War inside and out

Combat Strength(CS)

~~Combat Strength, or CS, is a numerical representation of the strength of your unit. The five direct factors that effect it are:

• Training % (how experienced your men are)
• Weapons/Armour % (how high quality your weapons and armour are.)
• Equipment damage
• Morale (how happy your men are)
• Cohesion (how well your men know each other).

~~Training is good, clearly, so you want that to be as high as possible. It will increase with training and battle. ~~Weapons/Armour quality depends on what your men were when you recruited. You can't increase or decrease this unless you add better/worse men (adding better men increasing, and worse men decreasing).

~~Equipment damage comes with anything except when you are in a city. Travel, training, battle, even sitting dug in a region can cause equipment damage. You want this as low as possible, clearly. If your damage gets too high it can start injuring or even killing your men as they use badly damaged equipment or fight each other for the best equipment. You can repair equipment in most cities and some towns land regions.

~~Morale varies on the unit. Typically, entertainment will have it rise, as will normal turn change. Being far from your realm will see it fall, and training will see it fall. Battle can either see it rise or fall, depending on what your unit is like. From there, it depends on the unit. Paying your men will only ever have it rise (if there is any effect at all). Clearly, more content men fight better than annoyed men, so keep it high.

~~Cohesion is increased with training, battle and sometimes entertainment (if you find what kind of entertainment your men really like, but you can only use entertainment when morale is less than 100%). It is decreased by adding new men, since these new men won't know the men in your unit very well. Cohesion is good, so try and have it high.

~~If you have high weapons/armour values, high training, high morale, high cohesion and low damage, your unit is at optimum fighting strength. However, you will rarely use such a unit in battle, for your men will be picky. All of these values together put together your 'Combat Strength'. I don't know how it's actually calculated, and I doubt anyone does except the developers.

~~Some standard and good CS/man values are as follows: Infantry/Archers/MI: Average/standard: 10, Good: 20 Cavalry/SF: Average/standard: 15-20, Good: 20-25

~~Now, having a huge CS does not mean you have won the battle. You can have a unit of 1000 CS Infantry, but that infantry might be 200 men, with 20% cohesion. They are very weak individually and the unit will break and flee the battlefield very easily. Compare a unit of 50 men with 95% cohesion, these men trust each other more and will fight better alongside men they know and have trained with, so will fight better and be much harder to make flee from the battlefield. Not only that, they are individually a match for at least 4 men from the other unit.

~~Just use some common sense. If your enemy have units that reach 60 men or more but only have a CS of 500, they aren't that good or have some serious issues (morale low, high equipment damage, just crappy men, etc). If your enemy have 40-man units that are 800 CS, you better watch out, those are some very well prepared and coherent forces that will be hard to break. Those judgements have to be made yourself.

Other pages

• Unit Settings - If you want unit settings and some other information go there, had information about unit settings on here but due to people not wanting doubles I took it off.

• Battle - another page with some information

• Unit Orders - same as above