Squad Size

[Purple Death77]

Hi, can someone help me understand how Squad Size effects a Production based city. I thought being a Production city meant we didn't want to learn those optional Squad Sizes in the Research Tree. I know it can be nice for a military city, but doesn't it make it worse for Negotiating?

I'm curious because the Cauldron requires learning all the optional Squad Sizes in every chapter of the Research Tree, in order to receive the extra cups.

Thanks for the help.

 

[Sweetp]

@Purple Death77

While squad size does not assist with production, it is necessary for other aspects of the game. You don't have to do them, as it is a choice on how you are building your city. However if you wish to use the benefits of the Cauldron, you will need to do them in Research.

 

[MaidenFair]

Hi, can someone help me understand how Squad Size effects a Production based city. I thought being a Production city meant we didn't want to learn those optional Squad Sizes in the Research Tree. I know it can be nice for a military city, but doesn't it make it worse for Negotiating?

No, the optional Squad Size Researches don’t negatively impact negotiating. In fact, they can be helpful if you are earlier in the research tree and facing lots of medium to hard or very hard provinces, because they may make the provinces drop a level, which also makes them cheaper to negotiate. Aside from this effect (which doesn’t always happen, as the province difficulty depends on the number and level of provinces you’ve already scouted and where you are in the tech tree, as well as your squad size), they have no impact on negotiating one way or the other.

 

[samidodamage]

Prior to the tourney changes in Oct 2020, activating those optional SS techs increased the cost of fighting and catering in the tourneys. Since most players do way more tourney than world map encounters each week (esp back then when each round was 4 encounters), the general consensus was it was best for all players to skip those techs. That's because the formula* for increased 'difficulty' was based on your regular SS and impacted both fighters and caterers. Province encounters were never impacted by SS and Spire encounters launched with a different formula that did not use SS. When the change was made to tourney structure in Oct 2020, the tourney formula was very similar if not identical to Spire encounters.
As a player who had skipped all optional SS, I went back and completed them for event quests. There was no reason not to do so and it improved the output of military AW's that provide extra troops based on SS.
*formulas: please note that Inno does not release these formulas. The current Spire/tourney formulas were done by a brilliant mathematical mind that has since stopped playing: MinMax Gamer. He crowdsourced the necessary data and reverse engineered the formulas. He has thankfully left all the info available to us on his site here. You may have to click around a bit to get to all of the info. I don't pretend to understand more than a tiny percentage of that info, lol! I was lucky enough to be here, participate in it, and follow along with the questions/answers in real time. Otherwise, I'd just have to take his word for it, lol! If interested, you can see the forum thread for Part 2 of the crowdsourcing effort here. There is a link to the Part 1 thread at the top of the first post. They're long threads, but that's where I became comfortable that his info was as close to perfect as it could be. I can't find it right now, but there's a calculator from him where you input your Spire squad size in the first Spire encounter and it continues to track well with results, leading to my belief that the formula remains unchanged at this point. @crackie Do you have a link to that calculator?

 

[crackie]

@crackie Do you have a link to that calculator?

I have to say, when I got my notification saying you’ve @ me in this thread, I was prepared to read you mocking my use of “Stack” size as opposed to “Squad” Size again. Ok, you just wanted a link to MinMax’s Tourney/Spire Calculator spreadsheet.

*opens can of worms*
That said, everything Sami said is true but unfortunately, the official “formula” has since changed from MinMax’s crowdsourced model. However, the good news is that the changes seems to be to the player’s benefit in that STACK size in tourney and Spire are smaller than what MinMax projects and the cost for catering is lower now as well. I’ve observed this change awhile ago, but I do not know exactly when it started because there always was a slight percentage of error in his calculations (spreadsheet even accommodated the display of error %), and I do not know how the formula is changed to give you a new formula. I’ve observed the new numbers are noticeably lower than his projections and you don’t even need to look at the % of error. However, I do believe the gist of MinMax’s findings still apply though, and his theory on CAL is still applicable today despite the changes. It’s just the numbers were tweaked and we don’t know to what. We are now rudderless to crunch the new math(s if you are British) because MinMax stopped playing.

How this affects catering..
For Spire and Tourney, the goods mandated were just a constant multiplier on CAL according to MinMax’s model. *IF* that still holds true, then if the overall cost went down, it would mean either the CAL number crunches to a lower number, the multiplier got lowered, or both got lowered. Net effect is still it is cheaper for you to do that same encounter now than before.

 

[Purple Death77]

Thank you very much, this was very helpful. I must have read an old post when I started learning the game. Very glad to know squad size doesn't effect catering cities negatively.

 

[Mykan]

In fact, they can be helpful if you are earlier in the research tree and facing lots of medium to hard or very hard provinces, because they may make the provinces drop a level, which also makes them cheaper to negotiate.

This is not correct, the cost of an encounter and the number of enemy troops are determined by the cost to scout. To my knowledge this has never changed. The difficulty indicator relates to combat and how difficult a province might be to fight.

Spoiler: History

When they changed the combat system, many moons ago. People kept trying to fight on the world map and dying and then complaining about it, despite been outnumbered even by 4:1. Considering under the old system elve treants and sorceress were near invincible it was a rude surprise. Now when people die in a hard province they don't complain as they understand it is difficult.

A player request was that they add a system to indicate difficulty so people would understand they are not supposed to win when outnumbered 100:1 or any other silly number. While the formula on how the difficulty display works was not revealed it predominately factors in your SS and the province SS. So if you research a new SS tech the difficulty gets easier as perhaps you now outnumber them. This is where the term "overscouting" came from as it took some people over a year to be able to combat on the world map due to the combat change.

This however has zero impact on catering costs. Easy test is to confirm the cost of a province to cater and number of units before and after researching a SS tech. You will see it doesn't change.

Province encounters were never impacted by SS

In terms of cost this is 100% correct, but SS always has an impact on how difficult those encounters were. It is a numbers game, how many troops do you have compared to them.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

@Mykan completing a squad size research does reduce the difficulty of all incomplete provinces, whether scouted or not. Completing Advanced Scouts reduces the cost of all unscouted provinces, but does not change scouted provinces, because the cost has already been paid.

 

[Lelanya]

@Mykan completing a squad size research does reduce the difficulty of all incomplete provinces, whether scouted or not. Completing Advanced Scouts reduces the cost of all unscouted provinces, but does not change scouted provinces, because the cost has already been paid.

Completing a Squad Size research can reduce the difficulty of all uncompleted provinces, but it doesn't always do so.