Melth posted:

I think it's worth noting that, as Orv said, a lot of this doesn't really matter that much. If you follow the basic counters the game tells you about and make sensible decisions, you'll generally do just fine. There are exceptions like the silliness of spearmen only having a 10% bonus against cavalry. That's ridiculous when we're told they're only good against cavalry and when the other units with similar descriptions trained by the same building have 300% bonuses. And having a unit like a Fire Giant secretly do triple damage (or better) all the time is kind of an issue too.

My impression of the AoM community is that they've never been all that fact-based and they tend to make decisions based on gut feelings or anecdotal evidence of what beats what rather than numbers- which is actually a good approach when so much about the in-game numbers is wrong.

For me as a guy who's into game design though, yeah this is ridiculous. When I make a game, I try to provide players all the information they need in a convenient and organized manner so they can make intelligent decisions instead of guesses and gut reactions. I hate opaque or falsely described mechanics in other games I play that have them- talking about them was part of my Civ 2 Let's Play and a smaller part (because most mechanics are on the table or at least easy to figure out) in Fire Emblem. One mitigating factor here though is that at least there are some semi-convenient ways to test things and learn the truth.