Combat: Elements & Weapons

Despite the colorful spell names, damage in Dungeon Settlers is binary: everything is either Physical or Magic.

There is no Water (or Fire/Nature) combat element for mitigation purposes - the element labels on spells are only a UI color, and enemies have just two defensive stats, Physical Resistance and Magic Resistance.

A "water" spell simply deals Magic damage; ice- and frost-flavored abilities are Water Magic flavor, not a separate damage type.

Weapons come in one-handed and two-handed types. Two-handed weapons - the Greatsword, the Bow, and all three elemental Staffs (Fire, Water, Nature) - occupy both hands and block the shield/off-hand slot. One-handed weapons (Sword and Blunt, plus the gated Dagger, Axe and Spear) can pair with a shield for sword-and-board play. This means a shield can never be combined with a bow or a staff on the same unit.

A few combat constants worth knowing: attacks split between head and body hit locations (about 30% head, 70% body), a successful guard cuts incoming damage by about 50%, and a critical hit deals 1.5x damage.

The game data also defines an encirclement constant - a +10% hit-chance bonus (GAMESYSTEM_Combat_StrategyRule_Encirclement_BonusHitRate = 10) and a +5% critical-chance bonus (GAMESYSTEM_Combat_StrategyRule_Encirclement_BonusCriticalRate = 5) per unit surrounding a target - but a decompile of this build shows it is not wired into the combat code: no compiled code reads those constants, and the hit/crit resolution has no positioning term. So encirclement currently has no effect on anyone. If the developers activate it, it would apply symmetrically (for and against you, since combat resolution is faction-agnostic) from the first surrounding unit.

You can still hand a unit a weapon or magic school its background doesn't grant by using a skill-tree inscription - that is how a caster can pick up, say, Water Magic. Training a tree is separate from what a unit can physically wield at once, though; an inscription can't let a unit hold a two-handed staff and a shield simultaneously.