- A reference guide and manual in Russian for Heroes 3.

I searched for the original source of information but couldn't find it right away. However, I remember the wording almost verbatim: "Only 3 factors affect the damage from ranged towers: the Air Shield spell, petrification, and the hero's armor skill and specialization. All of them should reduce damage, but in reality, they increase it." The range of tower damage values does create a problem for testing. Plus, "it can be higher than the upper limit, but never goes below the lower limit." This may be related to the damage calculation algorithm and its rounding. If the base damage of a tower is, say, 10-15, then the actual damage may be in the range of 10-17...18 (approximately). To determine the influence of a particular factor, you need to change each parameter one at a time, to the extent that the value goes beyond the base damage range. For example, for the archery skill, take expert level (+50%) and 3 artifacts (+30%) - a total of +80%, the damage range will already be 18-27 (displayed in the tooltip). But if, at the same time, it only deals 10-15...17 damage to a monster (any, including a catapult), then you can be sure that the skill is not working. The same applies to the attack and defense parameters of monsters and the hero. However, increasing a parameter by 10% (base archery) might not give anything. This is probably related to the rounding algorithm. For example, if you increase defense (+20%), for a peasant with 1 defense, it adds 20%, i.e., +0.2, but not less than +1 (it indicates). For a monster with 9 defense, it should be +1.8, but after rounding, it also indicates only +1. And if the monster's defense is 10, then it will already be +2. The armor skill specifically falls within the +100% damage range (20-30), although the tooltip shows -15% (8-13). However, this was not always the case, and the dependence algorithm is unclear. Regarding the Air Shield, there is also this information (possibly from the same source) - for the spell at the advanced or expert level, the damage increase is 2 times (+100%), and for the spell at the basic level, the damage increase is about 40%. This dependence has also been confirmed. I don't think it's necessary to conduct a "darkness" (100,000) of battles - it's not a random occurrence; either there is a bug, or there isn't. And if it occurs, it happens constantly; if it doesn't occur, it also happens constantly. The main thing is to understand when and why it occurs, or, conversely, does not occur.