Again this is inspired by the article I read on Starcraft which roughly says:
If enemy has 12 Dragoons maybe you counter it with 14 Zealots, but it's more complicated than that because if they're a micro god, they might beat you anyway and then you lose.
Well, it's not a bad idea, but it's like saying Dragoons counter Knights in FFT unless the Knight was Orlandu.
Again I'll go over with example from ROTK 11 which seems to be one of the most balanced strategy games out there. We'll take a simple unit matchup: Cavalry versus Halberdier. The game has a basic rock paper scissors model: Cavalry beats Halberdier which beats Spearman which beats Cavalry. At least in theory.
The game's model works like this. Cavalry has an attack rating of 100 and defense of 80, while Halberdier has an attack rating of 80 and defense of 100. There's a relatively small (10-20%?) bonus for the rock paper scissors advantage since Cavalry counters Halberiders. Cavalry are also faster, so it's almost certain they'll get the first hit in. When you attack, the attacker first inflicts damage, and then defender attacks back with whoever that survived the attack. So if you just mindlessly attack back and forth with unupgraded units, Cavalry always counters Halberdier. So far so good.
Now each unit has 4 level of upgrades. Throwing out the stuff that just cancels each other out, you have the following relevent upgrades:
Cavalry level 2 - increase movement by 1 hex.
Cavalry level 3 - allows cavalry to range attack (2 hex range). This attack is done at roughly 80% the strength of a normal melee attack.
Halberider level 2 - 30% chance to take no damage from normal ranged attack on defense
Halberdier level 3 - 30% chance to take no damage from normal melee attack on defense
So let's just assume you have all your units totally upgraded. Well first thing you notice is that the Cavalry can now range attack the Halberdier with no risk of retaliation, but mathematically it works out it will inflict .8 * .7 = 56% of its normal damage. If a Cavalry makes a normal attack, it will inflict on average 70% of its normal damage while eating a full retaliation from the Halberdiers, so a normal melee attack is almost always worst than a ranged one. Now I mentioned normal attacks. There are also special attacks that generally inflicts about 150%-250% of your normal damage (depending on the game difficulty setting) that bypasses the defensive specials. Special attacks require willpower which is a limited resource. Once a unit runs out, it tends to stay run out unless they resupply or go back to a city. For all practical purposes, a unit never gets its special attacks back once it uses them up unless it withdraws from combat.
Now it seems pretty obvious the solution is just use your special attacks on the Halberdier. That works for normal mode where special attacks inflict 250% of normal damage, but not on Super where special attacks only inflicts 150% of normal damage. In a well fortified area, both unit is likely to exhaust its special attacks before doing meaningful damage to each other. Good players will also combo willpower draining attacks as much as possible which gives you even less special attacks to work with.
So what happens when both units are out of specials?
Well let's look at the abilities again. Halberdier's special only works on defense. If it goes up to Cavalry and attack, it is going to eat 100% of the Cavalry's retaliation with no chance of damage prevention. This means it will almost certainly lose even if it is the attacker in every fight despite attacking first. Likewise the Cavalry will not be attacking in melee range since the defensive bonus of a Halberdier means it will win. So, what is going to happen is that the Cavalry will probably just range attack while inflicting low damage, while the Halberdier will not be attacking at all.
In a real game situation, the fight might look something like this. Let's say you started with 1 unit of 20K Cavalry versus 1 unit of 20K Halberdier. After all your special attacks are used up, you might be looking at say 16K Cavalry versus 14K Halberdier. They will fight some more and you will end up with say 10K Cavalry versus 7K Halberider. At this point the Halberdiers will probably stop attacking and just defend (remember most of the Halberdier losses comes from trying to attack Cavalry, not being attacked), or simply retreat if this is an option. If retreating is not possible, given enough time you'd probably see the Halberdier unit completely destroyed while the Cavalry hover around ~10K strength.
