I'm working on creating a custom setting for my next ACKS campaign, and part of that is creating some new mercenary units. However, I'm having some trouble calibrating my calculation spreadsheet to some of the actual troop types, particularly for cavalry. For oen thing, I'm getting a BR per trooper of 0.105 for cavalry instead of 0.103, which doesn't sound liek much, but is the difference between a company BR of 6.5 instead of the correct 6.0.
Can I have a worked example of how the Melee Value for Heavy Cavlary is calculated, since I'm pretty sure that's where the variance is coming from?
Hi James! You're getting the mathematically correct value. The official spreadsheet I work from yields 0.105. However, I manually re-calibrated some of the cavalry battles based on playtesting, and the re-calibrated values are the ones that appear in the rules.
Under FINAL NOTES in D@W: Battles, I explained: "No formula can account for all of the interplay of different factors. At best, it provides a useful benchmark. The Judge should freely adjust the calculated battle ratings whenever magical abilities, special circumstances, or the experience of actual play suggests an adjustment is appropriate. Several of the BRs for standard units were adjusted after play testing, mostly by less than 5% but in a few cases (notably human light cavalry) by as much as 30%. We hope that between the formula in this chapter and the hundreds of examples in the D@W: Campaigns Troop Characteristic Summaries and Exotic Creature Roster that we have provided sufficient information for Judges to create and customize units for their own campaigns."
If you're building custom units, it's up to you to decide how you'd like to handle. The most important factors are that wages and BR are in alignment and that identically-statted troops have identical BRs.