Should You Target Strong or Weak Units First? 

Generaly, in any game with a decision which units to kill first, the ones who reduce the damage output of the enemy the quickest are the best target. That means you need to get the highest damage per second reduction per second. To get that we have to divide the damage per second by the time to eliminate that damage source. So the best targets are high damage per second and low time to kill, and the worst ones are the low damage per second and high time to kill.

I thought this is some sort of military strategy video. But no! This is a genuine AOE video! At 2017!

I thought I'd make a "puzzle" video where you have a situation and think about what you'd do - then I try it out both ways and you can see if your choice was right ;) Maybe a fun future series if there are some other good topics?

So basically: -Units that do lower damage get a lower priority -Units that do higher damage get higher priority -Units that have low health get higher priority -Units that have high health get higher priority So targeting order: #1 high damage, low health troops #2 high damage, high health troops #3 low damage, low health troops #4 low damage, high health troops Reason for putting low damage, low health under high damage high health is to minimise wasting ammo

Before watching: Answer is always attack what reduces enemies dps/time the quickest. Glasscannon units like archers, onagers, shotels etc should be killed first, tanky units like elephants, rams last.

Your goal should always be to reduce your opponents dps as quickly as possible. so it's not really about killing weak or strong units first, but instead all about dps/health(corrected for armour, so basically tdk) of a unit. the higher that fraction the more priority you should give said unit in targeting.

If video games have taught me anything, it's to pick off the weaker enemies first then go for the stronger ones. Though if it takes 8 shots to kill an archer in feudal from full hp if you had more than 9 archers you could set 9 to focus down the archers and then the rest on a skirm. And the same for castle age.

a huskarl is just a love child of an elite skirmisher and a woad raider

I think strong vs weak units is quite a broad term and can vary. What you are looking for i DPS to Tank ratio in an inverse relation. In the example you used, skirmishers have a slightly higher DPS, so one would assume they should be the first target. Their pierce armour makes it so they have the equivalent of about 5 times more tankiness however, so the archers, even with the lower DPS, become the better target. It's why in the militia / huscarl example, it was better to attack the huscarls. The militia DPS was so low, they barely posed a threat compared to the huscarls. Add to that the fact that the wasted shots served the purpose of essentially making the militia tankier than they were makes huscarls the optimum target in this scenario.

I live for spirits intro...

You should always attack the one unit that has the highest attack/defence relation. You want to reduce the enemy attack output the fastest way possible to reduce accumelated damage over time, therefore you if you attack the one with the highest attack/defence relation, that will decrease the enemy damage output the most, fastest. Even if the difference is small, the effect will be large as your relative advantage will increase relative to your advantage (if one archer survives two volleys longer, that means he might deal enough damage to delay your next archers loss for another volley). A good example is 1 siege onager and 1 siege ram vs 20 arbalests. Naturally you would target the SO first, as the SR's ATT/DFC is really low to units, while the SO's is high. However, if it was the same enemy units against 4 close castles. Now, it would be smarter to take out the SR, since it's ATT/DFC just became higher than the SO's (I'm not completely sure if this is true, but it's certainly a completely changed scenario from the one with the units).

I just send in 50 20 damage zerglings and hope he has no air units

"You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down." -Zapp Brannigan

WEEE SPIRIT OF THE LAW UPLOADED A NEW VIDEO! NOW I CAN UPGRADE MY INTELLIGENCE

At the end I was expecting some kind of graph, something like a curve showing when you should start focusing on stronger units first Guess this channel has spoiled me into expecting graphs and maths everywhere

Very simple - attack the unit with highest ratio of damage to defense.

im neither sure what game this is, nor what hes really talking about, but somehow i still really enjoyed this video. shoutout to anyone who got this video in their recommended too

You should make a bigger video where you can talk about the dps/hp relationship in units and how it affect optimal focus. Great job on this one still.

One of the more practical episodes! Well done :)

I love Spirit's intro montage, so awesome!!!!

Whether you should choose unit A or B is merely a function of A's attack and armor, B's attack and armor, and your attack and armor. It just so happens that in this case, the overwhelming armor of B (skirmishers) causes it to fall in the favor of killing archers. It'd be cool to try to derive a closed form equation that tells you how many archers you'd have left after the fight - perhaps using Lanchester's laws.

