Follow-up test on the Spearmen attack speed indicates that attack interval likely matters


Yesterday, I made a [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/1cxruls/til_spearmen_with_shield_attacks_30_faster_than/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) on how Spearmen with shield has 30% faster attack interval than shieldless version.

But there were reports that attack intervals don't really matter, because units have different animation speeds, and that the devs have designed so that every unit attacks at nearly identical speed when you account for its animation length.

So I did some tests to confirm this. I made a mod to make both versions of Spearmen's melee stats identical, with the only difference being attack interval and animations.


The tests were done by fitting 2 of each Spearmen versions against AI's 4 shieldless versions 5 times to see which versions dealt more damage. There were probably much smarter ways to do this in retrospect, but oh well.


The shielded versions dealt about 14% more damage on average even though they have the same sheet stats aside from attack intervals. It's not as drastic as the 30% difference in attack interval would imply, but still seems like a significant difference.

Interestingly, the shielded ones always pushed deeper, like the screenshot above. My guess is it has something to do with the attack animation.

TLDR/Conclusion: The difference in attack intervals and animations matter, though it's not as simple as having 30% faster attack interval means 30% more DPS.