Topic: Considering the War Bow vs. the Heavy Crossbow

I finally got around to reading the dev log based on it, and it’s behaviour is a bit counter-intuitive, as it seems like the “damage ignores armor” stat is also a “damage armor ignores” stat and I’d never realized the damage cutoff was both 10% and that direct damage prevented in this way was ignored rather than applied to armor. Which can have some bad consequences in terms of total damage dealt. Unfortunately I don’t know what normal enemy stats to expect, but working through the numbers it seems the crossbow isn’t nearly as good against heavily armored dudes as I would have thought compared to the bows.

Summarized from the dev diary:
Armor is split into two types, “normal” and “direct”. Direct is the type used for the percent that “ignores armor”. Normal damage is multiplied by the armor effectiveness and dealt right to armor until armor is gone, and then it deals 100% towards health. Meanwhile, a portion of direct damage is completely ignored equal to 10% of remaining armor, and anything remaining is dealt to HP.

So take two weapons, the War Bow vs. the Heavy Crossbow, vs. an enemy with 250 points of armor and 100 health – which is around the optimal effectiveness of the heavy crossbow as far as I can see.
Both deal identical amounts of damage at a glance – 50-70 (We’ll call this 60 per shot for ease of calculation)
The War Bow has an armor penetration of 35% and armor effectiveness of 65%
The Heavy Crossbow has an armor penetration of 50% and armor effectiveness of 75%.

You would imagine, at a glance, that the heavy crossbow would be superior against armor – especially so since it fires half as quickly as the war bow.

So let’s break it down.
War bow deals 21 direct damage and 25.35 armor damage.
Heavy crossbow deals 30 direct damage and 22.5 armor damage.

Despite it’s superior armor effectiveness, the heavy crossbow actually deals less damage against armor.

So against our heavily armored enemy, we have the following health/armor after each shot: (I have no idea how the game handles rounding so I’m just rounding anything beyond the tenths place, it shouldn’t change the final result by a noticeable amount no matter how its done though)
1 shot: WB: 100/224.6 – HC: 93/228.5
2 shot: WB: 98/199.2 – HC: 83/206
3 shot: WB: 94/173.9 – HC: 71/183
4 shot: WB: 88/148.5 – HC: 57/160.5
5 shot: WB: 80/125.6 – HC: 43/138.5
6 shot: WB: 69/100.3 – HC: 31/115
7 shot: WB: 53/75 – HC: 10/92.5
8 shot: WB: 37/49.6 – HC: *DEAD*
9 shot: WB: 18/24.3
10 shot: WB: *DEAD* (armor destroyed)

You might think to yourself “Great! The Heavy crossbow killed the dude first!”. Except, of course, that the Warbow fires either twice as quickly OR deals 10% damage, so it takes 8 turns to kill with a crossbow and 5 to kill with a war bow. Although it should be noted that the more armor your opponents get past this point, the better the warbor gets and the worst the crossbow gets in comparison (and that helmets and body armor have their own pools reduced independently)

So the Crossbows real advantage here isn’t damage (it does less), it’s accuracy. You get a +15% accuracy improvement for using it over the bow. Assuming, of course, you fire the bow twice per turn. But you don’t have to – firing the longbow with an aimed shot not only matches the crossbows accuracy in most cases, it also improves damage by 10%! Giving us 23 direct damage and 27.85 armor damage.

That changes our equation slightly:
1 shot: WB: 99/222.2
2 shot: WB: 95/194.6
3 shot: WB: 89/166.8
4 shot: WB: 82/138.9
5 shot: WB: 70/111.1
6 shot: WB: 55/83.2
7 shot: WB: 38/55.3
8 shot: WB: 18/27.5
9 shot: WB: *dead*

So in the end the heavy crossbow kills 1 shot earlier in it’s optimal scenario.

The further you get from this point the less good the heavy crossbow is. Against a heavily armored opponent, the crossbow is *slightly* better, assuming it is used as the sole source of damage or combined with other weapons that can also kill the enemy before their armor is destroyed.

But in pretty much every other situation the warbow pulls ahead or holds even.