at the health the dwarves on the right shot by the ranked up gezeles down to 1800 health and the dwarfs on the left shot by the unranked gezel's 1800 health even with an extra volley so it's hard to really say whether that accuracy from the chevrons is worth it but this is a subject that will probably require some deeper investigation in testing but i for one am skeptical of putting the money on chevrons to increase accuracy because i haven't really seen any great gains in performance it still seems pretty hit or miss pun intended shields let's talk about shields as you may or may not know a bronze shield on a unit blocks 35 percent of missiles potentially and a silver shield will block 55 percent of missiles potentially this means if you shoot at these units with your missiles there's a good chance you're gonna be wasting a lot of ammo but what angle of protection does the shield provide and what kind of projectiles can it block can it block a cannonball can it block an arrow can it block a magic missile let's start with the angle shields will block 120 degrees in front of the wielder giving them protection from the front and the kind of front sides so if you shoot at shielded units from these angles you will likely have your missiles blocked but if you shoot them from directly behind from the perpendicular side or somewhere in between you will not be affected by the shield at all and all your missiles will land if they hit somebody this is why you need to be careful of who you're shooting at with your missile units especially if they're expensive units with powerful ammo if you shoot at silver shielded units from the front there's a good chance you're going to waste 60 70 maybe 80 of your ammo because 55 is gonna get blocked by missiles potentially and you're simply gonna miss so you're probably gonna waste a hell of a lot of ammo basically you'll be better finding a more vulnerable target or trying to flank around to get those missiles in the backs so that the shields don't come into play but what kinds of projectiles can be blocked by shields well it depends which category they fall into these are the main categories arrow artillery axe grenade javelin miscellaneous musket or sling every single ranged unit will be put into one of these categories affecting how their missile performs and it is these three that cannot be blocked by shields artillery grenades and miscellaneous ranged attacks artillery being mostly obvious artillery units but also some infantry units like these ushabti great bows they fire a massive arrow more like a ballista shot so good luck trying to block that with a shield also things like the skaven mortars and global deers count as artillery grenades fairly obvious anything explosive blasting charges deckhand bombers and miscellaneous is mostly magic and abilities magic missiles the arrow of course vindictive glare also breath attacks from dragons vomit attacks from throg or a river hag any kind of raged attack that doesn't really fit into any of these other categories and all the other ones should be fairly self-explanatory although some things can be a little bit weird like iron drakes are classed as a musket which seems odd but where else do you put them nevertheless it's useful to know which kinds of projectiles can be blocked by shields so you know where to use your ammo and to finish off here's a few other useful bits of miscellaneous info bonus versus large on ranged attacks how does that work quite simply it adds on damage to the ranged attack you'll see a bonus versus large number that'll be whacked onto missile strength the same way it works in melee except of course it won't affect melee attack because that doesn't come into play high ground is important for missile units as it can actually increase damage up to a certain distance making your missiles do up to 30 percent more damage with their missiles potentially so always a good idea to look for that high ground with your missiles where possible and here's a pretty cheeky little trick have you ever noticed how missile units whether it's yours shooting at the enemy or the enemy shooting at you sometimes they aim right for the very edge of the unit and only the edge of the unit for some reason so you have an entire missile unit almost firing like down an alleyway at one particular point of the enemy unit and the models at the other end of the unit are never really in any dangerous no missiles ever come their way they're all being aimed at this one edge of the unit this is all to do with what the closest target is most units not all but most are programmed to shoot at whatever the closest target is and that's every individual model here's a little test to show it so we got one unit that is completely parallel to the unit that's firing at it so the deck gunner should fire all over this unit both edges in the middle everywhere this middle unit is slightly off parallel it's a little bit of an angle to the deck gunners and then the last unit is at even more of an angle to the deck gunners what this is doing is putting forward a certain edge of the unit to make the deck gonna shoot at that particular edge as you can see happening here by all the dead phoenix guard the deck gunners are shooting this one edge that i have presented them and nowhere else in the unit this is because the gunner on the left and the gunner on the right the closest enemy model to them is on the left side of this unit that i've put forward so that's what they're aiming for whereas the parallel unit the gunner on the left his closest target model is on the right side of the phoenix card and opposite well it's vice versa and all the ones in the middle will shoot at the ones closest to them so basically every individual gunner in a unit will shoot at the closest target to them if you put an angle forward it makes them shoot at that edge but why does this really matter well because it seems to make a unit miss more you could potentially waste more of the enemy ammo by being a slight angle to them rather than parallel the parallel unit has just gone down to about 3000 health the middle slightly angled unit is at 3800 and the far more steeply angled unit is around 3400 health and by the end of the test the parallel unit is at 1 100 the middle unit is at 3 000 health and the fire unit is at around 2400 health so it seems like a little sneaky trick to slightly angle your unit off parallel to the enemy unit shooting at you will make them miss more because they'll all be shooting at one edge so this kind of angle seems to be the best parallel is where you take the most damage being face on to an enemy unit and the far one being much more steeply angled is okay but not quite as good as the middle one so you want to be slightly angled potentially to save yourself some damage so just to reiterate every individual missile model will shoot at the closest enemy model to the unit they're targeting if the unit they're shooting is parallel to them they'll all have different models closest to them meaning they spread their damage across the entire unit but if you're slightly angled it makes those forward edge units the target for every missile unit because they're the closest ones which ultimately seems to make missile units miss more when they're shooting at only one edge of a unit a pretty sneaky trick that could waste some enemy ammo so there you go some of the secrets of range attacks hopefully you found this useful you learned something you maybe didn't know before there's also some useful info on ammo in the what the [ __ ] is cp secret stat video which i will link right now i hope you've enjoyed this thanks for watching i will see you in the future

Channel: Zerkovich

Views: 162,374

Keywords: warhammer 2, total war, guide, secrets, stats, hidden, how does, work, mechanics, range, ranged attacks, missiles, artillery, guns, bombs, explosions

Id: iLukgYOcGVQ

Length: 26min 59sec (1619 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/-yaVuz-]

These should be official tutorials imo, love zerkovich's informative vids al ot