Armor vs Armor Piercing

[Jimmy]

Okay so does Armor Piercing units/archers ignore the armor of my Units?
Or it ignores a proportional amount of the armor of said units to deal damage?
Because i am having an insane amounts of armor with Empire blacksmiths on all my provinces and the buff stacks.
So i have like 180/190 armor Greatswords and even my archers are in 150s i think and Steam tank..dont get me started with that monster.
But everything except the tank gets pretty heavily damaged by archers and i am wondering if someone can clarify this for me.
ps: I am not using any major overhaul mods. So units have standard stats and ruleset.

[RCMidas]

Regular damage is resisted by armour.
Armour-piercing damage ignores all armour.

If a swordsman, for instance, does 5 regular damage and 2 armour-piercing damage with each hit, they will ALWAYS inflict the 2 armour-piercing damage regardless of how much armour their opponent has.

So if your Steam Tank with 500 Armour (or whatever) is getting peppered by 70-odd arrows from ordinary Crossbowmen (for instance) every few seconds, each of those doing around 5 armour-piercing damage, you're still looking at a lot of damage that does not get stopped in the slightest by the massive amount of armour the Steam Tank has.

For that, you'd need physical resistance or a ward save.

[Toby Larone]

Damage is splitt into two parts AP damage and none AP damage.
AP damage ignores armour and every unit has at least 1 AP damage, even lowly goblin archers.

For none AP damage an armour value is rolled which is between 100 and 50 % of the armour from the unit, the result is the percentage the damaged is reduced by.

So say you have a unit with 100 armour NONE AP damage will be reduced from anywahere between 50% and 100%. Over 200 Armour negates all none AP damage.

One thing to remember however is that exhaustion effects armour, which is not shown in the unit cards.

[Jimmy]

oooh.
Okay this is clearly why my math was off. because even my Archers should at least survive alot longer in fights. But if AP ignores Armor completely this makes alot of sense.
Guess AI is smarter than i thought for picking the armor piercing army comps so fast.
When i noticed i can stack the buff i thought it seemed OP as hell but now its actually easily counterable.

[Dominic]

Originally posted by Toby Larone:

For none AP damage an armour value is rolled which is between 100 and 50 % of the armour from the unit, the result is the percentage the damaged is reduced by.

So say you have a unit with 100 armour NONE AP damage will be reduced from anywahere between 50% and 100%. Over 200 Armour negates all none AP damage.

So theres no difference between 200 and 400 armour?

[Jimmy]

Originally posted by Dominic:

Originally posted by Toby Larone:

For none AP damage an armour value is rolled which is between 100 and 50 % of the armour from the unit, the result is the percentage the damaged is reduced by.

So say you have a unit with 100 armour NONE AP damage will be reduced from anywahere between 50% and 100%. Over 200 Armour negates all none AP damage.

So theres no difference between 200 and 400 armour?

There is. from what i understand 200 armor will practically make you immune to normal damage.
But armor piercing will shred you regardless.

[Toby Larone]

Originally posted by Dominic:

Originally posted by Toby Larone:

For none AP damage an armour value is rolled which is between 100 and 50 % of the armour from the unit, the result is the percentage the damaged is reduced by.

So say you have a unit with 100 armour NONE AP damage will be reduced from anywahere between 50% and 100%. Over 200 Armour negates all none AP damage.

So theres no difference between 200 and 400 armour?

Not without any negative debuff. With 200 Armour debuffs like exhaustion and plague of rust still make you take more damage, while I think it would be impossible to lower your armour to 200 from 400

[zefyris]

Well technically anything above 200 armour is useless as long as the enemy doesn't debuff the unit on armour OR that the unit is not "very tired" or more.
"very tired" units gets armour debuff of 10 % among the various debuff they get, and for exhausted units the penalty raises to -25% armour, which means that technically if you account for that armour stays usefull up to around 266 rather than "just" 200.
Since I don't think the AI is ever going to cast more than one armour debuff (if any) on the same unit at the same time, it means that for exhausted units debuffed by the most potent armour debuff (-60 I believe), around 326 armour is the max after which there will be absolutely no value to stack armour.

So well, there's still some room for improvement, but tbh anything above 266 will almost never be useful since the AI isn't especially using armour debuff often in battle AFAIK.

[Jimmy]

by not useful you mean not being effectively used?
Because its still alot of armor and can help vs normal damage dealers.

[zefyris]

Originally posted by Katakuri:

by not useful you mean not being effectively used?
Because its still alot of armor and can help vs normal damage dealers.

Basically by "not useful" I mean "absolutely no difference between having that number or anything above it". The non armour piercing portion of any registered hit will be reduced to "1 damage" 100% of the time for a unit that isn't debuffed and isn't very tired+ if that unit has 200 armour, and anything above that will not change that fact.
Meaning if a unit with 200 armour (non debuffed and not very tired+) gets hit by something that does 25 normal damage and 25 armour piercing damage for a total of 50 damage, the 25 normal will be reduced to 1 damage and the 25 armour piercing will go through just like normal, so the damage taken will be of 26 (except if the unit also have some kind of % damage reduction, like physical, magical, fire, missile damage reduction or ward save, and that the type of damage inflicted is affected by it) . If that same unit hit by the same hit had 1,000 armour, it would still be 1+25 just the same, so quite literally, 0 difference.

To reduce damage taken in melee more than this, you need to look at melee defense, or the damage reduction I spoke above. For missile damage, it's missile resistance + shields + others adapted resistances.

Now if the unit becomes very tired it will have its armour reduced by 25% so if its armour was less than 266 the resulting armour will be of less than 200 so this time it can take more than 1 dmage from the non armour piercing part of the hit, but it will not take that much tbh (taking back the example above a unit with 200 armour hit by something dealing 25 normal damage and 25 armour piercing would take a random number between 1 and 3 normal damage per registered hit + the 25 of armour piercing so a 26-28 instead of always 26... Not that much difference tbh).