Now does that mean Cavalry countered Halberdier? I mean you started with the same number of troops, and the Halberdier all died while Cavalry still has half of its original strength. But now we get into the economics. For most players in ROTK, horses are roughly twice as expensive as any other unit, because the specials to produce horses cheaply is rare while the specials to produce other weapons are common. Further, Cavalry are the strongest unit in the game by a mile. If you tried to fight Cavalry with their supposed counter, Spearman, most of the time you'd see Cavalry destroying their supposed counter by even greater margins (depends a lot on terrain). Indeed, the counter to Cavalry is Cavalry, not Spearman.
Now you ask why not just have all Cavalry? Well that's what you usually want except horses are expensive. Also, each city can only hold at most 100K of every weapon type. If you sent 100K horses, and enemy defended with 30K Calvary, 30K Archer, and 40K Spear, and managed to trade resources. That means in a few months you're going to see the lowly Halberdiers + 2 Catapults taking out your city for basically no loss because Halberdiers will just form a protective front around Catapults that takes out your city. If you had any Cavalry left, this wouldn't work because Cavalry can break through defensive parameters very easily and then destroy the Catapults before they get into range.
Therefore, if someone is fighting your Cavalry with Halberdier, that means they have a resource advantage on you all else being equal. Of course, if you can make cheap horses so that it's not a resource disadvantage, then your opposition is at a huge disadvantage. If you simply keep pressing your attack, what's likely to happen is that the enemy will either send out 20K worth of Cavalry or some combination of 20K in Spear/Archer/Halberider in an attempt to trap your remaining 10K Cavalry, and your 10K will quickly get killed, which means at the end you lose 20K horses while they lose no horses. They could lose more than 20K in other resources but again, these other resources are not as expensive as horses. And remember, once your horse supply goes below about 20K, you'll start seeing Catapults coming your way, and Catapults obviously counter everything if not killed before they're in siege range since you can't fight a war without a city.
So now it sounds like Halberdier always counter Cavalry? Not really. Let's say you attacked with 5 units of 20K Cavalry versus the same thing on Halberdier. First thing that will happen is all 5 Cavalry will focus all their special on one Halberdier unit and kill it, while Halberdier have no chance to do the same. Even if they got one of the Cavalry units low, since Cavalry are the fastest unit that unit wll almost certainly withdraw. After the Cavalry are out of specials, they'll simply move around the Halberdiers and sack your city. Remember, Halberdiers can never attack Cavalry normally without taking massive retaliation. The defender will simply lose his city, and at that point the Cavalry will go into the city to resupply finish off the Halberdiers, who have no chance of escaping because Cavalry are much faster.
So what exactly counters what? The answer is that it depends. A Cavalry will almost never lose to a Halberdier whether it's 1 on 1 or 5 on 5. But if you know what you're doing you might be able to use a Halberdier unit enough to slow down a Cavalry to the point where it is effectively countered. In the previous example, almost certainly the 10K Cavalry side will withdraw their forces because you don't want to get trapped. So the attacker will have an edge in troop numbers, but the defender now has an edge in weapon numbers. Depending on what these numbers are either side could've won. A fight in ROTK is never as simple as "okay they have 100K of troop Y so we bring 100K of troop X".
Catapults gets countered by Cavalry (technically anything can counter it since it cannot fight back, but Cavalry can get to them the fastest, and they do most damage per attack). Why would you bring a Catapult if you know enemy has Cavalry? Maybe you do it so you can draw out their Cavalry and attempt to kill them if you know that city cannot make more horses and is only getting them through transports. Of course it can easily backfire if the enemy Cavalry manages to destroy your Catapults without getting trapped. But if you're able to trap the Cavalry that will no doubt attempt to destroy the Catapults, then you can say your Catapult really countered the Cavalry, even if the Catapults got destroyed.
That should be what countering is about. It does not always need to be a strict unit advantage. You can actually lose a fight and still come out ahead if you consider other dimensions like mobility or resources.
