Important notice! The following post contains unofficial information gathered by a fan of Knights of Cathena and as such may well include some false information or may be missing information on game mechanics, including the resolving of attack damage, the effects of unit parameters and the real nature of datk effect, please follow the official Knights of Cathena website for new releases of official info on game mechanics and please comment below if you notice mistakes!

When discussing about a strategy game, the first question that arises is, where is the strategy? As closed alpha players, you might have noticed that soon after leaving lower ranks like peasant and squire you begin to constantly meet armies with two or three lifesteal knights, supported by nothing or a single priest. The question soon becomes, what is the best technique to find the best strategy against the masses?

In the previous post, the set of unit parameters (that can be modified by equipment) were introduced.

 

But how to optimize the formation and equipment to meet up for example an army of three knights?

Its not necessarily best to go with three knights yourself, especially if you are up against players with better equipment than yours.

When selecting the formation equipment, keep in mind that for the damage calculation not only your ATK is relevant. The opponent has the defense stat and there are also type boni when attacking specific classes. (For example mage does more damage to knight, knight does more damage to archers, archers do more damage to mages)

 

How the game resolves an attack?

Firstly, the attacking unit ACC defines chance of a miss: up to a hundred % its the complement of the raw acc percentage, above a hundred acc its still just a 0% chance of a miss (no other adjusting parameters).

P_miss=max(0;1-(ACC/100))

Evasion comes to play when a hit hasn’t been a miss. Then EVA% defines the chance of a evasion unless the opponent had over 100% ACC. Then the EVA gets adjusted according to the attacking unit ACC (for example for attacking unit with 130% ACC and defending unit 30% EVA, the chance of evasion is 21%, 30% off the EVA% due to above 100% accuracy).

So in a nutshell, the miss and evasion are two different events, evasion only possible when hit wasn’t a miss, the non-missed attacks may be evaded at a propability of

P_eva=EVA/100*(1-(max((ACC/100)-1);0))

The rest hit the target and without CRT do damage according to basic attack strength of unit, attack, defending players defense, typedamages (kdmg, pdmg, hdmg, mdmg). With CRT theres a chance of doing double damage. 

P_crt=CRT/100

With double attack DATK, the game resolves another series of these events, but with halved damage but with damage boost modifier (for example 0.55 per attack, meaning a 10% damage boost to average attack). With a higher DATK than one, a modifier to both attacks is increasing as the loading screen hint suggests (while currently in Closed Alpha no combinations of equipment combine for higher than 1 DATK on a unit).

For example currently in closed alpha as of writing this blog post the base damage is calculated like that:

let baseDamage = (attacker.attack * 50) / defender.defense + 10;

 

Then a few modifiers are applied:

critical hits (if success): x2

type advantage: x1.5 (mage to knight or knight to archer or archer to mage)

type advantages from items: varies between 5% – 10%, (but will be removed in newer versions)

double attack: x1.1 (+0.1 for each level)

 

So what do we do with this info?

We can try maximize Expected Damage Per Attack EDPA:

EDPA=(1-P_miss*P_eva)*(50*(atk/def)+10)*(1+P_crt)*type_bonus*(1+type_dmg)*(1+0.1*datk)

Easiest way to generally maximize it, is to 

1. a) prefer these parameters (ACC, ATK, CRT, DATK) in equipment over the more defensive ones (DEF, HP, SHL, and LST that do help our unit expected lifetime or hits taken before death)
2. b) optimize your formation considering type bonus against the generally accepted best strategy available, for example using Mage heavy army against the LST knights in the current META.

So for example a mage + knight (2m+1k or 1m+2k) formations could work well against two knight or three knight armies (2k or 3k). Or add a supporting priest behind your lines for heals.

 

This knight/mage formation generally requires using a line formation (or zig-zag where mage line is one square behind the knight line) and using your mages as the main damage sources, while still bringing them back or close to your formation line at the end of every turn in order to capitalize from enemy errors from attacking your line with single knights (as they will be easy prey for your damage heavy lineup alone)

I personally liked to use a three knight two mage army (3k+2m) to go against the grain against the two or three unit armies, lately have modified it to a (2k+2m+2a+p) for fun and variety rather than strict efficacy!

Happy hunting for a succesful strategy! Theres all archer strategies, all knight strategies but not yet all mage or all priest strategies! Maybe you are the first to find them?

 

 

Ps. Whispers from the shadows of likely future changes to game mechanics

 

1. remove the extra type advantages from the items
2. remove double attack alltogether.
3. introduce an additional mechanic to reduce the evasion value in evasion streaks. If you successfully evade, your evasion will be halved. If you evade again it will be halved again. If you were hit it is restored to the original value