I though this thing was obvious but good point with the militia bait tho. It is a tactic That I use in other video games where I use cavalry or sometimes shield walls of infantry to distract my AI oponent while the archers/crossbowmen volley fire on them.

Excellent video. Very informative. Keep it up. I am sure that many thousands eagerly await your next video. :)

This is really helpful! I've always been one to target the really tanky units first, believing that would be most effective. Thank you for this!

I see it as a DnD perspective where players often can hit well above their weight in terms of challenge rating when fighting a boss because of action economy where the players will have several actions per round (1 per player assuming no magic shenanigans) and the big bad boss only gets 1 (assuming no magic shenanigans). So eliminating the archers first is taking away action economy from the enemy

I will bring you the counter question: Say, youre in a 1vs1, and you saw an archer rush coming from your enemy coming from miles away, and you decide to greet him with skirmishers. You have 6 skirms and your enemy has 3 archers and 3 skirms of his own, identical upgrades on both sides. In this case, you should be focusing down the enemy skirmishers first, for their bonus against AR units piercee your skirmisher armor, while your armor comfortable shrugs off archer arrows As a guy that likes rushing a lot and mainly plays infantry civs, such as aztecs and celts, in a skirmisher battle, you should be prioritizing the enemy skirmishers first to avoid greater casualties

in (the art of war) written by Sun Tzu in the 6th century BC, he does argue that you should focus your strength to target the enemy weaknesses, while trying to make up for your own weaknesses.

Love it when you put the minutes where the answer come out in the video description

Before I watch this, I'm guessing weak.

answer : just do what Biper does micro everything and kills their army without losing any of your archer

I haven’t seen this game before, but this video looks interesting enough for me to look for more

oh snap, looks like I just found a great youtuber! Look forward to scouring through your vids now

I wish you could research something that would make troops automatically focus fire, but only fire as many arrows as necessary to kill an enemy.

0:48 Just use Kratos with a lightsaber and you'll win every fight.

keep up the good work even though i bet its hard to find ideas after awhile :P

Dude 2 years past and you are still the best

Road to 1.8k?

You picked a very specific case here. If you had the critical mass to kill the skirms with one volley, you would be better off killing them first.

Thank you for adding the counter example. It makes me think about hallucinated units in SC2.

Spirit of the Law intros are the only one I do not skip on youtube.

I need to go to get food for the next week. Then I saw you uploaded a new video. Seems like I'll be starving next week.

Can your next video be a Malians overview?

So this is why I was so good at Empire at War, I always focus fired the weak units and turrets on stations first.

I learned this years ago in as it is a valuable skill in strategy games you always kill the high dpm yet squishy units first, or another way to put it "smash the glass cannons first".

*In short: Always attack the weakest first, unless that is overkill (wasted damage).* Is that a correct summary?

You missed a very crucial element in your example, which is offense vs defense, or in other words why is unit A strong against unit B. While it's true that Skirmishers have bonus damage vs archers, they're also significantly tankier thanks to their extra pierce armor. You can ask the question of which of these 2 elements is more significant in the Skirmisher vs Archer scenario, and your test proved that the extra armor is more significant than the extra damage. Same deal with the Huskarl, the extra pierce armor is more signifcant than the extra damage. The problem is that you used Militias alongside the Huskarls rather than Champions, with Champions I suspect you'd have seen the same result as with the Skirmishers. However these are 2 rather extreme examples of counter units having both an offensive and a defensive advantage against their counter. In the majority of cases counter units only deal extra damage with no extra defenses. For example the Spear line vs Cavalry, the Archer line vs the Spear line, etc. Thus when you take extra defenses out of the equation it suddenly makes much more sense to go after the counter units first as they're significantly more threatening yet die just as quickly. TL : DR stronger and weaker are too generic of terms to be of any significance here. It's mixing 2 entirely different concepts, 1 of which is tanks vs damage dealers like in classic MMOs and the other is counter units. Tanks, as their name suggests, are supposed to soak up damage and are therefore the last units you should target. Counter units on the other hand are the best damage dealers against your own troops, therefore they're the first units you should target. Skirmishers and Huskarls happen to be among the anomalies of units that are both counter units and tanks. To isolate the tank issue you'd need a test of Champions vs fewer Champions and a War Elephant for example, in which case it's obvious the War Elephant should be left for last. To isolate the counter unit issue you'd need a test of Paladins vs Champions and Halberdiers for example in which case it's obvious the Halberdiers should be targeted first. Mixing the 2 issues together simply makes no mathematical sense and in fact answer a completely different question than the one you were asking which is which is more significant: offense or defense, nothing to do with stronger and weaker units.

wow bro that is very help full not only in this game ty keep up the good work

Nicely presented. In games I usually go the route of prioritising the enemies which have the highest damage output vs HP ratio (or instead of high damage output could be any crippling status effect that can really mess up your strategy). It's easier to see this in turn-based games, where you ideally want to beat your enemies in as few turns as possible to minimise how many free hits they deal to your team.

