Question about visual combat rendering in Ashes

I've had a question about the visual rendering for a long time, and frankly I just haven't bothered to ask, for some reason.

My question is essentially this:

How close does the stuff on screen correlate to what is happening on the back end, behind the scenes.

My reason for asking is that I have seen MANY occasions where a unit like a zeus fires off, and seems to kill another unit that was nowhere near the energy bolt.

So I am curious what the logic really looks like on the back end.

In the example above, is the logical zeus data object actually interacting with other back-end unit objects based on their pinpoint locations and individual hitpoints; OR are we only seeing an approximation of the combat playing itself out, with the back end logic being more oriented towards macro stats of a metaunit?

This is an important distinction in my mind...

It would potentially have a significant implication relative to the capacity of units to actually have better AI (so that they can react more logically and reasonably).

... which leads to a secondary underlying question:

To what extent is the foundation already there for more intelligent AI (formations, units that respond as a player might hope)?

Or would better AI actually require more of a fundamental overhaul of the engine and the way that combat is currently calculating unit behaviors and results?

Hope that's clear enough.

It might be based on some false premises.

Feel free to educate me.

I bet I'm not the only one who wonders about this.

I bet many folks would find the answer really interesting.

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From testing, the Zeus's weapons does circular splash around a region. However, for some reason the zeus weapon consistently does little or no damage on it's first attack. Nothing in the moddable game data seems to explain this behaviour (the weapon doesn't even have splash in the game file), so how the zeus actually deals damage must be handled as a special case code within the game.

For the Zeus the graphical effect is generated differently from how the damage is actually applied. The weapon effect appears as a lightning effect that arcs between nearby unit, while logically the damage is just circular splash. In programming there's no inherent reason the graphics have to follow the data model of the world. It's just that they often do, to make things understandable and intuitive. What you see is pretty concrete, the units in just about any game follow the logical data quite clearly.

To your question, the answer is yes. Units are logically interacting with numbers that represent the precise location of other units.

About formations:

Altering how formations work is complicated because the code to provide pathfinding for a group of units in formation is itself complicated. There are a lot of edge cases (unusual cases that can lead to unforeseen bugs).

If the game was structured decently, making better formations should only have to deal with the pathfinding part of the code. It is generally seperate from the part of the code that involves dealing damage (though pathing includes the motion of units during combat), and seperate from graphics.

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