Combat Efficiency?

Farthest Frontier General Discussion
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“Combat Efficiency” is displayed in two locations in the game:

  1. On the barracks/fort under the company information
  2. In the Villager Happiness window

I’m currently on year 88 of my current playthrough (Trailblazer difficulty), and for the entire game, the “Combat Efficiency” for my Companies has been 81%. My Villager Happiness “Combat Efficiency” is 107%. I currently have five barracks, mostly Heavy Infantry with a few Light Infantry holdovers. I have one barracks of nothing but crossbows. All of them display 81%. For a very short time after loading my game, they were all at 79%. A minute later, they all went back to 81%.

Things I have confirmed that do NOT affect the number in the Barracks Company display:

  • Veterancy
  • Number of units in the company
  • Type of units in the company (mixing archers and infantry has no effect)
  • Overall Happiness or the number displayed in that screen
  • Years in the game
  • Technologies

Questions:

  1. What do these two numbers effect? Attack speed? Damage? Health? All of the above?

  2. How do these two numbers interact? I have seen the Happiness-based “Combat Efficiency” fluctuate, but the one displayed in the Company Barracks card has been pegged at 81% for 88+ years of gameplay. I’m assuming like most games they’re multiplied together? Are they the same stat? Is one more accurate than the other or displayed post-calculation?

  3. Does anyone have a source or reference from the devs in-game or any where else that explains what these numbers are? I googled and used the search function here, and the only mentions of combat efficiency come up when talking about Happiness, and none of those instances explain the stat.

Thanks to any who can shed some light on this. Really wish there were some in-game tool tips that explained these two numbers.

1 Like
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For the record, I did find both of these articles:

And as helpful as those both are, frustratingly, neither even mentions the “Combat Efficiency” stat in either article. Very mysterious stats.

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So I managed to answer my own question by examining the game’s code. I may not have this 100% correct as I just recently started looking at this, but, the gist of it is:

The number displayed in the company window is the average “CombatMultiplier” (this is what it’s called in the code) of all soliders, in all divisions, of the selected company. A division appears to be the logical grouping of soldiers by type (L.Infantry, H.Infantry, Archer, etc.)

The HappinessManager class has a GetCombatMultiplier() function which appears to be based off the same Happiness tracked for other villagers. This number is tied to the “Overall Happiness” value in the Happiness tooltip which appears when you hover over the drama masks in the top bar. Oddly, this number is not displayed in the Happiness breakdown which opens when you click this mask.

To validate my findings and see this value change, you can just turn on/off any policy like “Rations” which affects “global Happiness”.

This was an interesting find for me, because it means that even in the Happiness breakdown window, if each individual category is 100%, you can still end up with a net “Overall Happiness” less than 100% due to policies, which in turn has an effect on “Combat Efficiency” (or ‘effectiveness’ as it’s called in the code).

Finally, what does ‘combat efficiency’ (or ‘effectiveness’) actually do? Olleus already answered that question in the Combat Calculations wiki page. That page was up-to-date as of 1.0.4 and may need to be revisited after 1.1 goes live to see if the formula receives any changes. According to his formula, it’s used in the damage calculation. It has nothing to do with attack speed or health.

Proof: The DamageableComponent class has the functions TakeDamge() and TakeDamageInternal() used for damage calculations where you can find the GetCombatMultiplier() function popping up again. This is the exact same function used by the CombatManager class function GetCombatEffectivenessUIValues() to display this CombatModifier value to the UI.

Edit: After digging around some more and comparing this function to the one used to display the combat efficiency value in the Villager Happiness window, this gets kind of convoluted. For reasons which elude me, the value shown in the barracks company window seems to be for display only, and is clamped between 0 and 100, whereas the value in the Villager Happiness window is not clamped. The actual value used in combat is indeed the one Olleus found, and it’s only for the individual villager. Neither the average happiness in the Villager Happiness window nor the clamped “average company happiness” in the barracks window are actually used in the damage calculation. Sheesh.

Simple right?

TL,DR:

  • “Combat Efficiency” in the company window is an average CombatMultiplier of all soldiers in the selected company.
  • It is related to the “Overall Happiness” stat visible in the “Villager Happiness” tooltip, which is affected by policies like “Rations”.
  • It affects damage calculations in combat.