I think with +1 defense skirms you're better off just running away, a much better question imo would be with skirms/archers with only fletching, so the archers deal 2 damage per hit (twice as much) meaning it might be better to focus fire down the skirms first because of their higher bonus damage.

It is bad to generalise this one. Use a formula instead. Target's dps / amount of hits to kill target If this calculation give high result, flag the unit as glass cannon. If it give low, flag the unit as tank. Always focus glass cannons before tanks - any gamer in any game

Dude you're like an AOE Scientist. awesome man. earned a new subscriber!

This is actually boss strat for most rts games. Good vid.

Always kill weaker characters first in any strategy game (assuming we're talking pve). The faster you take out enemies the less damage you take. Bottom line.

you are usually pretty good with these calculations, but this time you messed up heavily. first you find out that it is good to kill the ones first that go down quickly. then you say that the example with the ridiculously weak militia went the other way and think it is because of the wasted arrows. well, the wasted arrows make up for a bit of the reason, sure. but the actual exeplenation is far simpler. because it is not about killing as many enemies as you can as quickly as possible, but about getting their damage output on your troops down as quickly as possible. so, if it is skirmishes and archers against range, you have one unit type that dies quickly and deals a lot of damage and a second unit type that survives longer and also does less damage. the obvious choice is to kill the archers to get the damage output of the enemy down as quickly as possible. then in the example with the militias: the militias do die quickly but they also do not deal very much damage. hence, killing a militia does not siginificantly drop the enemys damage output. the huskarls do survive longer but a dead huskarl actually significantly drops the enemys damage output. that is why it makes sense to ignore them first. you basically just looked at defensive stats instead of taking the attack into consideration. and that makes all the difference. I really do not know why you did not think of that, as you usually tend to think of everything relevant. to be perfectly honest, if I were you, I would redo this video

I'm actually surprise of how useful this video is

Always wanted to know this. Now i do thanks mate

“It never hurts to see a counter-example” is solid wisdom

What a useful video!

Something I learned a long time while playing Halo at higher difficulties: you want to reduce the number of guns pointing in your direction as quickly as possible. This improves your overall chance of survival, and this video helps to illustrate that.

Nice job. I will try it next time I play

Thanks mann this was useful

This was the first video on this channel I saw and I didn’t even know about aoe2 at the time

Awesome video! I picked up the convention of targeting weak enemies before strong ones from my time playing SWTOR, barring special mechanics, but it's good to see that hold true in with the numbers in AoE2 as well. Numbers advantage is no joke - there's a multiplicative factor in force concentration such that 2:1 is roughly a 4:1 advantage. When the enemy elements' offensive and defensive capacities are scaling roughly equally, that is when there aren't glass cannons or bullet sponges to consider, you want to be focusing the weakest elements first to reduce their strength relative to yours in the fastest way possible.

This guy and his friendly or "trivia" music themes are awesome.

Nice little video :)

This just confirms the cardinal rule of damage-dealing I have ever followed: target the weak first unless they are the tank.

Love this game great video fantastic strategies well done developers and uploader

thats the first video from Age of Empires I've ever watched and I don't even play the game, but it had numbers and theory so have a like

I play Warcraft 3 and this is a good informative video, thanks!

You definitely deserve more Subs

ya know i found this video some time ago but forgot to click on it or something - a few weeks later i think of the title... had to try and guess like 10 different ones lmfao great vid btw

So as a general rule you would look at something like time to kill (ttk) divided by dps. When one of the enemy units takes double the ttk, but has 3 times the dps than their other units, focus it. If it is the other way around, focus the other units. Where it get's really complicated, is when you yourself have a mix of units, so the enemy dps varies depending on what of your units are attacked first.

