Ogres: BR vs wage/cost

Right now I'm trying to design some custom units for an ogre-centered realm, but I already feel confused as to how the official units in the DoW books are calculated.

Light infantry ogres are 0.077 BR per troop, with a wage of 40 gp. This is somewhat less than the predicted wage of 55 gp based on the "720 x BR" formula for designing units. A similar situation arises for heavy infantry ogres, which have a predicted cost of 94 gp (instead of the listed 80 gp). This means that ogres are an "underpriced exotic". I'm trying to figure out if there's a reason for this, which I should carry over when designing other ogres, or if it's just a mistake.

Overall, I've always thought that ogres seem substantially underpriced relative to their effectiveness. That is, the combat utility of 120 ogres (2 companies) is substantially better than the utility of 120 bugbears (1 company), but with only a small difference in wages (120x36 gp vs 120x40 gp). Bumping up ogre wages to 55 gp would help with that (though ogres will still be pretty awesome). So I'm leaning toward thinking this should be just corrected as a mistake, if I have to house rule it. But I always like to check to see if there's a good rational for the rules-as-written before changing anything.

After playing around with the spreadsheet for a while, it looks like I can exactly reproduce the current stats of the ogre light infantry unit (AC, # of attacks, etc) using a combination of factors that gives a BR of 0.565 (vs 0.77 in the DoW table), and this gives a wage of 42 gp -- pretty close to the official value of 40. Before, when I was trying to match the published BR instead of the unit stats, I had to give it an extra attack.

So maybe it's just the printed BR that's wrong, and both the unit stats and wage/cost are correct (and ogres are just really OP by design!) I'm still not sure why the wage isn't 720*BR, though.

Hi! The answer is that troop wages take into account variance in supply costs. Ogres cost 16gp per month to supply, compared to about 2gp for an ordinary troop. So their cost is reduced by 15gp (with some rounding for easy of play). 

55gp - (16gp - 2gp) = 41gp, rounded to 40

94gp - (16gp - 2gp) = 80gp

This is explained in "Calculating Wages" section of Domains at War: Battles. The exact language:

Individual BR can be used to estimate an appropriate wage. For most creatures, monthly wages approximately equal their individual battle rating multiplied by 720. However, creatures which demand expensive supplies are paid less; decrease monthly wage by 1gp for each gp by which the creature’s monthly supply cost is in excess of 2gp. You may round values below 40gp to the nearest 3gp, and round values above 40gp to the nearest 5gp.

EXAMPLE: A heavy infantry soldier’s wage is (.017) x (720) 12.24, rounded to 12gp per month.

EXAMPLE: An ettin’s individual BR of 0.265 implies a wage of (0.265) x (720) 190.8gp per month. The ettin’s supply cost is 12gp per week, so the wage is reduced by [(12x4) -2] 46gp to 144.8gp per month. This rounds to 145gp per month.

I hope that clears it up!

 

 

That makes sense. Ogres are unusual, since they are the only non-cavalry type that have excessively high supply requirements. So they don't follow the same pattern as the other beastman types.

 

[quote="EHamilton"]

That makes sense. Ogres are unusual, since they are the only non-cavalry type that have excessively high supply requirements. So they don't follow the same pattern as the other beastman types.

[/quote]

Right. It's easy to miss. Sorry I didn't see this sooner and save you some spreadsheet time!