I think we have a non-disagreement about critical damage. I merely meant to say that the ratio between critical damage and average damage is not fixed across units (unlike the ratio between critical and maximum); the ancient ent's critical does 1.75 times its average while the AD's critical does 1.6 times its average. Your formula for figuring out the ancient ent's critical damage is precisely right, and gives a more precise value for the specific situation of an ancient ent fighting an arch-demon than my general statement that a critical does a base of 210 damage before resistances, attack, and defense are considered.
I did forget about the adjacent-enemy restriction on wasp swarm, and you're absolutely correct - it makes my suggestion about wasp swarm simply incorrect.
Defense lasts until the unit's next turn. I'm not sure how that works with abilities that give multiple turns in one round, but that's not really relevant here.
And, because I was curious, I went and checked what the archdemons odds actually are in a straight-up punching match by writing a short script to simulate 10,000 of them (including rolling for damage and critical). The ent won 7,804; the demon 2,196. When the ents took the defensive and forced the archdemons to attack, the archdemons won precisely one match out of 10,000.
So it looks at first glance like the ancient ents have a major edge... which means the archdemons would be happy with a draw, and are free to take delaying tactics of their own: sitting next to the ents and defending, getting a +6 defense boost. Now the ents can't defend, or else the match ends in a draw... and the ents would like to have more than a 50% success rate out of this. When the archdemons do that, their odds of victory go up to 35%.
But it gets even better - suppose the archdemons just sit there defending themselves, UNTIL they have good odds of killing the ents with their next attack; then instead of waiting to counterattack they take the initiative and strike first. Now the demon's odds of winning rise up to 63%.
To summarize:
If the archdemons defend, and the ents defend, it's a draw. 50% success for each.
If the archdemons defend (intelligently), and the ents attack, the archdemons win 63% of matches.
If the archdemons attack, and the ents defend, the archdemons win 0.01% of matches.
If the archdemons attack, and the ents attack, the archdemons win 22% of matches.
So obviously the archdemons should start every match on the defensive. However, the ents need not respond by defending as well. The ents know that even if they get one or two unlucky attacks, the archdemons will still accept a draw; on the other hand if they get a string of lucky attacks they might win. So the ents would be well-served to attack for a little while, and if things go poorly call it off, take the defensive, and accept a stalemate. So if both players are playing optimally, you would expect well over 63% of the matches to end in draws (I don't know the exact number, but I'd guess around 80%), and the remainder to be victories for the ents.
If you change the scoring, you change behaviors and results of course. You could make it zero-sum (a victory for the ents gives the ents one point and takes one from the demons, and vice versa), you could make draws worthless, or any of a number of other creative scoring techniques... which is why it's so hard for me to say who actually "wins" this matchup and by how much. But if you forced me to guess what the outcome would be, I'd predict stalemate (neither side willing to attack, so both sit next to each other defending for eternity).
|