If enemy has 12 Dragoons maybe you counter it with 14 Zealots, but it's more complicated than that because if they're a micro god, they might beat you anyway and then you lose.
Well, it's not a bad idea, but it's like saying Dragoons counter Knights in FFT unless the Knight was Orlandu.
Again I'll go over with example from ROTK 11 which seems to be one of the most balanced strategy games out there. We'll take a simple unit matchup: Cavalry versus Halberdier. The game has a basic rock paper scissors model: Cavalry beats Halberdier which beats Spearman which beats Cavalry. At least in theory.
The game's model works like this. Cavalry has an attack rating of 100 and defense of 80, while Halberdier has an attack rating of 80 and defense of 100. There's a relatively small (10-20%?) bonus for the rock paper scissors advantage since Cavalry counters Halberiders. Cavalry are also faster, so it's almost certain they'll get the first hit in. When you attack, the attacker first inflicts damage, and then defender attacks back with whoever that survived the attack. So if you just mindlessly attack back and forth with unupgraded units, Cavalry always counters Halberdier. So far so good.
Now each unit has 4 level of upgrades. Throwing out the stuff that just cancels each other out, you have the following relevent upgrades:
Cavalry level 2 - increase movement by 1 hex.
Cavalry level 3 - allows cavalry to range attack (2 hex range). This attack is done at roughly 80% the strength of a normal melee attack.
Halberider level 2 - 30% chance to take no damage from normal ranged attack on defense
Halberdier level 3 - 30% chance to take no damage from normal melee attack on defense
So let's just assume you have all your units totally upgraded. Well first thing you notice is that the Cavalry can now range attack the Halberdier with no risk of retaliation, but mathematically it works out it will inflict .8 * .7 = 56% of its normal damage. If a Cavalry makes a normal attack, it will inflict on average 70% of its normal damage while eating a full retaliation from the Halberdiers, so a normal melee attack is almost always worst than a ranged one. Now I mentioned normal attacks. There are also special attacks that generally inflicts about 150%-250% of your normal damage (depending on the game difficulty setting) that bypasses the defensive specials. Special attacks require willpower which is a limited resource. Once a unit runs out, it tends to stay run out unless they resupply or go back to a city. For all practical purposes, a unit never gets its special attacks back once it uses them up unless it withdraws from combat.
Now it seems pretty obvious the solution is just use your special attacks on the Halberdier. That works for normal mode where special attacks inflict 250% of normal damage, but not on Super where special attacks only inflicts 150% of normal damage. In a well fortified area, both unit is likely to exhaust its special attacks before doing meaningful damage to each other. Good players will also combo willpower draining attacks as much as possible which gives you even less special attacks to work with.
So what happens when both units are out of specials?
Well let's look at the abilities again. Halberdier's special only works on defense. If it goes up to Cavalry and attack, it is going to eat 100% of the Cavalry's retaliation with no chance of damage prevention. This means it will almost certainly lose even if it is the attacker in every fight despite attacking first. Likewise the Cavalry will not be attacking in melee range since the defensive bonus of a Halberdier means it will win. So, what is going to happen is that the Cavalry will probably just range attack while inflicting low damage, while the Halberdier will not be attacking at all.
In a real game situation, the fight might look something like this. Let's say you started with 1 unit of 20K Cavalry versus 1 unit of 20K Halberdier. After all your special attacks are used up, you might be looking at say 16K Cavalry versus 14K Halberdier. They will fight some more and you will end up with say 10K Cavalry versus 7K Halberider. At this point the Halberdiers will probably stop attacking and just defend (remember most of the Halberdier losses comes from trying to attack Cavalry, not being attacked), or simply retreat if this is an option. If retreating is not possible, given enough time you'd probably see the Halberdier unit completely destroyed while the Cavalry hover around ~10K strength.
