I recently purchased BOW and there are a number of things about the game that do not make sense to me. Most of these revolve around the dice system as it pertains to units of different experience levels. I noticed in game play that there seemed to be virtually no difference between green and blue units in terms of their abilities to score hits. Furthermore, red units- the heavily armored elite veterans, seemed to miss the most often and in general be no more effective than green and blue units. I did some math and made the following discoveries.

Green units have a 25% chance of inflicting 0 damage.

Blue units have a 24% chance of inflicting 0 damage.

Red units have a 32% chance of inflicting 0 damage

The most elite units are the most likely to fail to inflict and damage in combat. Now, you might think that this would be balanced out by the possibility of doing more damage. (Blue units and red units roll more dice, but are less likely to score hits on each individual die.) However, a little more math will reveal the following:

All units are about equally likely to inflict one or two damage- they are within a few percentage points of each other. (Red suffers slightly here.) When it comes to inflicting maximum damage, Blue units will score 3 damage 5% of the time. So, one in twenty attacks it makes a difference if a unit is blue rather than green . but about 93% of the time, it doesn't matter. Red units only have a .0039% chance of inflicting maximum damage. One out of every 238 times a red unit attacks, it will really show its value. One the otherhand, it missed completely 1 out of every 3 attacks. Blue and green units only miss 1 out of every 4 attacks. Add to this the fact that red units are slower and less maneuverable than blue and green units and it looks distinctly like blue units may actually be better then red and that green are not far behind.

Another concern: archers. It seems silly to me that archers are just as effective in close combat as heavily armored, veteran knights. In BOW when a block of heavily armored, veteran knights crashes into a line of inexperienced, lightly armoured archers there is a 1/3 chance that the knights will fail to harm the archers in any way. The archers then, while the knights are engaging them in hand to hand combat- are actually more likely to inflict at least one casualty on the veteran knights than the veteran knights were on the archers. This makes no sense. Archers should be vulnerable in close combat- especially to mounted troops- and missile troops should not be just as effective in hand to hand as mounted knights, or melee troops.

I am sorry to say, I think you are playing the game incorrectly. Using your calculations, it looks like you are playing such that a green attacker needs to roll green shields for hits, a blue attacker blue shields for hits, etc (not considering valor, of course). This isn't the case. Successful hits are determined by the rank of the target unit being attacked. Thus, attackers score hits on target green rank units when rolling green shields, target blue rank units when rolling blue shields, etc. (again ignoring valors). The rank of the attacker is irrelevant except for determining the number of unmodified attacking dice rolled. Thus, higher ranking attackers (ie. red vs green) roll more attack dice and will have a greater chance of scoring a hit, assuming the same rank of target unit. Hope this helps...

Thanks so much for clearing this up! I am relieved to know that the mistake is mine, because the game was essentially unplayable the way I understood the rules.