Olden Era Combat System Guide: How Fights Actually Work

Olden Era combat looks like the Heroes games you remember, but several pieces underneath are new or work differently than you’d expect. Turn order is split into two stats that do separate jobs. Retaliation has a hard limit you can exploit. Ranged attacks get punished at both extremes of range. If you’re losing fights you thought were even, it’s usually because one of these rules bit you and you didn’t notice.

This is the map of the whole system. The deeper mechanics each have their own guide, and I’ll point you to them as we go.

The battlefield and turns

Fights happen on a hexagonal grid. Your stacks and the enemy’s stacks take turns acting, and within a round each unit gets to move and act once. The hex layout matters more than a square grid because flanking angles and blocking lanes open up that a grid wouldn’t allow. Where you stand is a real decision, not an afterthought.

Turn order: Initiative first, Speed breaks ties

This trips up everyone coming from older Heroes games. Two separate stats decide turns, and they’re decoupled:

Initiative is the main driver. Higher Initiative means a unit acts earlier in the round. This is what actually sets the order.
Speed is the tiebreaker. When two units have the same Initiative, the faster one goes first.

So a fast unit is not automatically a quick-acting unit. A stack can move a long way across the field but still act late if its Initiative is low, and a slow-moving stack with high Initiative can act early. Read both numbers. Don’t assume the unit that covers the most ground gets the first hit.

Wait and Skip

Two ways to not act right now, and they do different things:

Wait drops your unit to the back of the current turn order. Use it when you want to see what the enemy does first, hold a stack until the right opening, or bait out a move before you commit.
Skip ends the unit’s turn entirely. No move, no attack. Sometimes the smartest play is to sit still behind cover and let the fight come to you.

Wait is the one people underuse. Holding your initiative and acting after the enemy reshuffles is often worth more than a hasty attack.

Attack types and retaliation

How a unit attacks decides whether it eats a counterattack:

Melee attacks provoke retaliation. You hit them, they hit back, unless they’ve already retaliated this round.
Long Reach attacks strike from one hex away and take no retaliation. Reach units are a big deal for this exact reason. They poke without paying for it.
Ranged attacks fire from any distance but come with two penalties. Up close, shooting at an adjacent enemy costs you 50% of your damage, so don’t let archers get pinned into point-blank shots. Far away, every hex beyond three drops your damage by 10%, capped at a 50% reduction. There’s a sweet spot in the middle.

Now the rule that changes everything: most units only retaliate once per round. After a stack has hit back once, it can’t punish the next melee attacker until its turn comes around again. That single fact is the foundation of clean, lossless fighting, and there’s a whole guide on weaponizing it in zero-loss battles.

The damage formula

You don’t need to do mental math mid-fight, but knowing the shape of it tells you what to stack. Core damage is driven by:

(20 + Attack) / (20 + Defense)

That ratio compares the attacker’s Attack against the defender’s Defense, and your hero’s Attack and Defense feed into every stack you own. After that base ratio, the game layers on several multipliers: an attack-type multiplier, a tag-based multiplier, an independent multiplier, and a luck multiplier. Tag-based reductions cap out at 90%, meaning even into a hard counter your hit lands for at least 10% of its value. And every single hit deals at least 1 damage, so nothing is ever fully shrugged off.

The takeaway: raising your Attack and lowering enemy effective Defense both bend that ratio in your favor, and the multipliers stack on top. Small edges compound.

Obstacles, walls, and sieges

Battlefields aren’t empty. Obstacles block movement and line of sight, which you can use to wall off a ranged stack or force a charging enemy to take the long way around. In sieges, walls and gates change the whole flow. Your ranged units can chip from safety while melee waits for the gate to break. Defending a town with walls is a real edge, so factor it in before you decide whether to sally out or hold.

The three systems that swing fights

Three more mechanics sit on top of raw stats and quietly decide close battles. I’m naming them here so you know they exist, with dedicated guides for each:

Focus Points are a combat resource you build during the fight and spend on powerful unit abilities and hero skills, mapped to the 1 through 0 hotkeys. Spells draw from mana, which Knowledge sets, completely separate from Focus. Full breakdown in the Focus Points guide.
Morale gives a unit a chance to act twice or, when negative, a chance to lose its action outright. Your army composition feeds straight into it. See the Morale and Luck guide.
Luck gives lucky and unlucky hits a chance to swing your damage up or down. Covered alongside Morale in that same guide.

Pulling it together

Win fights by reading both Initiative and Speed instead of guessing, abusing the one-retaliation-per-round limit, keeping archers out of point-blank and extreme range, and bending that Attack-over-Defense ratio with hero stats and positioning. Master those and the rest of combat starts making sense. Specific numbers shift across the current Early Access build, so when an exact value matters, check the in-game unit card.