The Juggernaut Index: A Brand New Astounding Metric

Design
1

You’ve probably heard it before: is this game player-phase centric or enemy-phase centric? These terms tell which phase the player deals most of the damage on. Player Phase FE games usually have fewer, stronger enemies, while Enemy Phase games have a lot of cannon fodder that can be dispatched with a unit who has enough attack power and defense. A juggernaut. We’ve all seen these guys: Seth, FE7 Marcus, Titania, FE10 Haar, Xander, Ryoma, Jill, Milady, Percival, Robin… You know them.

People usually talk about this property of games in vague qualitative terms, as in “FE7 is more enemy-phase oriented than FE6”, or “Fates is more player-phase centric than Awakening”. But wouldn’t it be cool if we had actual numbers to compare them?

Fear not, my dear fellows! I’ve done some number crunching in a variety of FE games and come up with a most exquisite formula:

Juggernaut Index = (Damage dealt on enemy phase / Total damage dealt) x (401 x #Maps - #Turns) / (4 x #Maps)

So let’s break it down. The left-hand side of the formula is rather simple: add up all the damage you dealt on player phase and on enemy phase on a particular map, and divide the EP damage over the total (PP+EP). This is the ratio of damage dealt on enemy phase. At first I was happy enough with this simple formula, but then it hit me: your army isn’t much of a juggernaut if you’ve baited all the enemies one by one, adding up to a lot of turns spent.

That’s where the right-hand side of the formula comes in. It’s a multiplier that reduces the Juggernaut Index the more turns you take. It’s designed so that you get a maximum 100 index if you kill all the enemies on the map on the first turn (which of course isn’t gonna happen - it’s an idealized scenario).

Admittedly, the 401 and the 4 are arbitrary; it could be 101 and 1, 201 and 2, 301 and 3, 501 and 5, or whatever you want. It depends on how much you want to punish slow play (or reward fast play), and how big you want the numbers to be across the board. Or you can ignore this part of the equation entirely if you don’t care about turns spent and only want to focus on the damage.

Let’s bring up some actual examples that I’ve gathered from a few let’s plays. These are the numbers for the map Clash in Path of Radiance Maniac mode:

Turn 1

Player phase: 82
Enemy phase: 418

Turn 2

Player phase: 208
Enemy phase: 495

Turn 3

Player phase: 148
Enemy phase: 154

Turn 4

Player phase: 58
Enemy phase: 187

Turn 5

Player phase: 154
Enemy phase: 228

Turn 6

Player phase: 196
Enemy phase: 531

Turn 7

Player phase: 153
Enemy phase: 78

Turn 8

Player phase: 103
Enemy phase: 74

Turn 9

Player phase: 28

Total damage dealt: 3295
Damage dealt on player phase: 1130
Damage dealt on enemy phase: 2165

Here, the Juggernaut Index would be:
JI = 2165/3295 x (401-9)/4 = 64.3915…

The percentage of damage dealt on EP is 65.71%, and this was multiplied by the factor accounting for the number of turns (9).

Now these are the numbers of the ninja cave in Conquest Lunatic:

TURN 1

Enemy phase: 63

TURN 2

Player phase: 30

TURN 3

Player phase: 60
Enemy phase: 33

TURN 4

Enemy phase: 26

TURN 5

Player phase: 39

TURN 6

Player phase: 67
Enemy phase: 30

TURN 7

Player phase: 97
Enemy phase: 90

TURN 8

Player phase: 143
Enemy phase: 97

TURN 9

Player phase: 105
Enemy phase: 33

TURN 10

Player phase: 36
Enemy phase: 63

TURN 11

Player phase: 11

TURN 12

Player phase: 33

TURN 13

Player phase: 28

TURN 15

Player phase: 104

TURN 17

Enemy phase: 30

TURN 18

Enemy phase: 32

TURN 19

Player phase: 32
Enemy phase: 68

TURN 20

Player phase: 153

TURN 21

Player phase: 31
Enemy phase: 2

TURN 22

Player phase: 47
Enemy phase: 46

TURN 23

Player phase: 21

TURN 24

Enemy phase: 28

TURN 25

Player phase: 8

TURN 26

Player phase: 34

TURN 27

Player phase: 30

TURN 32

Player phase: 100

TURN 34

Player phase: 33

Total damage dealt: 1883
Damage dealt on player phase: 1242 (66%)
Damage dealt on enemy phase: 641 (34%)

