I don't really delve in to the mystery of initiative, critical hit, and to a lesser extent defense.

But attack works like this -> Min Atk is half the Atk Value/Number, Max Atk is equal to the Atk Value/Number.

Level works like this -> Each level up without any modifier will give you: hp, 1 spell resistance, 1 spell mastery, 1 accuracy.

The way I heard initiative explained, initative is added each turn, and you get a go when your initiative reaches 100. So in other words if your initiative is double another units you get to go twice as often, which makes initiative very important.

I have noticed that if you give a unit a big initiative boost, e.g. by using Haste, they quite often seem to get two moves, one after the other. Not quite sure why this is, it doesn't seem to fit the explanation.

Your formula isn't quite right, it is Max Damage = A*A/(A+D) instead of A=A*A/(A+D).  Min Damage is Max Damage / 2.

Does anyone know how the swarm bonus works? Is it like +2 attack per person near or something like that?

You are right, I forgot the (), like Halmal wrote. But hey, I am typng this from work

Swarming gives +1 damage and +5 accuracy for every friendly unit next to the opponent you are attacking, they do not have to be adjacent to the unit attacking.

that depends a lot on the defense value of the target and the attack value of the attacker. a low attack multi figure unit won't get that much out of swarm vs. a high defense target, even if the boost counts per figure. the unit count has no influence on the attack vs. defense calculation.

 on the other hand, a high attack champ already penetrates a large percentage of the defense (due to the high attack), so +1 attack on a champ can (in some cases) deal more damage than +1 attack per figure on a trained unit.

Another question.

Lets say i have a weapon that does 11 base, and 3 fire damage.

When i do the calculation, is the damage:

11 vs defense + 3 vs fire resistance, or is the 3 also calculated in the attack vs defense calculation?

Assuming this is how Initiative works (seems right to me), the 'Turn' thing is something that happens in the background.  From what I've seen, the game will add the initiatives of all units each 'round' until someone crosses the 100 threshold, at which point units act in order of the highest initiative over 100, and works down to 100 (subtracting 100 from your accumulated initiative in exchange for your earning an action).

Air Elementals are awesome at initiative.  They have an initiative of 36.  By comparison, an Earth Elemental has an 18/19 initiative, so you can see that the Air Elemental will get roughly twice as many actions as the Earth Elemental.

Initiatives for most units start at 20, with weapon types affecting this (clubs are -4 to initiative, for example). So you can see that, with say a special sword that gives you +3 to initiative, a hate stone (+1), an enchanted backpack (+1), and a haste spell (+3), and those Soldier boots (+1), your initiative is now 29.  So versus a clubber with a 16 initiative, you are getting 1.8125 actions for every 'Clubber's action.  Essentially, you'll squeeze in that second and third attack before the clubber gets his second attack.

Or, to put this another way,

29 initiative will act on round 4 (116), will act second round 7 (203), round 11 (319), and round 14 (406), round 18 (522).  Total 5 attacks.  Note the two attacks vs one fall betweens round 7 and round 13, and betweens rounds 13 and 19.

16 initiative will act first on round 7 (112 initiative), round 13 (208), and round 19 (304) Total 3 attacks.

Oh, and if said Air Elemental is nearby...

36 initiative acts on round 3 (108), round 6 (216), round 9 (324), round 12 (432), round 14 ( 504), round 17 (612), and round 20 (720).  Total of 7(!)  attacks, versus the Clubber with 3 attacks and the awesome swordsman with 5 attacks.

The average engagement probably doesn't last 20 rounds though... unless opponents are evenly matched, both initiative wise and with high defenses (more 'plink' attacks).

Of course, you are probably trading attack strength and such for all of those initiative boosting items (instead of other buffs), but with the right sword, if you kill your target before he gets to act, it's academic.  Plus, he (usually) gets some counterattacks in to boot, except against those annoying spearmen...

it's just a matter of patience. with enough mana this should be possible, unless there's a hard cap for initiative in the game. celerity (air 5) costs 200 mana for a permanent +1 boost, so assuming 20 base init any maybe 5-10 from items, you'd need something like 14.000-16.000 mana.

you could run the game in cheat mode to get the required mana without actually wasting several hours of real time to farm it legitimately (for testing purposes)

Regarding parrottmath's comment,  I'm guessing that the game determines action order by highest initiative that round.  So the character that has 116 accumulated initiative points (say 29 points earned each round) that 'round' gets to act before the character with the 101 accumulated initiative points.  This jives with what I've seen ingame.