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There are way too many dogs in the medium and hard camps. There are so many in fact, that bowmen and cavalry are useless. It is too expensive to build cavalry in the numbers needed to counter dogs. Therefore there is no point ever making cav or bowmen once you have cleared out the easy camps.
Either dogs need to be changed and/or most removed, or cavalry needs to be a heck of alot easier to build. until then, spam Recruits and militia. dont bother with the cav or bowmen.
Thanks for the heads up Cruizer, lets hope they look into that soon.
Actually, the dogs were designed with the sole purpose of preventing you from only building up recruits/militia without having to replenish bows or cavalry. They in essence are by design to slow you down. There is a reason for this.
If you ignore all adventures at level 26 and only destroy the camps, you will reach level 31(Source German Version) after defeating the final bandit leader Wild Mary. Now from levels 16 -20, you had to defeat 3.5/4 easy camp sectors gaining you those 4 levels. However there are only 28 camps remaining once you hit level 20 that includes the leader camps. Essentially you will find that the camps will literally lead to a 1-3 ratio to level up, with the bosses causing greatest jumps. If you only needed to focus on recruits/militia, without replenishing the other two you'd speed by much faster then the current leveling intentions.
As an aside if you look at the combat section of the wiki: Translated From German to Broken English
You can see what people use for the camps with success estimations of min/max losses.
Looking at the hard camps section, you will notice, several cases where large scale cavalry (ie ~200) are used to kill off dogs, and then a follow up army is sent in after to fight the remaining mobs/boss.
Actually I disagree with this. The dogs make recruits and militia more useful the bowmen and cavalry. Cavalry is way to expensive and time consuming to make to throwaway countering dogs. I lose less guys against large groups of dogs just using recruits and militia. Bowmen and cavalry are useless to me now.
I can see where the disagreement comes from on apparent speed and a personal level, my opinion is also derived from my own readings and doesn't make it any more correct then your own, though some may argue on the cost of one resource vs another on the expensive nature of the units which I do, the overall production rate for iron swords vs horses and bows leads to longer overall production times or larger production chain requirements. However you are not as likely to have built up your bow or cavalry compared to the bronze or iron production chains.
Total production times(cumulative resource time):: Raw materials (Source Siedler Online Wiki)
Again this is the overall time spent amongst all the materials for creation for level 1, this is the base production time not including work yard/clean up times affected by storage location/proximity to resource.
Horses : 42 minutes
Bows: 42 Minutes
Iron: 3 hours 6 minutes
Beer 24 minutes.
Resources Required:
Bow x 1 = 8 fir logs
Horses x 1 = 2 wheat, 4 water
Iron Sword x 1 = 24 fir logs, 12 coal, 4 Iron ore, 2 iron bars
1 Milita = 10 swords , 10 beer => 35 cumulative hours
1 Bowman = 10 bows, 10 beer => 11 cumulative hours
1 Cavalry = 30 beer, 40 horses => 40 cumulative hours
Costs:
Cav = 80 wheat, 160 water
Bow: 80 fir logs
Iron: 240 fir logs, 120 coal, 40 iron ore, 20 iron bars
Now, it's clear to see bows are the cheapest/fastest of the 3, however they do not have any special ability and will be rocked by dogs allowing 1 attack. Militia though slightly faster to produce eat up a large portion of a production chain used heavily by other areas. In my case cavalry comes off cheaper given that only the farm portion(of which I have a focus on in production) requires licensees, the water is a joke to account for.
The second benefit to cav also comes to their ability to attack the weak targets first. This is a major thing come hard camps when you can't attack the weak hp targets first till beating down the large number of heavy hp targets, but their weak targets go about eating up your damage dealers.
I was also appalled looking at the time it requires for cavalry. It stretches even "video game logic" as to how one dog = one horseman with slightly lower accuracy.
I agree with your calculations Silvanoshei, but now add in hit points, as cav are the first attacked by dogs. when you factor in unit survivability, they are way too pricey in terms of materials and time to build. Of course that is my opinion, cav might be a great choice. I just don't see it yet.
maybe they should either boost the hp of the cav a few points or lower their build cost instead of 30/40 make it say 15/20 or 20/30 to lower the time cost and resource cost on Cav units.. making them a better dog/cav soak then mass recruits or bowmen.. i havent even started my horse production but if they are infact useless.. whats the point of investing in 1-2 farms for horses :/
See, im not worried about the wheat and water cost to make the horses. its the long build time and the fact that they take 30 beer each.
guys one thing to keep in mind.
