How Damage Works

Lilith has never published the literal damage equations, so everything here is a working model that reproduces observed in-game behaviour. Its one governing principle: percentage bonuses of the same type are SUMMED into a single category total, and the resulting category multipliers are then MULTIPLIED against each other.

Every attack% you own — academy tech, commander skills, talents, gear, titles, VIP, runes, civilisation and alliance buffs — lands in the same sum. A worked archer-nuke march (Qin Shi Huang + Yi Seong-Gye):

Damage rises with your effective attack measured against the defender’s effective defence, then picks up its cross-category multipliers. Skill damage occupies its own lane: it multiplies active-skill hits only, never normal attacks or counterattacks.

The Damage Factor is set by the skill’s level and is independent of the enemy’s troop count. Two practical consequences: skill-damage% is gold on a nuker with a big active (YSG’s +24% from gear multiplies his entire active lane), and worthless on a commander whose skills carry no damage factor at all — a pure buffer like Scipio Africanus gains nothing from it.

Because bonuses add within a category, each new point is diluted by every point you already own. The real gain of adding +x points to a category whose current total is T points:

A defence-reduction debuff (“shred”) subtracts from the DEFENDER’s summed category, so it multiplies your effective damage no matter how tall your own attack stack already is:

A defender at D = 160,000 hit with a 20% shred drops to 128,000 — and every hit from every march in the fight benefits. This is why a maxed +150% attacker who would gain only ~4% from another +10% attack instead reaps the full multiplicative swing from a shred deputy: Philip II and Liu Che scale disproportionately into the late game precisely because they operate on the opponent’s denominator.

Active skills fire the instant the rage bar reaches the skill’s cost (1,000 for most commanders); surplus above the cap is wasted. Over a fight, total skill output is governed by one ratio:

Rage comes from normal attacks (~100 per hit), counterattacks (uncapped per turn — being engaged by several enemies charges you faster), damage taken, and restoration effects. Rejuvenate returns 60 rage per cast, 120 with it on both paired commanders; Sun Tzu Prime’s hit-based restoration is effectively a built-in Horn of Fury. Lowering the cost or raising generation multiplies total skill output — the single biggest damage lever in the game, worth more than any one +10% attack bonus.

Severely wounded troops are routed by combat CONTEXT, not a ratio. The death fraction φ (dead = φ × severely wounded) by situation:

The same battle that costs you nothing defending your own city (30,000 severely wounded, all hospitalised) loses all 30,000 permanently when you attack an enemy city. That asymmetry is the entire argument for hospital capacity before KvK, and for never open-field-attacking a city or holding a Level 3 pass without healing reserves in place.