New Mod Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Babies!

[MattCaspermeyer]

I think in this case, your +1 poison and +1 physical damage may have been coming into play, as I'm pretty sure these damage bonuses only apply to base attack and not to talents (by the way, these types of bonuses are awesome on low level troops).

Horseman damage is 12-16, but with +2 your damage was technically 14-18 (+16.7% to +14.3%), while charge damage was still 12-16.

I checked some things out yesterday, and I couldn't get the horseman base attack damage to exceed the charge damage for the same hex distance, but I didn't have any bonuses.

Here are some numbers that seem to verify what is happening in your situation:

Base Attack Damage / Charge Damage: 14-18 (with your +2) / 12-16 (no bonuses)
+10% / +15%: 15.4-19.8 / 13.8-18.4
+20% / +30%: 16.8-21.6 / 15.6-20.8
+30% / +45%: 18.2-23.4 / 17.4-23.2
+40% / +60%: 19.6-25.2 / 19.2-25.6
+50% / +75%: 21.0-27.0 / 21.0-28.0
+60% / +90%: 22.4-28.8 / 22.8-30.4

So you can see that you only do more maximum damage with charge at the +40%/+60% and up cases whereas the minimum damage is always equal or lower unless you go to +60% / +90% (which would require you to have a speed bonus to your horseman). If you have other bonuses (sounds like you may have some additional melee damage bonuses) then the base attack will most likely always be higher damage because 14-18 might be 15-19 or even higher.

I'm pretty sure this is what is going on...

/C\/C\

Originally Posted by Kiras

What you say makes sense, however, there was no backing up in my experiments. I just tried this again: Walking a horseman forward one hex at a time and comparing charge vs normal attack. When he was really close to the enemy, he didn't have the movement left to back up, but normal attack was superior with 1 hex empty. I launched the attack and there was no backing up movement.

In any case, charge is useful for the no retaliation and being able to cross the map with almost no movement left, so I use both still.