I have had some examples of shot power upgrades having very strange effects in an OCMOD3 clone which I use as a test bed for new possible ideas. People will need some background first on the OCMOD3 shot system, so bear with me. (1) Units have far more life points or hit points. For example, the average infantry unit has 300 hit points. The average cavalry unit has about 500 hit points. (2) Musket ball damage is higher, especially after upgrades, but musket reload time is much longer. (3) Importantly, musket balls can kill in two ways. First, the chance of a head-shot is much higher in OCMOD3 and increases at closer ranges. A head-shot gives an instant kill. Second, the shot power causes incremental damage. A 30 shot power musket would have to put 10 shots in to kill a 300 hit-points infantry unit. However, chances are a head-shot would kill the unit first. A 60 shot power musket would need 5 shots to kill a 300 hit-points infantry unit without a head-shot. (4) As shot powers rise from upgrades, they start to provide increasing supplementary kills to the head-shot kills. This really does make a difference in bigger battles. (5) In this system, the fire RATE upgrades in the academy are very important for muskets. Make sure you get them. Make sure you get fire POWER upgrades in barracks and stables and then get the extra fire POWER upgrades in the academy. In this explanation above you will note my assumptions which seem logical. Assumptions: (a) Head-shots kill instantly. (b) Non-fatal shots cause incremental damage which can eventually add up to cause a fatality. (c) Shot rate upgrades help because your units can fire more shots. (d) Shot power upgrades help to give supplementary kills via greater accrual of incremental damage. However, I have had some test results which seriously call assumption (d) into question. Here is what I did in a key test after I discovered something odd was happening. (A) I set base shot power of muskets to 4 (much lower than my standard of about 16). (B) I did no barracks upgrades of shot-power. (C) I did the shot rate upgrades in the academy. (D) Then I did shot power upgrades set at just 20% for each one. For the first two shot power upgrades, the power of the musket did not even go up. It stayed at 4. Not too surprising as these are applied to base shot power so far as I can tell. At the third shot upgrade the base shot power went up to 5. This is next nothing in the scheme of incremental damage and yet musket formation suddenly starting killing a lot more targets! This leads me to wonder if the vanilla engine applies these shot power upgrades to shot power and also to head-shot %. It's almost as if it adds 20% to shot-power (in this case) AND 20% to headshot chance. Anyone know anything about this part of the engine or scripts?
This sounds like there is a discrepancy between what numbers are displayed in your GUI and what is actually happening in upgrade calculations and damage calculations. And no vanilla doesnt really do jack squat with headshots outside of the base chance. So either you messed up your testing or your coding.
The tests were valid. I did a lot of them too. Something funny must be happening in the calculations in my coding plus in code I use from General WVPM. It is much more likely that my coding is at fault of course. Or it could be that the combination of what the base game does plus what General's code does plus what my code does is adding up to wrong numbers in some cases. Strange thing is this. If a "fuzzy" set of equations add up to casualty outcomes that seem generally right across the board then only the final results matter. I can get final casualty outcomes and increases from upgrades that I want and do it in at least two different ways that seem incompatible mathematically speaking. It is rather odd but not a show stopper. I will keep it under review.