Cavalry and dogs have first strike. That means they will attack first. After all units that have first strike have attacked, any loses the dogs and cavalry cause will be removed.
After that all normal units get their chances to fight (assuming they are still around). Then the loses from those attacks get removed.
Then after the normal units are done, Slow units get to attack (like bandit bosses). then losses from the slow units are removed.
this big important thing to remember though is that Dogs and cavalry will attack and cause loses before any other unit gets to attack.
For those that have attacked and defeated "Skunk" or "One-Eyed Bert" you can see this in your battle replay in game. Skunk and One-Eyed Bert both have the skill "Initiative: Last Strike" making them "slow" units
yes selak. but CAV and dogs only first strike the weakest (hp) unit. if you do not take Cav/dogs in your army.. they will hit your archers as archers have the lowest hp at this time.
where as dog/cav have 5 hp... so basicly cav kill dogs and visa versa... but it makes the cav kind of wasteful do to their costs to make. i mean 200 strong army you take 50-100 cav vs 200 dogs.. and have the dogs kill all your cav :/ thats a huge chuck of your army wiped out. granted it might have saved your archers but is the cost really worth that waste?
in battles without dogs i can see cav being useful. like taking out stone throwers ect.. but against dogs.. as they counter each other its kind of pointless. thats what people are talking about 30 beer could be used to make more recruits to damage soak the dogs hits after round 1's first strike
The other thing regarding cavalry has to do with if a boss is courageous or not. Both Bert and Skunk are not so they hang back, and you defeat their minions first. However when a boss is courageous they will attack "out front" meaning they take the damage first. Chuck, Metal toothed and Wild Mary all have this behavior, as well as many of the bosses in the adventures.
Essentially if you were to attack Wild Marys Camp as an example, you will need to do 60,000 damage before you can attack the dogs, all the while the 180 dogs will be doing 900-1800 hp damage to your units, weak units first. As both Mary and the dogs have first strike initiative, the losses that occur before your attack will not be able to cause damage.
The only way to counter this is with another unit that has First Strike initiative, which is cavalry. They will die, but they will be able to ignore the boss, and dispose of the dogs, leaving you with only Mary to deal with and her 740-800 damage attack. Again this also applies to the medium boss camps. As was also pointed out, Cavalry because of first strike, can also cause damage without incurring loss.
Example: Cavalry and Militia vs a mob with Rangers and Thugs. Only Cav is first strike, so if the cav kills all of the rangers(npc equiv of our bowmen) in their attack, they do not get to retaliate on us, as rangers cause a lot of damage the losses incurred significantly drop overall.
Hypothetical Battle vs 100 Dogs | 50 Rangers | 50 Roughneck(Ill probably redo this one with average or best case since worst case makes them all be defeats)Code:200 Cavalry
1 General
>Round 1<
200 Cavalry Kill 200 Dogs
200 Dogs Kill 200 Cavalry
Loses(All 200 Cavalry)
8000 Horses
6000 Bear
5000 Bread(200 Settlers)
-------------------------------------------------------
200 Recruits
1 General
>Round 1(Worst Case)<
200 Dogs Kill 50 Recruits
150 Recruits Kill 150 Dogs
1 General Kills 1 Dog
>Round 2(Worst Case)<
49 Dogs Kill 12 Recruits
138 Recruits Kill 49 Dogs
Loses(62 Recruits)
620 Bronze Swords
310 Beer
1550 Bread(62 Settlers)
---------------------------------------------------------
100 Recruits
100 Cavalry
1 General
>Round 1(Worst Case)<
100 Cavalry Kill 100 Dogs
100 Dogs Kill 100 Cavalry
100 Dogs Kill 25 Recruits
75 Recruits Kill 75 Dogs
1 General Kills 1 Dog
>Round 2(Worst Case)<
24 Dogs Kill 6 Recruits
69 Recruits Kill 24 Dogs
Loses(100 Cavalry / 31 Recruits)
4000 Horses
3155 Beer
310 Bronze Swords
3275 Bread(131 Settlers)
Do dog or roughnecks get hit first?
