Today I continued the investigation on terrain advantage for legionary battles, introducing slope-aware charge momentum. Soldiers now carry some of the force from their approach into their first blows, gaining an advantage when charging downhill and losing some momentum when pushing uphill.

The results from the previous tests showed uphill sides winning most of the times while charging against each other (good), but when testing charging vs. idle (our eternal headache) the height advantage wasn’t counting. It seemed an idle army gains no meaningful advantage from simply standing on high ground against a charging opponent, neither the other way around.

The next step was to make the approach itself matter. A foot soldier who runs downhill into combat now carries extra force into his first blows, while a soldier charging uphill gets less. This momentum fades over approximately 2.5 seconds, so it primarily affects the opening exchanges.

The initial coefficients were much too strong with momentum alone producing an 83–93% advantage, so I reduced the momentum effect, while also dialing back the existing terrain effects.

With the terrain and charge mechanics in place, the next question is whether to tackle stamina or tighten those remaining matchup numbers.