Eritrean Archers

[montesaurus]

I'm playing Judea in a game where I was recently attacked by Aethiopia. He had these Eritrean Archers with "4 stars", and a "combat power of 17". This was on turn 44. How is this possible? The Aethiopian player states they have been fighting since the beginning of the game getting experience to have gotten so good. I mean these sheep herding archers are better than new Sarmatian Cataphracts. Is this possible or is the player modding the game?

Regards,

montesaurus

[Swuul]

I'm playing Judea in a game where I was recently attacked by Aethiopia. He had these Eritrean Archers with "4 stars", and a "combat power of 17". This was on turn 44. How is this possible? The Aethiopian player states they have been fighting since the beginning of the game getting experience to have gotten so good. I mean these sheep herding archers are better than new Sarmatian Cataphracts. Is this possible or is the player modding the game?

Regards,

montesaurus

4 stars by turn 44 is very likely, especially for skirmishers who are practically unkillable if the front line holds.

As for "combat power", it is an absolutely useless stat. The AI uses it when making some estimation calculations, but a player should never fall into that trap. What you should be interested in is their melee offense/defense and ranged offense/defense -> compare your offense values against their defense values (and vice versa), while taking into account the leader ratings, fatigue and terrain.

As an example, lets say you have 1 star cataphracts, who have one point of fatigue and fighting in difficult terrain led by 0 rating leader -> their dice-rolls for combat is 1-10. They meet 4 star archers in their prefered terrain, without fatigue and led by a 2 star leader -> their dicerolls for combat are 7-10. In the missile phase of combat your cataphracts will turn into pincushions if they are not protected by friendly skirmishers, and even in melee phase they will have a hard time (even when the melee ratings favour the cataphracts, their dice-rolls are wild and could go any way, while the archers will steadily have good dice rolls even though their melee values are worse).

[montesaurus]

Thank you, that was very helpful!

Regards,

Monte