Hey guys,
I was trying to make some sense about the earthquake spell, and things didn't seem to be adding up. Am I missing something, or not doing the math correctly haha? What is described in the description/stats of the earthquake spell seems to be different than what is observed in game play. I will be focusing on walls here:
A lvl1 earthquake spell says it does 6% damage to remaining hitpoints, and does 4x damage to walls. This can be either interpreted as taking 24% damage away from walls, or taking 6% damage away from walls 4 times (0.94 ^ 4 = 0.78075, so that would be equivalent to 21.925%. I will show both below:
Lvl 1 Earthquake Spell Calculations:
Spells Used Wall Hitpoints Remaining (using 24%) Wall Hitpoints Remaining (using 21.925%) 0 100% 100% 1 100 * 0.76 = 76% 100 * 0.78075 = 78.075% 2 76 * 0.76 = 57.76% 78.075 * 0.78075 = 60.957% 3 57.76 * 0.76 = 43.898% 60.957 * 0.78075 = 47.592% 4 43.898 * 0.76 = 33.362% 47.592 * 0.78075 = 37.157% 5 33.362 * 0.76 = 25.355% 37.157 * 0.78075 = 29.010% 6 25.355 * 0.76 = 19.270% 29.010 * 0.78075 = 22.650% 7 19.270 * 0.76 = 14.645% 22.650 * 0.78075 = 17.684% 8 14.645 * 0.76 = 11.130% 17.684 * 0.78075 = 13.807%
Below is what I have observed in the game using lvl 1 Earthquake spells. I got these percentages by taking screenshots of the game after each spell, and using photoshop to count the pixels of the percent bar. I would say this is accurate to roughly 2% or less.
Lvl 1 Earthquake Spell Observations Vs. Calculations:
Spells Used Wall Hitpoints Remaining (using 24%) Wall Hitpoints Remaining (using 21.925%) Observed 0 100% 100% 100% 1 76% 78.075% 72% 2 57.76% 60.957% 53% 3 43.898% 47.592% 34% 4 33.362% 37.157% Destroyed
As you can see, what is observed in the game does not correlate with the claimed 6% damage (x4) at all. You can also notice that the observed percentage of damage taken away for each spell is not even a consistent number (1st spell appears to take away 28%, second spell takes away 26%, 3rd spell takes away a whopping 36%!, and then the 4th spell destroys the wall completely).
Now lets talk about the threshold at which the building collapses. In the earthquake spell description it mentions that buildings with low health will suddenly collapse. The reason for this is that if you only rely on a spell taking away a percentage, it will never reach 0 ever (its an asymptote), so there must be a threshold of some sort.
I did the above calculations with a Lvl4 spell as well, and the 3rd spell takes walls down to 18%, and the 4th spell destroys the wall. This would imply that the threshold percent we mentioned earlier is less than 18% (like 17%?). In order for lvl1 spells to get a wall down to 17% it would take 7 earthquake spells... but the observed shows it only takes 4.
And speaking of this threshhold percent, the observed threshold for lvl1 earthquake spell implies that walls will collapse at roughly 25 - 30%, but as you can see with lvl4 earthquakes - the 3rd spell takes walls down to 18% and the wall still remains. Is there different mechanics between lvl1 and lvl4? If that is the case, it almost seems better to leave the spell at lvl1! haha
So you might be wondering why I care about all of this. This brings up a lot of questions for me:
- Is it worth upgrading to lvl4? Some of the above information would go to show that keeping it at lvl1 is just fine, and better in some scenarios.
- Is it hard coded into the game that there is a spell counter on the walls, and if any wall gets touched by 4 earthquake spells then it is destroyed - regardless of the damage done to the wall?
- What if a wall is already at 72% damage (damaged more than the first spell would do), would it take 4x more earthquake spells to destroy it? It looks like it might.
- If you drop an earthquake spell on a wall that is heavily damaged in an attempt to collapse it, what is that threshold? According to a lvl1 earthquake its at 25-30%, and according to a lvl4 earthquake its at roughly 17%.
- Is there some kind of a bug/glitch going on here that supercell might want to know about?
So the only conclusion I can make at the moment is that the game mechanics for earthquake spells is completely different than what is described in the spell description. Let me know what you guys think
EDIT:
It was also brought up that it may be 4 multiplicative factors of 1.5% to get the 6%... which would be (1 - ((0.985)^4)^4) * 100 = 21.48%, which would make the discrepancy even larger.
Originally Posted by lasmite
