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| Thread: Spreadsheet for calculating creature power | |
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alcibiades
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
of Gold Dragons
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posted July 19, 2006 12:21 AM |
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Spreadsheet for calculating creature power
It has, for me at least, been a long standing mystery how the Power of the creatures in the game was calculated. It still is - but I actually managed to come up with a spreadsheet (in Excel) that emulates it very well. In fact, I was rather surprised at the how good it came out in the end. It's available here, for anyone who might be interested in playing around with it (and comments/improvements are received gratefully), and I'll add a few comments below.
Power Calculation spreadsheet
How to use it: It's pretty self-evident I think, what you do is type in the stats of the creature (Attack, Damage, Speed, etc) and tick off which specials it has by placing a "1" in the respective field (see image for example). There is a list of abilities, but not all are included yet - but most of them can easily be extrapolated by finding a similar ability to tick off, and there's also options for unnamed ability ("other ability").
Do not delete the boxes in the grey area, or the calculation won't work.
What does it do: The spreadsheet offers you the Power value of the creature, based on it's stats and abilities. Furthermore, it offers you an estimate on reasonable creature cost and weekly growth based on the creatures power and level. It only works for upgraded creatures currently, for the standard creature, you'll have to estimate a reasonable cost (app. 60-80 % of full creature cost).
The spreadsheet works for existing creatures, but also allows you to evaluate new creatures you would like to add to the game, possibly through modding. Of course, new skills aren't listed, so one would have to estimate which of the current abilities are of approximately same value.
What's the use: Well, it can be a handy tool when developing new ideas for monsters, but what I hope this will do in the long run will be to make a foundation for a creature editor. The creature editor would allow you to customize your own units by taking a base creature (providing graphics) and then you could customize stats and possibly abilities. The latter is not currently possible, as far as I know. With this spreadsheet, a "correct" prize and weekly growth would automatically be calculated, which would guarantee ballance in the game.
Discrepancies: The spreadsheet works fairly well, but there are some creatures that come out with the wrong numbers. Some of them do so "on purpose" because I think the developers have ascribed the wrong Power value to the creature (for instance, Imp and Hydra are underpowered). Others, I cannot explain - for instance, Inquisitor comes out with a much lower power rating than other level 5 creatures because of the extremely poor damage this unit does. Whether one accepts the lower Power rating of the creature (1300 vs. 1500 from the developers) to be more acurate (after all, the Inquisitor is not the most usefull level 5 unut!) will be a case for the idividual. By and large, however, it works pretty well, and gives reasonable numbers. As shown in the example, the Archangel Power is calculated at 6310 (developers: 6153) and the cost is estimated for 4700 (in game 4200 - however, the Archangel is too cheep for its power, compared to other level 7 units in the game - a more reasonable price should be 4500). I think that's not too bad of a fit, and most of the units actually fit much better.
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Gnoll_Mage
Responsible
Supreme Hero
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posted July 29, 2006 11:18 PM |
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I'll have a look at this properly tomorrow or later, but it looks fantastic. I'm doing my own stats for lineups at the moment using my own (inferior) system, and it will be nice to have yours to help / to compare to. My method for example does not take abilities or weightings into account. It is nice to see that some of my `guessed` prices and growths aren't too far of the suggestions (although it seems I have a tendency to overprice and `undergrowth`).
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Gnoll_Mage
Responsible
Supreme Hero
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posted July 30, 2006 02:40 PM |
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Wow, great work.
Where do all those values come from?
You've got stat averages and power averages, but where did the multipliers for these come from, along with the Powergrowth and Costgrowth values, the values of the special ablities, and the 1/1.05/1.1/1.15 series?
Just how on earth did you work it all out? I'm very impressed.
Edit: it seems the minimum damage formula for double attack is overcomplicated - it can be simplfied to 1.2^(creature min damage/average min damage for level) can't it?
Why do the min and max formulae for double attack use 1.2 and 1.3, but the normal damage multipliers use 1.3 for both min and max?
Edit: I get the powergrowth and costgrowth things now.
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alcibiades
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
of Gold Dragons
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posted August 10, 2006 12:36 AM |
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Hi Gnoll Mage, thanx for the feed back! First off, I have uploaded a new and slightly modified spreadsheet that should have better numbers. See below for comments. The old link should work to the new file.
To answer your questions one at a time:
Quote:
Where do all those values come from?
You've got stat averages and power averages, but where did the multipliers for these come from, along with the Powergrowth and Costgrowth values, the values of the special ablities, and the 1/1.05/1.1/1.15 series?
Well, it was pretty much guess-work, and that's why it's not exact. It was more or less trial and error - I had tried a bunch of different approaches, and this one with the power multipliers was the first to actually provide a reasonable fit. In the end, I'm not even sure how much of it is just pure coincidence.
But well, I came up with the exponential thing as a start, and then I wanted to add some sort of correction for the abilities, which I graded as major, intermediate or minor based on my evaluation and trial-and-error for best fit. As I said, it was pretty much guess-work, and it's certainly not THAT precise - but it's a good start for evaluating strength of new units, I think. 
Btw. for the additional corrections for second version here, I actually did a more mathematical approach by calculation some sort of total deviation for all the creatures, and the minimized this by changing the different weight parameters. I'm not sure that makes sense. 
Quote:
Edit: it seems the minimum damage formula for double attack is overcomplicated - it can be simplfied to 1.2^(creature min damage/average min damage for level) can't it?
Why do the min and max formulae for double attack use 1.2 and 1.3, but the normal damage multipliers use 1.3 for both min and max?
As to the fomula - it does look like hell, but in fact, what it does is pretty much what you say - it makes a new multiplier based on double damage and then divides by the old multiplier - it just looks like hell because of the way I made the spreadsheet, and it has to normalize to the value appropriate for the specific level.
And the fact that it sais 1.3 one place and 1.2 the others is obviously a mistake - that would be because I changed the multiplier at some place, and forgot this formula. It should be fixed in the new version I hope. 
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Gnoll_Mage
Responsible
Supreme Hero
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posted August 20, 2006 02:26 PM |
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Ah, good old guesswork. Thanks for that, I'll get the new one now (and no, that doesn't make sense...  ). It should come in handy with the `perfect stronghold` we're trying to make.
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Nebdar
Promising
Supreme Hero
Generation N
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posted October 25, 2008 06:39 PM |
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Where i can find updated version of this Power Calculator
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Gidoza
Famous Hero
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posted September 26, 2018 12:08 AM |
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Hi there - the link isn't working. Is this still around somewhere?
Thanks!
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