What is going on now?

[EvilSmoothie]

1. Tiles that do not hit any enemies count as double mana (also known as ghosting), could this explain the number difference?

2. The Defender has a 20% damage boost to make up the attackers advantage.

[Kerridoc]

@Enigma-MT

when playing the story I counted how many troops were needed to fill my players marna for a special. Then did the same in a raid and noticed I had to send considerably more troops to fill the marna. Is this common? Is this even right?

That’s exactly the bug that the OP was complaining of. Looks like we need to do some collective testing to isolate the problem, or understand why it isn’t a bug.

Update: just ran a raid and counted tiles. Everything looked fine using Alberich, Magni, Sartana, Tibertus and Merlin.

@Enigma-MT

And lastly, I’ve faced people with the same characters as me so I obviously know they have slow or average marna only to see them hitting 2 special attacks and not dying while my character of equal level ie a maxed out bane is dead before I even get to use his special once. That doesn’t stack up to me.

That’s because defense heroes gain mana differently than the offense.

• on offense, a hero only gains mana by matching tiles (unless boosted with a gain-mana buff from, say, Alberich). You gain one tile’s worth of mana when the tile hits a foe, or two tile’s worth if it “ghosts” (doesn’t hit a foe). Certain troops or specials increase the amount of mana each tile is worth.
• on defense, every hero gains a tick of mana each turn. Any hero hit by a tile will gain a chunk of mana; the chunk size decreases the more tiles hit in a particular turn (so a huge cascade may not charge all foes’ mana). Again, mana-boost troops and specials may increase the mana gain.

[ChoppedLiver]

@Kerridoc

• on defense, every hero gains a tick of mana each turn. Any hero hit by a tile will gain a chunk of mana; the chunk size decreases the more tiles hit in a particular turn (so a huge cascade may not charge all foes’ mana). Again, mana-boost troops and specials may increase the mana gain.

I’m fairly experienced but I didn’t know about the decreasing mana effect for more hitting tiles in a turn. Learn something everyday! Thanks for the info!