The Juggeranut Index would now be:
JI = 641/1883 x (401-34)/4 = 31.2330…

And in Chapter 19 of Awakening Hard mode:

TURN 1

Player phase: 73
Enemy phase: 546

TURN 2

Player phase: 98
Enemy phase: 718

TURN 3

Player phase: 80
Enemy phase: 424

TURN 4

Player phase: 59
Enemy phase: 251

Total damage dealt: 2249
Damage dealt on player phase: 310 (14%)
Damage dealt on enemy phase: 1939 (86%)
Juggernaut Index = 1939/2249 x (401-4)/4 = 85.5694…

So now you can brag about your math skills when discussing FE games and maps with fellow FE enjoyers. Just drop the Juggernaut Index in a discussion and look like a NASA engineer.

8 Likes
2

is this… supposed to be a resource or something?

1 Like
3

I love this. It does actually feel useful.

1 Like
4

Now, while I see the potential on this, there are some sort of things that make me ask some things.

→ Is Overkill damage counted on this? As in characthers having the chance to proc skills that ramp up the damage in an agonizing amount despite not being a reliable source of damage for the Jugg. index. (Astra, Impale, crits, etc.)

→ There’s kind of no penalitzation on this by ending a chapter by losing multiple units, or disregarding player phase entirely - if you never attacked, surely your player phase damage amount’ll be 0.

Being honest, damage dealt feels like a very alterable situation, as you could defeat enemies on player phase through precise amounts of damage, while you could fight one single enemy on ep with, let’s say, 800 damage through multiple skills.

I’d say HP depleted would be something that could be slightly trusted more - or even count of enemies defeated on each phase.

5

Overkill damage is not counted. If the enemy has 20 HP and the player crits for 60 damage, it counts as 20 for the purposes of the Jugg Index. It effectively deals with enemy HP depleted.

I’m not sure what you mean on your second point.

I like the idea of enemies defeated per phase. Indeed, the JI is flawed - it doesn’t even take into account the varying number of reinforcements each map has. But it’s a start. I’m glad it has sparked this discussion.

6

The intention on that is that you could “technically” aim to rig the index by either disregarding player phase entirely (just moving to strategic points and aiming to get as many attacks on that phase as possible) or the inverse, sending, let’s say, Seth without weapons for meatshielding so everyone else can gang-up in.

Its also on that the current formula doesn’t take on possible losses - as in you losing a unit halfway does not enter a penalitzation on the index, despite technically hurting your attempt at a pp/ep playstyle.

7

Is it?

8

Using data from Kebe’s FE8 0% growths LTC playthrough, I calculated the Juggernaut Index for (almost) the whole game. (He still hasn’t released the final chapter.)

Total damage dealt: 12490
Damage dealt on player phase: 4163 (1/3)
Damage dealt on enemy phase: 8327 (2/3)
Total number of turns: 84
Total number of maps: 22

FE8 Jugg Index: 66.20

Twice as much damage was done in EP compared to PP, almost exactly.

1 Like
9

While true, l think that is why the researcher would use multiple Let’s Plays and playthroughs to accumulate an average for the game overall. l suppose the “Juggernaut” part of it isn’t the full focus, but merely a baseline name since that’s how Enemy Phase maps typically go. A single map played by a single user could certainly be rigged, but when it comes to determining the overall index of a map (or even game), that’s why the results would be averaged together from playthroughs unaware of the index.

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