Combat System
Combat resolves over a series of rounds — one per cycle — and runs until one side is eliminated, breaks and routs, or one of the two commanders pulls off an organised retreat. Neither side can voluntarily withdraw during the first four rounds of any battle; once committed, you're committed, at least for that long.
Every round, two completely independent things happen at once: troops get hurt, and troops get scared. Neither one waits for the other.
The Two Axes
- The Physical axis — Melee Value and Ranged Value measured against the enemy's Armour Value — is what actually kills people.
- The Morale axis — Shock Value measured against the enemy's Resolve — is what makes an army stop fighting before everyone in it is dead.
A battle can be won on either axis independently of the other. An army can be physically dominant and still lose if its opponent simply refuses to be frightened — and an army that's barely scratched anyone can still rout in terror if it's faced something genuinely horrifying.
Combat Stats
| Stat | What It Represents | Modified By |
|---|---|---|
| Melee Value (MV) | Combined melee power of the side | Experience level, Army Composition Bonus, Combat Readiness, Strategy, Leader skills, technology, terrain bonus (if defending) |
| Ranged Value (RV) | Combined ranged power of the side | Experience level, Army Composition Bonus, Combat Readiness, Strategy, Leader skills, technology |
| Armour Value (AV) | Combined physical protection of the side | Combat Readiness, Strategy, Leader skills, technology, terrain bonus (if defending) — not affected by experience level or Army Composition Bonus |
| Shock Value (SV) | How psychologically threatening the side is, averaged per troop rather than combined | Combat Readiness, Strategy — never Army Composition Bonus |
| Resolve (RSV) | How psychologically resistant the side is, averaged per troop | Combat Readiness, Strategy — never Army Composition Bonus |
The relevant leader here depends on who's actually present: a General's Tactics skill affects an army's own MV/RV, while the Emperor and Heir's Strategy skill applies a flat empire-wide modifier to every army at once. See Leader Skills for the exact figures at each skill level.
Shock and Resolve being averaged rather than combined is deliberate, and matters more than it might first appear: 200 terrifying heavy cavalry remain just as terrifying whether they're standing alongside 50 infantry or 5,000 of them. Diluting fear into an army-wide total would mean numbers alone could make any horror manageable, which defeats the entire point of fielding something frightening in the first place.
Army Composition Bonus deliberately never touches Shock or Resolve either, for a related reason — see Armies. Fear is treated as something intrinsic to a unit, not something a well-balanced formation can manufacture.
Flanking bonus: when more than one army fights on the same side of a battle, whichever side has fielded the greater number of armies (not troops) receives a flat +15% bonus to MV and RV — converging on an enemy from multiple directions is rewarded regardless of how large any single army involved happens to be.
Outnumbering an Enemy Army
When one side vastly outnumbers the other, not every soldier in the larger force can physically reach the fight at once — there's only so much ground to stand on, and a soldier can only fight whoever's directly in front of them. To reflect this, only a portion of an overwhelming force actually gets to engage each round:
- At most, 3 soldiers from the larger side may engage each soldier on the smaller side.
- Regardless of how extreme the size difference becomes, at least 10% of the larger force always engages — this exists specifically so an overwhelming army can never become mathematically unable to finish off the last handful of survivors from a much smaller one.
Only this engaged portion of the larger force's Melee and Ranged Value counts towards that round's Combat Value and damage — the rest of the army is present, but not yet in the fight.
Worked example: a force of 1,000 troops faces a force of 100. At the 3:1 cap, the larger side can only actually engage 300 troops that round (3 × 100). Its combined MV and RV are scaled down accordingly to 300/1,000 — just 30% of what the full army would otherwise contribute — before the Combat Value calculation below even begins.
Raw numbers have sharply diminishing returns once a size advantage passes roughly 3:1. A 1,000-strong army gains no extra combat power over a 3,000-strong one when fighting the same 100 defenders — both are capped at the same 300 effective troops that round. Overwhelming numbers still help in other ways — absorbing losses, replacing the dead, simply being there in the next battle — but they stop translating into extra raw combat power long before they become genuinely overwhelming.
This is separate from the outnumbered and outnumbering bonuses certain Troop Traits grant — such as Last Stand or Wedge Formation — which check only whether your side has more or fewer troops than the enemy at all, not how many of them can physically engage this round. See Troop Traits.
The Physical Axis: Combat Value and Damage
Each side calculates its own physical Combat Value (CV) independently, every round:
CV = your combined MV ÷ the enemy's combined AV
A CV above 1.0 means you've overwhelmed their armour and hit harder than baseline. Below 1.0 means their armour is holding, and you're hitting softer. Crucially, both sides calculate this simultaneously — it's entirely possible for both armies to overwhelm each other's armour in the same round, each grinding the other down at once.
