CaptainPolyp said: I don't think Dragatus took the costs into account. Only the efficiency in battle. Click to expand...

My tests took cost into account in the sense that I gave my test armies a limited "budget" (which in the second test was 36000 retinue cap) and they only got as many retinues of a specific type as the budget allowed. This effect was even more pronounced in the first test where the entire test army was composed of retinues.I do use the term "cost" somewhat interchangeably though for how much retinue cap a soldier of a given type uses, for how much gold it costs to hire a soldier of a given type, and for both the upkeep and reinforcement costs for a soldier of a given type. That's because all these values are linearly proportional to each other and derived from the maintenance attribute that is given to the unit in the defines file. The ratio of any of these costs for two chosen units types is going to be the same, no matter which of the specific costs you pick, as long as you have an equal number of soldiers of both types.I also was not aware that effectiveness and efficiency were two different things, but will keep that in mind from now on.As for ARCEM, my first comment is to make it clear in the document that the "usage" mentioned on page 3 is retinue cap usage. Since I've always thought of it as "cost" and I've never seen anyone call it "usage" before I had trouble figuring out what exactly this usage was supposed to be. I must have started at that part of the text for half an hour trying to understand it before I decided to just read on and then gradually came to understand what you meant. Simply calling it "retinue cap usage" the first time it's mentioned would have been enough to avert this.I would also recommend having a short summary at the very beginning which explains the caveats and limitations and how slash lines are a measure of how powerful a retinue is in each phase of combat before delving into how you calculated them. That would help retain the attention of the less technically inclined.The calculations themselves seem fine to me, if incomplete due to the omission of morale as a factor. The only thing I have doubts about is that you have chosen to calculate defensive reinforcement cost-effectiveness instead of defensive usage-effectiveness. Can you elaborate on your reasoning?Finally, for putting together offensive and defensive efficiency, multiplying is certainly better than taking the mean, but I'm not sure taking the square root it was necessary. Then again I wouldn't quite say it did harm either, at least not at this point. The order in which the retinue compositions are sorted would be unaffected, only the relative ratios would change.In defense of multiplying offense and defense, if a unit has 4 attack and 1 defense and another unit has 1 attack and 4 defense, the first unit will do 4x as much raw damage, but the second unit will divide that raw damage by 4 when determining casualties, so they both end up inflicting the same amount of casualties upon each other. If you take either of these and have it fight a unit with 2 attack and 2 defense you will again have both sides inflict the same amount of casualties upon each other, though the amount of casualties will be either twice as high or half as high as in the first case, depending on whether you take the offensive or the defensive unit.Writing that made me realize there is one effect beyond morale that ACREM does not take into account and that is how quickly a retinue will resolve it's battle. In the above example all 3 units would have the same ACREM, but would function differently on the battlefield. The offensive unit would resolve it's fight against the opposing flank quickly and if victorious would then become able to flank the enemy. While flanking it would not be taking any damage, which in turn meas that it's low defense would not hinder it but it would still benefit from it's high attack (which now has the flanking bonus applied to it). On the contrary, the defensive units would take longer to resolve it's battles, so even if it was set to lose if left to it's own devices, it could be able to hold out long enough for an adjacent friendly flank to win it's battle and begin flanking the enemy.So if you had a pure retinue army you could have the left and center flank be composed of Defense retinues and account for 25% of the total retinue cap usage each, while the remaining 50% of your retinue cap would be spent on filling the right flank with Light Skirmish retinues.Returning to how exactly to combine offensive and defensive efficiency, one further thing that is perhaps worth noting is that during the course of battle the effect of scaling up either of those will be non-linear. If you double offense you double enemy casualties, so you take less damage on the next day. Likewise if you double your defense you halve your casualties, which in turn means more of your soldiers will survive to deal damage to the enemy. So offense reinforces defense, which reinforces offense, which reinforces defense ...But since you're currently focused on the static picture on day 0 of a tactic, you can maybe ignore that for now.