Now does that mean Cavalry countered Halberdier? I mean you started with the same number of troops, and the Halberdier all died while Cavalry still has half of its original strength. But now we get into the economics. For most players in ROTK, horses are roughly twice as expensive as any other unit, because the specials to produce horses cheaply is rare while the specials to produce other weapons are common. Further, Cavalry are the strongest unit in the game by a mile. If you tried to fight Cavalry with their supposed counter, Spearman, most of the time you'd see Cavalry destroying their supposed counter by even greater margins (depends a lot on terrain). Indeed, the counter to Cavalry is Cavalry, not Spearman.
Now you ask why not just have all Cavalry? Well that's what you usually want except horses are expensive. Also, each city can only hold at most 100K of every weapon type. If you sent 100K horses, and enemy defended with 30K Calvary, 30K Archer, and 40K Spear, and managed to trade resources. That means in a few months you're going to see the lowly Halberdiers + 2 Catapults taking out your city for basically no loss because Halberdiers will just form a protective front around Catapults that takes out your city. If you had any Cavalry left, this wouldn't work because Cavalry can break through defensive parameters very easily and then destroy the Catapults before they get into range.
Therefore, if someone is fighting your Cavalry with Halberdier, that means they have a resource advantage on you all else being equal. Of course, if you can make cheap horses so that it's not a resource disadvantage, then your opposition is at a huge disadvantage. If you simply keep pressing your attack, what's likely to happen is that the enemy will either send out 20K worth of Cavalry or some combination of 20K in Spear/Archer/Halberider in an attempt to trap your remaining 10K Cavalry, and your 10K will quickly get killed, which means at the end you lose 20K horses while they lose no horses. They could lose more than 20K in other resources but again, these other resources are not as expensive as horses. And remember, once your horse supply goes below about 20K, you'll start seeing Catapults coming your way, and Catapults obviously counter everything if not killed before they're in siege range since you can't fight a war without a city.
So now it sounds like Halberdier always counter Cavalry? Not really. Let's say you attacked with 5 units of 20K Cavalry versus the same thing on Halberdier. First thing that will happen is all 5 Cavalry will focus all their special on one Halberdier unit and kill it, while Halberdier have no chance to do the same. Even if they got one of the Cavalry units low, since Cavalry are the fastest unit that unit wll almost certainly withdraw. After the Cavalry are out of specials, they'll simply move around the Halberdiers and sack your city. Remember, Halberdiers can never attack Cavalry normally without taking massive retaliation. The defender will simply lose his city, and at that point the Cavalry will go into the city to resupply finish off the Halberdiers, who have no chance of escaping because Cavalry are much faster.
So what exactly counters what? The answer is that it depends. A Cavalry will almost never lose to a Halberdier whether it's 1 on 1 or 5 on 5. But if you know what you're doing you might be able to use a Halberdier unit enough to slow down a Cavalry to the point where it is effectively countered. In the previous example, almost certainly the 10K Cavalry side will withdraw their forces because you don't want to get trapped. So the attacker will have an edge in troop numbers, but the defender now has an edge in weapon numbers. Depending on what these numbers are either side could've won. A fight in ROTK is never as simple as "okay they have 100K of troop Y so we bring 100K of troop X".
Catapults gets countered by Cavalry (technically anything can counter it since it cannot fight back, but Cavalry can get to them the fastest, and they do most damage per attack). Why would you bring a Catapult if you know enemy has Cavalry? Maybe you do it so you can draw out their Cavalry and attempt to kill them if you know that city cannot make more horses and is only getting them through transports. Of course it can easily backfire if the enemy Cavalry manages to destroy your Catapults without getting trapped. But if you're able to trap the Cavalry that will no doubt attempt to destroy the Catapults, then you can say your Catapult really countered the Cavalry, even if the Catapults got destroyed.
That should be what countering is about. It does not always need to be a strict unit advantage. You can actually lose a fight and still come out ahead if you consider other dimensions like mobility or resources.
