Home › Blog › Total War WARHAMMER II – Patch 1.12.1 and Cavalry Update

Total War WARHAMMER II – Patch 1.12.1 and Cavalry Update

Total War: WARHAMMER II

Total War

November 3 2021

Update 03/11: The cavalry beta detailed below has now been pushed to the live version of the game.

Total War: WARHAMMER II patch 1.12.1 is now live for everyone. It will update automatically through Steam. This patch features a variety of changes to address some problems present since the launch of Silence & Fury. While they are all classed as bugfixes, several of them should have a balancing impact, particularly on multiplayer. We hope the patch improves your gameplay experience.

In addition, we are developing a beta patch to target some major rebalancing of cavalry. Details on this are towards the bottom of this post, and it can be opted into in the usual way through the betas tab in Steam.

中文版请在我们的Bilibili专栏查看

Total War: WARHAMMER II – Cavalry Patch

The goal of this update is to improve the effectiveness of cavalry across the board, but especially targetting issues related to being counter-charged by infantry and the underperformance of heavy cavalry.

Several battle gameplay interactions have changed to address the issues that Heavy Cavalry were suffering from. The issue itself stemmed from the interaction between Infantry counter-charging Cavalry; due to the number of entities in an Infantry unit outnumbering Cavalry entities, more attacks were being received on Cavalry than they were able to put out against the Infantry they were charging.

This lead to Cavalry actually trading very poorly against counter-charging Infantry (especially Infantry with high Armour-Piercing weapon strength). This was not intentional so we looked to tweak some interactions to reduce the damage Infantry can do in this situation, and make sure the Cavalry impact felt as strong as you would expect.

A summary of the changes:

Entities will no longer charge attack if their charge path is blocked by a friendly entity. This particularly affects infantry vs cavalry counter-charge interactions:
- This means that when an infantry unit charges into cavalry, the back ranks no longer get to charge attack as well.
- This reduces the damage dealt by infantry when counter-charging as fewer entities get an immediate charge attack. This helps cavalry trade more favourably with infantry.
The calculation for collision damage has been changed
- Previously collision damage was increased by the charge bonus of a unit, which meant that high charge bonus cavalry would have little difference in collision damage between braced and unbraced infantry. This meant that bracing often didn’t make a big difference for collision damage, so it would nearly always be better for infantry to counter-charge.
- Now collision damage is just a calculation using collision power and not adding the flat Charge Bonus, this essentially means charging into braced Infantry will result in much lower damage on impact than unbraced Infantry.

These two changes reinforce our intentions of how Cavalry and Infantry should interact:

Cavalry should be favoured in fights against counter-charging Infantry – of course, the relative strengths of the units will still be important.
Braced Infantry should receive less damage than counter-charging Infantry, so there is a benefit to bracing Infantry against Cavalry.

Now for the gritty details. First, some terminology and calculation specifics:

Collision damage: the amount of damage dealt when a large entity collides with a small entity. This follows the formula of (collision power ^ collision damage normaliser) * collision damage modifier. The normaliser and modifier are factors that are used to modify the output of collision power into collision damage. Collision damage is 70% armour-piercing.
Collision power: This represents the momentum difference between entities. Collision power = relative speed delta * mass ratio. In more detail the formula is (entity 1 speed + entity 2 speed) * (entity 1 mass / entity 2 mass).
Bracing: when infantry is standing still and facing the enemy, they will get a bracing multiplier to their mass. A braced entity can have significantly improved mass, reducing the collision power and damage considerably.
Knockdown getting up delay: the game has a random delay for how long entities will stay on the ground before getting up following a knockdown.

The changes themselves are as follows:

The check for entities in front of others before charging means that infantry units get fewer charge attacks in when counter-charging. Our testing quantifies this reduction at around 35% less attacks, which means less damage dealt by infantry on the charge.
We have tweaked the collision damage calculation formula to have a bigger delta for possible damage (difference in range of damage output) and increased the amount of damage per collision power. However, charge bonus is no longer added into the collision power as this was reducing the impact of bracing on collision power. The largest change should be seen with Heavy Cavalry that have relatively small charge bonuses.
- Collision damage normaliser has increased from 0.7 to 0.8
- Charge bonus is no longer added to collision power.
The knockdown getting up random delays have been increased as cavalry would often not have a window to disengage cleanly as infantry would get up inside the cavalry unit and disrupt disengaging when cycle charging.
- The delay has been changed from 0.7-2 seconds to 1-2.7 seconds.
Bracing multipliers have been increased to further improve the power of bracing against collision damage. The goal is to increase the difference between bracing and counter-charging in terms of how much collision damage is dealt.
- Braced units now get their max bracing bonus at 8 ranks deep (was 6 previously)
- Max bracing multiplier for mass from ranks was changed from 3.5 to 4.
- Charge Defenders have had their bracing multiplier increased from 1.75 to 2.

Please give feedback and report anything unintended on the forums, or via your preferred social media channel.