Invulnerability

[Eggplant]

I figure this deserves its own thread. So how strong is invulnerability, and how does it work? I have noticed that units with 10 invulnerable are nowhere near actually invulnerable, even when they have high magic resistance.

[marsilian]

It gives you the respective value in natural protection and stacks with armor. Any magical damage ignores it and it does not stack with other protection buffs. 10 invulnerability is pretty good if you have armor on top, but mostly worse than barkskin, which is unconditional (but weak to fire).

[Silence]

Two things :
- Invulnerability is completely ignored by magical damage
- If you have a high natural protection or magically enhanced natural prot (barkskin, stoneskin, ironskin), the system will use the highest value between invulnerability and your modified natural prot. In the case of magic damage, the modified natural prot is used whatever.
- There's an alteration spell called "Invulnerability" which gives Invulnerability 25, which is quite high

[Olter]

It's used as additinal armor layer against mundane attacks. Invulnerability 25 basically means, that your unit is almost immune to all non-magical damage. The standart Thug spell combination for Death 3 mages after reaching Alteration 6 is: Invulnerability + Soul Vortex, then charge. Extremely efficient efficient against province defence, basically single thug with this combo can beat any size PD.

[dfriggodingray]

An invulnerable unit is very hard to damage with non-magical weapons and will have this amount of protection against mundane attacks.

[TheMeInTeam]

To clarify, invuln doesn't stack with nat prot.

Invulnerability is just natural protection that doesn't work against magic weapons/magic, nothing more or less. If natural prot is equal or higher to invuln value the invulnerability does nothing. It's pretty good against chaff/PD, bad against most thugs and spells.

Also, while 25 is a good amount of natural protection, without good armor there are quite a few mundane troops that can still chip through that. Similarly, giant troops or even human troops with 2h weapon + strength of giants can hack through that amount of prot.

For example Tien Chi glaives do 10 damage on 10 strength unit, sometimes slashing, sometimes piercing. When it does piercing it multiplies prot by .8. If Tien Chi casts strength of giants they will do 14x1.25 + 10 damage, or 27.5 damage. Even if you are wearing good armor and have 30 prot, half of their attacks will be pierce and drop that to 24...so a group of this type of troop hitting an invuln-buffed thug can still kill it pretty easily. This can also be used to catch people off guard if they are raiding into certain PD types as they often rely on having enough protection to limit attackers to no damage or chip damage and a sudden +4 or more to damage baseline can mean the difference.