Tactical Notes: Defense and dodging

Sometimes you sit out there in the battlefield, and you think to yourself, "Why is this 10% extra defense relevant at all?"

Well... it is.

See, when you are getting hit by a 5-4 attack, that really translates into a mere 10% less damage of the total, which is only 2 damage, on average. Which seems weak. But this shouldn't be weighed as damage relative to max damage, but rather relative to the difference in damage taken between defenses. Consider:

The difference between with 30% dodge and 40%, you take 16% more damage than you would have from that 10% difference.

For 40% and 50%, it's 20% more damage - the amount of most resistances units have.

For 50% and 60%, it is 25% more damage - the difference between the optimal time of day and the less-optimal time of day.

And for 60% and 70%? That's a 33% difference. Which is big, particularly since most evasive units take extra damage or have low HP to balance.

Consider:

An Orcish Assassin stands on plain ground, with a 60% to dodge. An elvish fighter does a max of 24 damage to him, if all four hit make it. With a 60% to dodge, on average that fighter is only going to do 9.6 damage to the Orc Assassin. With only 26 HP, he's not going to last long - 2.7 attacks of that will finish him (which is to say that three elvish fighters have a pretty good shot at killing him in a turn).

But what if he moves over to some place and gets 70% defense? Suddenly that damage goes down to 7.2 per elvish fighter attacking. He can survive 3.6 of those attacks - it would take about 4 elvish fighters to put him down, reasonably.

What's one extra elvish fighter? Well, most of the time, units only get surrounded by, at most, three people. Two people, if in a line, or three people, if not a very good line. Four is... excessive.

(If you're curious about the exact difference, three elvish fighters have a 56.18% chance of killing an assassin on 60% terrain, and only a 27.63% chance on 70% terrain.)

Moral of the story? The defense does matter. But it matters more between high percent dodge rates than at low ones - the difference between 30% and 40% is less than half of the difference between 60% and 70%

Keep that in mind when you position your evasive units.