Embers Combat Primer

Welcome to *Embers in the Dusk*, one of the longest running quests on SV. Now you may have heard some people talking about stuff like armor, penetration, and so on and so forth. This is because the game does not use narrative combat. While there are a degree of narrative elements included, they are mostly expressed in terms of modifiers to the hard system. The systems for ground and space combat are fairly similar, although void combat has a few more stats to keep track off. So, here's a list of the raw stats.

Ground Stats

Space stats

Yeah, there's a reason I felt the need to write up a rough primer on how this stuff actually works. Now, while Durin has kept some of the inner workings obscured, we do know enough of the system to get a rough idea of how it will behave, and even better, the broad high-level understanding isn't that complicated. There are three key systems ground and space combat share, range, skill modifier, and armor vs. penetration. These three systems are what I'm going to be going over here. This is in general enough to get a rough idea of how two units will stack up.

### Range

So starting with the simple thing here. Range is just how close someone is to you. It goes short, medium, long and space also has extreme cause space is big. Space and ground combat ranges have broadly similar outcomes but through slightly different means. On the ground weapons deal set damage depending on the range, usually having a single range bracket they are best in and losing damage as they get farther from that bracket, on the ground a fair few weapons deal more damage at medium or long-range, representing weapons intended to outrange their foes. In space the adjustment is to accuracy, which is abstracted as a pure modifier to damage. A gun that deals 10 damage in space shooting at 50% accuracy is doing a flat 5 damage rather than doing either full or no damage, representing accuracy averaged out over a prolonged barrage.

Moving between range brackets is a part of the system that's behind the curtain, and it is my personal belief that the brackets are not as homogeneous as they seem. For example, both a melta gun and impaler carbine are best at short range, but I suspect that a carbine equipped soldier would have a bonus for outranging a melta gun equipped soldier.

TLDR: weapons deal different damages at different ranges, and there is probably weirdness under the hood for movement and weird edge cases.

### Skill modifier

If you’ve read war turns you have probably noticed that each side rolls a d100 and adds their skill and modifiers to it. These modifiers are where a lot of the soft stuff comes into play. In general, any given unit will have a skill and equipment bonus that applies to every roll, and a set of bonuses that come into play in various situations. Common sense stuff tends to come into play here, sending unescorted tanks into a city? Enjoy the roll malus for being an idiot. So that's what the modifiers mean, but what do they actually do?

After the bonuses, maluses, and rolls are totalled up, each army gets its final value. The values are then compared, and the side that wins both reduces losses suffered, and increases damage dealt, doubling damage and halving losses by each 100 points they win by. This is an exponential rather than linear increase, so if an army wins by 200, then they will inflict four times as many losses rather than three. This ensures that every bonus matters, since even if you have a +1000 bonus, another +10 is still a 10% increase in effectiveness. This is a big part of why really good troops can and do kill ludicrous numbers of lesser troops, though there is a soft cap for ground combat.

No matter how badass you are, no one person can kill more than 10,000 infantry, or 1000 vehicles per combat tick. You usually only see the kill cap come up when a high level hero enters the fray, but it can come up in extreme edge cases, such as someone trying to mob a helguard squad with a massive number of cultists. A fair few heroes have ways around this, as do marines. Astartes count as one unit size larger than they are for a lot of purposes, most likely including kill cap. So a squad of ten marines is mechanically a 100 man unit of power armored badasses. This is exactly as broken as it sounds and a big part of why space marines are so goddamn good.

All that being said, just because you're getting a good multiplier does not mean you're going to win. Horde factions tend to get shellacked by this system, trading horfficaly because of it, but not carring because there are so damn many of them. It is entirely possible to win despite having the skill multiplier against you the entire time simply by having that many more bodies than the other side.

TLDR: Every 100 points an army beats the other armies roll by, they double losses inflicted and half losses taken, and it's also an exponential curve. Space Marines remain horrifically overpowered.

### Armor vs. Penetration

Armor is important, really really important. Every weapon has a penetration value, and every unit has an armor value. Even a naked human would have an armor value of 0.1 simply because bones provide some protection. When a weapon hits someone, before other modifiers kick in, its penetration is compared to the target's armor and its damage is modified based on this simple formula.

1/(1+MAX(0,2-AP/Armor,Armor-AP, Armor(Armor-2.5AP), Armor^2 (Armor-5AP), Armor^3(Armor-10\*AP)))^1.5

Or you can just use this calculator Execute/Dumbo made. B4 is the % of damage, D4 is the fraction. So if it's 3 then it's one third, it can get pretty big.

So to help you with that said, here’s is a list of some weapon types and armor values to give you some reference points.

As a general rule of thumb, if penetration is the same as armor then you're doing about a third of your full damage. A point below that is not much worse, but two points below and you’ll notice your damage falling off rapidly. In general, if your penetration is more than 3 or 4 points below your foes armor, you're going to be doing very very little damage. In general, every point of armor or penetration matters since each point of advantage in either direction is a notable relative advantage. You're not going to be doing full damage until your penetration is twice your foe's armor. This is another big part of why elites in Power Armor can wade through most troops. Unlike Carapace Armor, Basic Power Armor can notably reduce the damage dealt by impalers. It's also why way back in the day when Las Rifles were the baseline gun, Space Marines could more or less disregard riflemen. In order to understand why, punch in 1 damage vs 12 armor in the calc. Yeah, that's something that gets rounded to a bit of extra upkeep cost.

So you’ll notice that a skill modifier and high armor both stack really well. This means an elite unit with heavy armor and powerful weapons can and will tear through dozens of times their own number, which is essentially how the Helguard work, for example. They combine extraordinarily high-powered weapons, good armor, and a frankly unfair skill modifier. Going up against foes with Carapace Armor and Impaler Carbines, they will be doing 100% damage through armor, and taking 30% in return, and then multiply that by some ridiculous amount due to having such high skill. There are units that have better gear and skill modifiers, but they tend to be deployed in far fewer numbers.