I'll Add Production Times Later When Servers Come Back Up And A Hypothetical Battle vs A Real Boss CampCode:200 Cavalry
1 General
>Round 1(Best Case)<
100 Cavalry Kill 100 Dogs
50 Calvary Kill 50 Rangers
50 Cavalry Kill 5 Roughnecks
100 Dogs Kill 100 Cavalry
45 Roughnecks Kill 45 Cavalry
1 General Kills 1 Roughneck
>Round 2(Best Case)<
55 Cavalry Kill 6 Roughnecks
38 Roughnecks Kill 38 Cavalry
1 General Kills 1 Roughneck
>Round 3(Best Case)<
17 Cavalry Kill 2 Roughnecks
17 Roughnecks Kill 17 Cavalry
1 Roughnecks Kill 1 General
1 General Kills 1 Roughneck
>35 Roughneck Remain!<
Loses(Deafet! All 200 Cavalry | 1 General )
8000 Horses
6000 Bear
5000 Bread(200 Settlers)
4 Hr Wait Time
---------------------------------------------------------
200 Recruits
>Round 1(Best Case)<
100 Dogs Kill 12 Recruits
150 Recruits Kill 50 Roughneck
38 Recruits Kill 38 Dogs
50 Roughneck Kill 25 Recruit
50 Ranger Kill 25 Recruit
1 General Kills 1 Dog
>Round 2(Best Case)<
61 Dogs Kill 7 Recruits
61 Recruits Kill 61 Dogs
70 Recruits Kill 50 Ranger
50 Ranger Kill 25 Recruit
Loses(94~ Recruits)
940 Bronze Swords
470 Beer
2350 Bread(94 Settlers)
---------------------------------------------------------
? Recruits
? Militia
---------------------------------------------------------
150 Calvary
50 Recruits
Spot on Aururah.....!!! With dogs bringing in cav in any form means generally more material losses....since dogs attack weakest first....cavs will always die
Dogs are easily taken out by Recruits. One thing to do against camps with many dogs is just send an initial army of maybe 100-150 recruits + archers. This will help thin out those pesky K9's.
not sure if you saw...but earlier i was doing some testing to see how cav and dogs attacked things. the first unit the dogs attacked was my general, shouldn't they attack everything else before the general or do they always go for the general first since the general only has 1 HP?
Again you have to approach cavalry from their beneficial abilities not just if dogs are present. Though it may be expensive to throw them up against a camp with say 180 dogs, consider the 200 ranger or similar camps where the mass population is Ranger followed by a small population of thug, Roughnecks or dogs. A flaw is you should not always use single battle assumptions alone.
Now the tactic is to use a two general assault. The first army, serves the purpose of reducing the ranks of the non-rangers. Example a small contingent of recruits or recruits/bows can generally suffice.
Lets use the medium camp with 130 Rangers, 20 thugs, and 30 dogs. Let's stick to recruits and cav alone for low cost reasoning.
Scenario 1: Recruits only 1 army:
Now you can attack this camp with an army of 200 recruits, causing on average a 2 round battle, winning with estimated losses of on average 120 recruits.
Loses:
1200 swords
600 beer
3000 bread
Scenario 2 Wave 1 recruits, Wave 2 Cav:
Lets say you go with 30 recruits 170 cav, again an avg 2 round battle, loses estimated at avg 25 recruits, 30 cav.
Loses:
250 swords
1200 horses
1025 beer
1375 bread
not bad but how about a 2 army attack?
Scenario 3:
Army 1: 30 Cav
Army 2: 16 recruits 184 Cav
Army 1 goes in, Result -30 dogs, -1 thug, loses 30 cav
Loses:
1200 horses
900 beer
750 bread
Remaining army: 130 ranger, 19 thugs
Army 2 goes in: Wins average 2 rounds, loses estimated on average 10 recruits
Loses:
100 swords
50 beer
250 bread.
Now I'm going to do something that should be taken with a grain of salt but as an example to show how the resources look at a cost value. Beer, bread and horses all use: Water and Wheat. 1 Beer = 1 Bread = 0.5 Horse
The Scenario 1 Loses:
1200 swords
3600 bread
Scenario 3:
4350 bread
100 swords
Remove swords and bread values from each scenario for equality =>
The Scenario 1 Loses:
1100 swords
Scenario 3:
750 bread
So material wise you have 750 bread to 1100 swords. Now this is not a great way as the times of bread, beer and horses are all different. However note: Brewery 1 per 24 mins < Bakery 1 per 27 mins < Horse production time is 1 per 42 mins. Where Swords is 1 per 46 mins 30 seconds. So even up converting for horses , you will recover the difference in materials faster then that over scenario 1.
