Hi all,

I have developed a tool that you can print out and keep beside your computer as you play. It's a series of three tables that tell you what your precentage chance is of winning a battle, depending on the strength of the units, terrain, hit points, and so on.

There are two pages to this document. You start with the table that tells you the modified defense strength (depending on terrain, fortification, etc), then on the second table you figure out the chance of the attacker winning one round, then on the third table you figure out the chance of the attacker winning the battle with at least one hit point remaining.

The idea is that you can *quickly get a good idea* of whether you will win (or lose) a battle without having to switch from Civ3 to another program. If you want to know the exact chance of winning or losing, use one of the automatic calculators.

Combat in Civ3 is pretty complicated (from a mathematical perspective), so this tool doesn't take into account every possible situation. But if you examine the percentages closely, I think you'll realize that the outcome for a lot of possible battles is roughly the same, so it doesn't really help to work things out to a finer degree of detail.

Or to put it another way, adding in more columns and rows to give more detail in the results would make the tool harder to use and wouldn't really convey a lot more information. Well, that's my opinion at least.

Thanks very much to Ken Brown for compiling the percentages used in Step 3: Attacker's chance of winning the battle with at least one hit point remaining. That's the most complicated bit.

I hope you like the file.

--LW

I appreciate the effort. But I am not likely to use this very often; I hate math and the game is tedious enough.

Still, thanks.

The whole point of this tool is you don't have to do any math. You just look up the defending unit and the attacking unit on the tables and that tells you how likely it is the attacker will win.

No math required, honest.

--LW

thx but this is in wrong forum;)

This will prove very useful LoneWolf, thank you. I'm often about to start a battle and want to check the odds. Starting up a battle calc is tedious so having this to hand is er... handy! ;)

nice document... :)

I downloaded it but it in computer giborish. What does one need to read it? I have ACROBAT but it does not read it?

Why was this moved to the creation & customization forum? The combat tables are for when you are playing the game, not when creating something.

yeah, it's moved. LoneWolf's other reference file is in here so I figured this reference file belongs in this forum also. :)

It's a .zip file, which will require a program like Winzip or PKzip to open up.

Inside the .zip file is the .pdf file. The .pdf will open in Acrobat.

--LW

Lone Wolf:
Thank you for your effort in putting this together. Playing a few games with these charts handy should give me a better feel for combat which, so far, has been one of my weak points since the system is so different from CivII.

The other benefit of this chart is that I can also cover my computer table is thousands of tiny square pieces of cardboard and pretend I'm playing a real board game. ;)
-drphil

Impressive, I'm particually curious about how you you came up with the numbers for the last chart,(although I don't doubt their vadillity) I can tell that they seem right, based on the simplestic scenareos, very interesting

Sorry about any spelling errors, lets face it English was not designed to be spelled easily. :)

Thanks everyone for the positive comments. I really appreciate it (honest, sounds canned, but it's true!). :)

The numbers on the last chart were developed by Ken Brown, who I believe is an economics professor at the University of Northern Iowa, so I trust his math. :)

Ken liked my Reference File (in another thread) and he was the one who originally compiled all the keyboard shortcuts and the data in the "tech tree" which I later reformatted and included in the reference file.

Ken later sent me some combat odds tables he had made, based on the formulas in some of the online combat results calculators. Those tables became the basis for the third table of this file, and I made up the first two tables so it would be easy to figure out the right win percentage to use on the third table.

The first table took the most time to design, since it had to accomodate any possible combination of defensive fortifications, terrain, etc. But once I was done that, I realized the second table would be HUGE if I included every possible number on it, so that's why it skips numbers as you get higher up.

Anyway, that's the history of the file. Good luck in all those virtual wars everyone!

--LW