Heroism vs. Charge

Good evening, cannon fodders.

I get a lot of questions about Heroism and army power. This is only natural, as most players start using armies for hunting, and Heroism is the first commander skill they encounter. Let's take a quick refresher on what Heroism can do for a small attack army, and then examine its limitations for large-scale PvP.

Hunting Commanders, Revisited

My guide on elite hunting swarms shows the damage that properly constructed commanders can do against wildlife. Take a few moments to look at the battle reports. The most important concept to internalize is that 95% of the damage is being generated by a potent combination of commander Heroism, commander equipment, elite commander status, and multiple commanders. In short: commanders. Only 5% of the damage is from the troops themselves. They are really just there to power up the commanders.

Boss Maffs

If you are a maffs-hating muggle, feel free to skip this section.

Why are those hunting commanders so powerful? First off, let's understand the underlying mechanic of the commander personal skill. Each skill has 10 levels. Every level adds +6 base units of power to that skill, up to 61 at maximum (1+10x6). The base units are determined by the soldier type you used to create the commander. In case you don't already know, Heroism is the commander personal skill for Attack.

Our example will use Knights.

• Knight attack: 65
• Heroism 10: 61x 65 = 3965 attack points

Simple enough. Now let's add in equipment. The most common attack equipment for Knight commanders in PvP would be a terrain spear (+60%) and terrain armor (+60%). Since you have finished the elite commander research on the Military: Cavalry tree, all equipment bonuses are doubled for elite cavalry commanders and elite cavalry.

• Terrain spear, armor: +60% x2 = +120%
• Double bonus: +240%, or 3.4x
• Modified attack: 3965 x3.4 = 13481 attack points

This means that each Knight commander--when elite and properly equipped--is worth 207 standard Knights. If you use a quadruple commander army (my personal standard hunting army) then that's the equivalent of 830 Knights. All it takes is 61 Knight soldiers to power up all four commanders, so with their equipment-amplified Heroism, their little army of 61 troops will strike like 891 troops.

Little Maffs vs. Big Maffs

891 equivalent troops for only 61 actual troops? That's enough to make muggle brains asplode. You can single-shot an entire Legion of giant rats with 61 guys. Let's just build armies with super commanders and take over the world! Spoiler alert: you can't.

I'm sorry to crush your muggle dreams. (Heh, who am I kidding, I'm enjoying a warm feeling about muggle dream-crushing right now.) The reason is, alas, those devilish maffs. 891 for 61 is an optimal 4-commander assault strike, but that's also the absolute most you can stretch the commander power. At the scale of PvP armies, which are typically in the 10000-25000 range, that commander Heroism becomes a rounding error between 3-8%.

Fortunately, there is another entire category of commander skills: the division skills. Most people are familiar with Forced March. Since we are talking about cavalry in this example, let's look at Charge. The Charge skill adds 1% per level to all attacking cavalry in that commander's division. If you recall from my article about Matching PvP Commanders and Troops, the correct t2 commander can build an extra 5% in their corresponding attack skill, resulting in a 15% bonus.

At about 6000 cavalry troops, the Charge +15% division bonus is equal to the entire power of Heroism for quadruple elite commanders. The bigger the army gets, the more important maximum Charge becomes over multiple Heroism commanders. 

Best of Both Worlds?

So, can you simply use both techniques? Absolutely. You can put a Charge 15% commander over the main division of 10000+ Knights, and then make four elite divisions of 60 for the other four commanders to add their Heroism power. This approach is quite common in tournaments.

It is used less often in military PvP. Players usually like to have one commander at home, in case their army needs to be dodged away from an incoming enemy attack. Also, things go wrong during operations. Small cavalry armies are often dispatched to set up emergency blockades when the main blockade has been broken, to monitor enemy camp sizes, to smash little occupations, or other tasks where fast armies are required. At the size of 10000 cavalry armies, the quadruple commander Heroism is only another 5% of power to an army that has already gained 15% from Charge. The utility of keeping extra commanders home usually outweighs the slight extra power to the army.

Division and Conquer

Always remember, cannon fodders: once you get up past 5000 troops in an army, the division skills tend to become much more powerful than the personal skills of 4-5 commanders, including the ever-popular Heroism. When you are building big for PvP, build your attack commanders for division skills.

We will talk about stacking elite defensive commanders in a future article. That scenario is unlike attack armies, because you can use far more than 5 commanders in a multi-army defense maneuver.

Misbehave, kill lots of stuff.

<^^^^^^^^||==O    Skint Jagblade