The base damage dealt is:
Raw damage = 0.05 × (your combined MV + your combined RV)
This raw figure is then scaled by your own CV, using a smooth curve rather than a hard cutoff — there's no cliff-edge where being slightly outmatched suddenly costs you everything:
| Your CV | Damage Multiplier | In Practice |
|---|---|---|
| 0.5 | ×0.75 | Outmatched, but still landing meaningful blows |
| 1.0 | ×1.00 | Evenly matched — full baseline damage |
| 2.0 | ×1.50 (capped) | Dominant — but the cap means even total superiority has a ceiling |
The multiplier never drops below ×0.4 or rises above ×1.5, regardless of how lopsided the CV becomes — a battle between a single soldier and an empire's entire army still resolves through ordinary combat maths, not an instant, automatic wipe.
Armour absorption then reduces the damage twice over, in two separate layers, both using a diminishing-returns curve so that stacking armour never makes a unit truly invincible:
- Army-level absorption — based on the defending side's average AV, capable of soaking up to 35% of incoming damage. A typical Infantry-grade army absorbs roughly 17–18% this way.
- Per-troop absorption — applied a second time as damage is split out across individual troop types, up to a further 25%. This is why Heavy Infantry visibly shrugs off losses that would devastate Archers taking the exact same proportional share of an attack.
Damage is then divided across the defending armies and troop types in proportion to their numbers — a defending force twice the size of another takes twice the share of incoming damage. If the result against a specific troop type works out to less than 20% of that troop type's hit points, the kills round down to zero entirely; a glancing, ineffective attack genuinely kills nobody, rather than slowly chipping away at impossible fractions of a soldier.
Initiative
Initiative isn't rolled separately — it falls directly out of the same Combat Value each side has already calculated:
Probability of winning initiative = your CV ÷ (your CV + the enemy's CV)
A side with CV 1.5 against an opponent's CV 0.5 has a 75% chance of holding initiative that round. It's entirely possible, and not even unusual, for the physically weaker side to occasionally seize it anyway.
What initiative actually changes is narrower than it might sound: it sets the base organisation drain rate you yourself use when working out how much morale pressure you take from the enemy that round — 3 if you hold initiative, 6 if you don't. It does not switch off anyone's morale pressure, and it doesn't decide who deals physical damage — both of those happen for both sides, every round, regardless of who holds initiative. Holding initiative simply means your own troops shrug off fear a little more easily that round; it doesn't make you immune to it.
Equipment Loss in Combat
Organisation isn't the only thing being worn down round after round — every army fighting also bleeds support equipment, regardless of which side is currently winning. Holding the initiative makes this less painful, but it never makes it free.
- The side holding initiative loses 0.2% of its support equipment that round (minimum 1 unit).
- The side lacking initiative loses a full 1% — five times the rate — reflecting how much harder a side fights, and how much more equipment gets broken or spent, when it's the one being pressed.
Over a short skirmish this barely registers. Over a long, grinding battle, though, it compounds with organisation drain to erode an army's Combat Readiness from both directions at once — a force still standing after fifty rounds may already be fighting at a fraction of its paper strength, equipment-starved and demoralised long before it's actually defeated. This is also why fielding very large armies in a protracted war is as much a logistical burden as a recruitment one: the bigger the army, the more equipment is being consumed every single round it spends fighting.
This is separate from the one-time 25% equipment loss an army suffers specifically from routing — see Armies. A long, undecided battle drains equipment gradually; losing outright costs a large chunk of it all at once.
The Morale Axis: Organisation Drain
Where the physical axis asks "how hard did that hit," the morale axis asks "how close is this army to running." Like the physical axis, both sides calculate their own version every round:
Morale CV = your average SV ÷ the enemy's average RSV
This is then converted into an organisation drain multiplier on the same smooth-curve principle as physical damage, though the swing is considerably wider — morale collapses far less predictably than flesh and bone does:
| Morale CV | Drain Multiplier | In Practice |
|---|---|---|
| 0.5 | ×0.65 | Barely unsettling |
| 1.0 | ×1.00 | Neutral |
| 2.0 | ×1.70 | Genuinely terrifying |
| 3.0+ | ×2.40 (capped at ×2.5) | Approaching the limit of how fast organisation can collapse |
The actual organisation lost that round is your base rate (3 with initiative, 6 without) multiplied by the enemy's morale CV against you. A small force of something dreadful — heavy cavalry, or worse — can break a vastly larger army's nerve in a fraction of the time it would take to actually kill them all, which is very much the point.
Combat on Water
Armies are not trained or equipped for fighting at sea, and it shows. Unless an army has the Amphibious ability, it suffers the following penalties to MV and RV while located on a water hex:
| Hex Type | MV/RV Penalty |
|---|---|
| Ocean | −40% |
| Coast | −20% |
| Island | −10% |
Armour Value is unaffected by water terrain — a soldier's armour works exactly as well bobbing on a transport ship as it does on dry land, even if everything else about the fight doesn't.
How Combat Ends
A battle resolves in one of three ways:
- Elimination — one side's troops are reduced to nothing through physical losses.
- Routing — one side's organisation reaches 0, and the army breaks and flees rather than continuing to fight. See Armies for what happens to a routed army afterwards.
- Organised retreat — once past round 4, a commander can choose to withdraw deliberately, rather than waiting to be either destroyed or broken.
In practice, most battles are decided by morale long before physical attrition would have settled things anyway — a frightening enough opponent rarely needs to kill an army to make it leave the field.