That explains why some rts games you have tanks that can taunt enemies into attacking it for a moment, preventing them from picking off the weak ones

The rule is generally that you target the easier targets to pick off. In most games- whether it it first person shooters, RPGs, real time strategy, etc- having more units means more actions. More actions means they can murder (or depending on the game, debuff, stun, etc) you. Less opponents means less actions they can throw at you. They are killing you slower, which gives you more time to kill them. Of course, other considerations come into play- ranged units over melee if you have the distance, AoE over others because their actions just count for more, etc.

I'm just blown away by how many people STILL play this fav of my childhood....

Sun Tzu says to attack where they are weakest and to avoid what is strongest. But if you have walls and castles then you should still make sure you have the means to attack their siege weapons and hope that they are stupid enough to try and storm your positions without them.

Cool bro, I'm impressed

I was expecting some calculous, but instead I got this piece of work.

I wish there was a channel similar like this for ao3

So many videos lately :D

I could actually see somebody like you running into this kind of problem against bots, saving the game, doing all the calculations, come back three days and hundreds of tests later and finish that encounter.

Idk why this was on my recommended since I don't watch stuff like this but thanks for the good tips

Interesting recommendation, RU-vid 🤔 Great video ☺👍 It takes me back to the mid-2000s when I was introduced to AOE by my math teacher in high school. Never played seriously, though. Nostalgiaaaa 😄 AOE games are so fun. And I just remembered introducing my cousin to the game too.

very interesting! as a conclusion we can say that it depends on the ratio btw hp and attack

Have always done this in every single game I've played. From RTS to FPS. Thanks for actually doing the math! The only exception I can think of right now is when the "strong unit" does Area Damage. As long as the difference in HP between it and the other enemy units isn't like Boss unit vs its minions. It all comes down to the rate you reduce the enemy's Damage per Second.

I think this applies in a lot of games. I imagine I'll be doing it more consciously in the future.

I guess it depends on the defense to damage ratio of the units. The one with low defens/damage ratio are the first to target.

I think it is all about attack Vs tankiness ratio. Fragile units with high attack should always be prioritized in order to reduce enemy firepower, while tanky units with a low attack (such as skirmishers) should be low priority targets.

Ok Spirit uplouded another video :)

Spirit Of The Law shows us why maths is important, even you won't become a teacher or whatever. He uses his intelligence and intuition to blame the developers and other people who express imprecise. I play AoM but your channel quality is so good bringing me more and more ideas and understandig math and the game at an very interessting level. You can use your skills for this channel but i think you should consider using your talent on varios ways! We should all appreciate the work Spirit put into his videos, because its hours and hours of video making, voice acting, research and thinking about the themes! I give you my award of approval: Sic itur ad astra!

You know a channel is good when you still watch the video even tho you are not interested in the game.

I don't even know which game this is and I haven't watched the video yet, but in my personal experience it's better to take out the weakest enemies first so they aren't pestering you. After watching, this is actually accurate to my experiences of pvp in WoW

rule of thumb is take the easy DPS off the field. an enemy with 1 hp in games can still typically still deal full damage.

It basically comes down to how well you know the units and what outcome you're looking to achieve.

Need to do a second one, this time for melee units, stuff like camels and light cavalry vs knights.

This is the same strategy Napoleon used. He would join 2 battalions to attack 1 enemy battalion. This would result only in 20% loss per battalion compared to around 80% loss if he would go 1 on 1. The trick is as enemy forces are getting smaller, the less of a chance to get your soldiers killed.

hey spirit, i subscribed when you only had 1500 subs. last year when you started focusing more on skylines i unsubscribed along with stopping play of aoe2, i was happy to have stumbled back to your channel and saw your new vids. made me instantly re-sub and play a game of aoe2 on hd! keep up the good work! oh and if you could talk to the powers that be to finally fix the beserker that would be great =)

Best Intro EVER

I havent played this game in 20 years. Glad to see it hasn’t changed.

I propose a metric for use in this scenario, "Damage per time to kill" or DPTTK. This would be defined per enemy unit as: [unit DPS / [ [unit effective hp / your total damage (rounded up to whole number) ] / your attack speed ] ] if accounting for overkill. Or simply [ unit DPS / [unit effective hp / your total DPS ] ] ignoring overkill or if using mixed attack speed army. Using this, you simply attack the unit with the highest DPTTK