Quote:I just had a thought about the new ability to do minimal damage regardless of armor. How much does that step on the toes of sky drakes, storm giants, and death knights? For instance, I would expect that sky drakes should do more damage than great drakes to high armor targets. But the ability is based on raw damage, so don't great drakes end up better?
Sky Drake vs Great Drake - their damage output is close to equal against extremely high armor, and Great Drake was better in the first place at lower armor. Having minimal damage changes nothing here.
Admittedly against 80 armor targets the Sky Drake might do 1-2 damage and the Great Drake can't but...that doesn't matter. You can't exactly ram 25 Sky Drakes into the hero to kill it. If anything, Minimal Damage helps both dragons equally to damage things they couldn't have damaged otherwise.
At 60 armor the Great Drake was better to begin with - it did 2x3 damage while the Sky Drake only did 1x3.6.
Great Wyrm - does more than the highest minimal damage on everything, even the most armored enemies. (ok, if the Great Drake also uses the breath then the Great Drake does more - 2*8 instead of 1x9.6. Hard to compete with something that can attack twice. But on counterattacks which is the more frequent case, the Wyrm wins.)
Storm Giant - unit with closest starts and no Armor Piercing is the Great Lizard.
However, since the lizard does not do minimal damage, comparing the is meaningless. In fact, no uncommon or rare summon has the ability and very rares are meant to outclass it anyway, armor piercing or not.
Death Knight - Ineffective against extreme armor due to high figure low attack. On medium armor, they do much more damage than the minimal damage of similar creatures. Note that numbers are per figure as both abilities are applied per figure.
Math :
If a creature has X damage output, the enemy need X damage reduction to disable it.
If it has Armor Piercing, they need 2X. However, 2X will also reduce the damage from a creature with 2X attack strength to zero.
So an Armor Piercing creature is equal to a non-armor piercing creature with double attack power, but in fact inferior to it - they are equal at dealing no damage, but the advantage goes down the less the damage is reduced - if the damage reduction is only X then the AP creature will do 0.5X damage after reduction but the non-AP will do 1.5X.
Meaning the AP creature needs to have significantly more attack power than half of the nonAP creature to be better.
This isn't true for Sky Drakes, Storm Giants or Death Knights - their per figure attack power is low compared to most other very rare creatures.
It's only true for Great Wyrm.
Indeed, the Great Wyrm now has less advantage over Great Drakes regarding damage dealt per attack - if a 50+ armor target does come up, the Drake will now do more damage to it than it was able to while the Wyrm is unchanged. But the Wyrm gets to teleport there and hit twice on turn 1, the Drake does not and that's what matters vs a 50 armor hero army.
So I think it's fine overall.
Edit : For most targets with realistic amounts of armor, both AP and nonAP creatures did more damage than the minimal and thus are unaffected. For heroes specifically, I think the question to ask is not "Is it ok that non-armor piercing creatures are now able to damage them almost as well as armor piercing creatures?" but "Is it ok that heroes don't take any damage at all from non-armor piercing creatures?" And for that the answer is obviously no. Most realms and wizards don't have the option to use armor piercing creatures and the human player will keep the heroes away from them even if an AI does have any. I don't like this solution very much but I don't know better.
