Exercising our right to Keep and Arm Bears

I wanted to stat up some Dwarven bear cavalry, but I'm unsure as to how to calculate the BR of a cavalry unit. Is it as simple as adding the BR of the mount and rider together? Because looking at golbin wolf rider and orcish boar rider BRs suggests that its not that simple.

Calculating a unit’s BR requires use of the complicated formulas in Battles or the use of a calculator of some kind. There’s a bunch of spreadsheets that can do it, my toolkit does it, there are probably other tools hanging around for it.

The rules for building cavalry units begin on page 82 of D@W:B and the rules for calculating a unit’s BR begin on page 92.

Ah, I still haven't dug into DoW Battles much, thanks for the tip.

It's kind of a nightmare. I'd strongly advise posting your calculations online so we can doublecheck it; there are a LOT of numbers in there to keep track of, and messing up one could mean your unit attacks three times as much as it should. 

OK, here we go:

Company of 60 Dwarven Bear Knights:

Armour: Full Plate and Shield (AC 9) on the Dwarves, Chain Barding (AC +3) on the bears.

Weapons: Lances for the Dwarves. The bears fight with their bear hands.

  • Formation: Irregular Mounted (since bears are a guard animal, the unit must be IM).
  • Speed: 2/4/6 since bears are 120' move.
  • Unit AC (unroudned): 7.5, 9 for the rider, 6 for an armoured bear.
  • Unit Hit Dice: 6 (1 for the dwarf + 5 for the bear)
  • Unit HP: 24, (60 * 6 / 15)
  • Unit Morale: +2 (bears as war mounts have +2 morale, so that's the highest morale in the unit)
  • Unit Attacks:
    • Primary: 3 lance attacks (60 * (1+0.35) * 6.5 / 180) at 10+
    • Charge: 4 claw/bite attacks (60* (3+1.1) * 3.2 / 180) at 6+

Battle Rating Components:

  • Unit AC: 7.5
  • (UHP / 8): 3 / 8
  • Morale Multiplier: 1.13
  • Speed Multipler: 6/9 for IM with a 6 charge move
  • Formation Multiplier: 0.62 for IM
  • Combat Multiplier: 8.51 melee + ) ranged (7.3 unrounded attacks / 7 rounded attacks * 8 max dmg on charge)

Multiply it up and divide by 6 and you get 14.96, for a unit BR of 15. That sounds plausible for Dwarven Gendarmes riding bears.