There is also the nice benefit that only 10 recruits were lost instead of 120. This is why you have to be mindful of the situation and how to use the situational power of the cavalry, used effectively, they can neutralize dogs, and reduce total loses, well remaining cost effective. If you have 200 Recruits and 200 Cavalry with Scenarios 3 loses you can achieve more potential camp combat in a shorter time.
Be mindful however that other scenarios benefit using a militia/recruit first wave for minimal losses and then allow the cavalry to come in and lose none of them.
in your last scenerio with the two armies...how are you getting 30 cav taking out 30 dogs and one thug.
each cav will take out no more than one dog so 30 cav will kill 30 dogs and no more. If you add more cav, they will tak out the rangers first as rangers have less hit points than thugs. I have discovered that guard dogs (and thus cav) hit the block of troops where each unit has the lowest hitpoints. not the block of troops with the lowest combined hitpoints.
Thus cav will hit troops in this order: guard dogs -> stonethowers/rangers (not sure which is first both have same hitpoints) -> scavanger -> thug -> roughneck
As a further note, cav/dogs do 5 or 10 damage each so its on average 1 cav to kill one dog, about 1.5 cav to kill one ranger/stonethrower, about 4 cav to kill one scavanger, about 8 cav to kill one thug, and about 12 cav to kill one roughneck as good ballpark figures.
Now for the real kicker that i have verified atleast 2 times in game since patch. The first thing Guard dogs attack is your general. Thus your general is always the first unit to die in a battle against a bandit camp with dogs. I have not sent enough troops to win an attack versus a camp with dogs yet (or enough to survive past round one) so I have no idea how that affects the battle. I would hate to see it end the battle after one round because the general is dead but who knows what it will do. I think its a bug that the general dies first before any other troops no matter what they are.
The general will kill 1 unit.Quote:
Originally Posted by Selak
Mine doesn't have that happening Selak.Quote:
Originally Posted by Selak
http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/7966/dogss.png
Production Math!
[This assumes level 2 buildings since they're pretty easy to upgrade too.]
[This assumes all building have a travel time of 0 sec.]
So if you use the same amount of licenses....Code:
1 Calvary Every 120min
1 Calvary = 40 Horse 30 Beer
2 Horse Per 6min
Needs Per 6min:
>6 Wheat
>12 Water
>1.5 Beer
Building Licenses Required: 7.25 Total
1 Stable
.75 Brewery
5.5 Farms
Spare Resources Per 120min: 10 Beer
----------------------------------------
1 Recruit Every 30min
1 Recruit = 10 Sword 5 Beer
2 Swords Per 6min
Needs Per 6min:
>2 Bars
>2 Ore
>6 Coal
>12 Wood
>12 Trees
>1 Beer
>2 Wheat
>4 Water
Building Licenses Required: 12 Total
1 Weapon-smith(2 Weapon Per 6min)
1 Smelter(2 Bars Per 6min)
.5 Mine(4 Copper Per 6min)
2 Cokers(6 Coal Per 6min
2 Cutters(12 Wood Per 6min)
3 Foresters(12 Tree Per 6min)
.5 Brewery(2 Beer Per 6min)
2 Farm(1Wheat Per 6min)
Spare Resources Per 30min: 10 Copper | 5 Beer
Per 120min:
You get 1 Calvary
You get 4 Recruits
1 Calvary Can:
Kill: | .5-1 Rangers | 1-1 Dogs | .8-.16 Thugs | .45 - .9 Roughneck
Tank: | 1-1 Ranger | 1-1 Dogs | 1-1 Thugs | 1-1 Roughneck
4 Recruits Can:
Kill | 4-4 Rangers | 4-4 Dogs | 1-2 Thugs | .6-1.3 Roughneck
Tank | 4-8 Rangers | 16-32 Dogs | 4-8 Thugs | 4-8 Roughneck
Calvary are good against 1 thing a large stack of archers,which there are few of on the map and you need about 1.5 Calvary to 1 Ranger to guarantee they get wiped out, even then you need a lot of recruits to tank for them.
thats odd, because i have sent two attacks against a bandit with guard dogs and the first thing killed each time was my general (same camp you attacked)