Dxter's Call of War 2.0 Unit Ranker - Help Page

Feel free to send issue and bugs reports to call.of.war.calc@gmail.com. Changes and updates can be found here.

General info

This tool will rank units based on a cost/benefit score. A lower score is better because it reflects the relative resource cost, given the set of specified conditions. The user assigns higher weights to various parameters of interest and lower weights to parameters of less interest. For example, your economy may tend to run low on manpower and iron, and you would like a unit that is good against heavy armor. Here you might set the weights for manpower, iron and heavy armor targets high so that units that are good against heavy armor and use fewer of these resources will rank higher (have a lower score) relative to units that require a lot of these resources and are not so good against heavy armor. You may, of course, want to consider more factors than just heavy armor. You may want to prioritize defense, speed, terrain, or hp. There are a large number of possible combinations one can play around with.

Unit evaluation (damage dealt)

The benefit of a particular unit, given the various weights, is a measure of how much hypothetical damage it can inflict before it dies. For each target armor class, the unit, in a stack of specified size, will fight a hypothetical boss stack that has equal attack and defense power for all armor classes. If the boss is killed, another will appear, and you will fight that one starting at the HP you have left. This continues until your stack is dead. The total amount of damage you deal to the bosses before you die is the denominator in the score = resource / denominator.

The difficulty of the boss has an influence on the rankings. The HP of a single boss unit can be weighted with the Boss HP setting and the power of a single boss unit can be set with the Boss Power setting. Each new boss starts with the number of boss units corresponding to Stack Size. It is useful to play around with the boss settings when trying to differentiate units around a given level/ability range. If the boss is too strong or too weak for a group of units with similar abilities, it may not resolve the members of the group very well. At boss weights of 1, each unit in the boss stack will have 30 HP and 10 power. Unlike the units being compared, the boss HP and power isn't adjusted by the doctrine or the terrain. This is so that different terrain combinations and doctrines are comparable to each other.

In cases were the clears still seem too small or too large the boss weights can be manually adjusted. Having 2-5 or so clears in the top ranked units seems reasonable, but this still needs to be optimized. It also depends on a players particular goals. What size of stacks are you usually fighting against?

The attack power used for your unit is the average over the 5 terrain types, weighted by terrain modifiers, doctrine modifiers, and user specified terrain weights. Note that overkill on the final round of killing a boss does not count toward damage dealt. This is to simulate how much damage a stack actually deals. If a stack is way overpowered, e.g. a nuclear bomber, most of its damage output will be wasted, but it will still take damage from each boss wave.

When attacking, ranged units (artillery types, battleships and cuisers) are assumed to take no damage so they could potentially deal infinite damage. Instead, these units are assigned the following large damage value vs a given armor class: (power vs given armor) * (unit HP) * (stack size). This may be modified for better balancing in the future.

Notes

Resource Weights

Give higher weight to resources that are more important. Important resources are usually those that limit your ability to build units or are expected to in the future or over the course of a game.

Target Weights

Give higher weight to targets that are more important. For example, if you want to know what is good againt air, set the air weight high or set the other weights low or zero.

Terrain Weights

Terrain weights affect land speed and attack/defense power. Say you expect to be using a unit mostly in hills and forests, then you might want to give a higher weight to those terrains. This will help distinguish units that excel in those terrains vs those that do not.

Stance Weights

This allows you to weight attack vs defence power. For example, if the defense weight is very high, then artillery will perform poorly.

Speed Weight

This weights unit speed score relative to other categories of weights.

Doctrine

The various modifiers of the selected doctrine will be applied to the calculations.

Stack Size

Assume units fight in a stack of this size. The boss will also have a stack of this size.

Boss Hit Points

The default boss hit points (see Unit evaluation) will be multiplied by this.

Boss Power

The default boss power (see Unit evaluation) will be multiplied by this.

Minimum Level

Consider only units at this level or higher.

Maximum Level

Consider only units at this level or lower.

Minimum Day Research is Available

Consider only units that can be researched on this day or later.

Maximum Day Research is Available

Consider only units that can be researched on this day or sooner.

Minimum Range

Consider only units that can attack at this range or further. For planes this is their flight range, although they techinically attack at melee range. The range used is the base range before doctrine modifers.

Maximum Range

Consider only units that can attack at this range or less. For planes this is their flight range, although they techinically attack at melee range. The range used is the base range before doctrine modifers.

Unit Rank

This is the ranking of the unit based on the overall score. A lower score gets a better rank since the score represents a cost / benefit ratio. A low score indicates the costs are low relative to the benefits.

Overall Score

This is the sum of all the individual scores. Units with smaller scores can be produced for less resources given the specified contraints and weights.

Unit Type

The name of the unit.

Unit Level

The level of the unit.

Environment of Operation

Where the unit operates: air, sea or land.

Unit HP

This is the unit HP after doctrine and other modifers have been applied. This is the HP used in the boss fight.

Unit Power

This is the units maximum power. It is meant simply to be an indicator to give a feel on how it may change with different terrain weights and doctrines. This value is the average over terrain modified values. The displayed value corresponds to the maximum power versus Unarmored, Light Armor, Heavy Armor, Air, Ship or Submarine, for Classes and Stances that have non zero Weight settings. The maximum power will be shown even if the Weight setting is very small, but non zero. For example, say the unit is Anti Air and its best power is Defense against Air and the Weight of Air is set to 0.1 and the Weight of Unarmored is set to 50. The displayed power will still be that vs Air on Defense.

Boss Wave Clears

This shows the number of boss waves that were cleared by the unit. If this value is too high or two low you might want to adjust the Boss HP and or Boss Power. Ranged land and sea units all get a value of 99 to indicate that their score was assigned without fighting the boss. The clears shown in the table is the maximum clears of all the target armor classes on either attack or defense.

Speed Score

This is a function of 1 / speed without regard to resources. The speed is the weighted sum of terrain adjusted speeds, weighted by the user specified terrain weights. Any doctrine specific speed or resource modifiers are also applied.

Unarmored Score

This is calculated separately for attacking (A.Uarm) and defending (D.Uarm) power, but otherwise the two are calculated in the same way. This is the sum of resource / unarmored power over all resource types, weighted by the resource weights and target class weights. The unarmored power against a given target class is the sum over all terrain types weighted by any terrain modifiers and the user specified terrain weights. Any doctrine specific resource or power modifiers are also applied.

Light Armor Score

See Unarmored Score for details.

Heavy Armor Score

See Unarmored Score for details.

Air Score

See Unarmored Score for details.

Ship Score

See Unarmored Score for details.

Submarine Score

See Unarmored Score for details.

Building Score

See Unarmored Score for details.

Morale Score

See Unarmored Score for details.