The AI CHEATS! (Admitted to by Sid) lol

You need a wall of text to respond to a wall of text ... unless you want and can be of short words ;)
I wasn't up for a arms race of quoting ever more minor paragraphs and sentences of each others posts, and writing long paragraphs in response :nuke:. Better to sum up my over-all objections in a few short lines. :)

1) No, I'm not confusing suspension of disbeleif with "realism realism". I was just comparing 2 stories and commenting on what one would be more credible in general. A tank with a life line from Vanhalla regarding combats againt spears is a huge suspension of disbeleif, IMHO far bigger than beleiving that sometimes things can go wrong to the stronger unit. It is is just more spread out, but, as this is a game where you actually are suposed to think for hours to play it, it is far more damaging for the supension of disbeleif a steady attack to it than a short exposition to a strong corrosive, and this especially if you actually find yourself on the short side of the stick :p
Whether it is realistic for some spearmen to overcome a tank or not is perhaps a discussion worth having, but it's not quite on topic of what goes through a gamer's head after having lost a battle a battle he expected to win. What goes through a players head is that they were screwed by the RNG, not the hypothetical scenarios that might enable a spearmen to get lucky.

2) If they are clear regarding this issue it is less bad , indeed. But that doesn't change the fact that a combat where only one can win hardly deseves the name of combat ;) In fact, if there is no combat ( aka you know the result before the battle ), why lose processing time doing it at all ? :p
You still have to determine the amount of damage the weaker unit deals.

Sometimes battles are one sided. The loser general knows he's in a bind and gonna lose. If he decides to fight it anyway, it's not because of a lack of confidence in his own ability to predict the battle outcome.

3) The RL vs game worse dificulty is completely irrelevant for what is being discussed ( I just spoke of it because you brought it , not consciously maybe ) and I only pointed that you should expect in a strategy game with a random element that you need to do risk assesement ... and that if you can't stomach that, you maybe should be playing something else more suited to your tastes.
I'm just saying that there is a point where too much risk makes the game less fun. And in general, real life things have more risk then you want in their video game counter parts.

Second, the fun element ... full circle on this issue, no ? Like I already said a lot of times in here, some people might actually find unfun to play a game where you have 0 chances of winning a combat if you are in the short side of the stick. It is already highly frustrating in Civ IV to be invaded by a technologically superior force because they are hard to stop even if you can zerg the enemy, so i don't want to think how frustrating it would be to being completely unable by design to stop a technologically advanced invasion just because the designer didn't wanted to expose people to a odd :spear: from time to time ... you must agree that is pretty much a "shelf game, never play it again and loudmouth it if possible" event. And, like I said, a compromise could had been acheived between avoiding both the :spear: and the :assimilate: scenarios as much as possible, instead of pretending that no one will ever try to play a level higher than their current skills ;)
Having combat less predictable doesn't make it more fun, even for the disadvantaged side. Sure it feels nice when your spearmen is the one doing the tank busting, but if the game looks like a loss, the theoretical 1% chance of tank busting isn't going to make most people keep playing. And the fact that plans are more likely to go awry still sucks for the disadvantaged player.

You do want to make it so that a moderate tech lead doesn't equate to total military domination, of course. Don't construe anything I've said to say otherwise.
 
Whether it is realistic for some spearmen to overcome a tank or not is perhaps a discussion worth having, but it's not quite on topic of what goes through a gamer's head after having lost a battle a battle he expected to win. What goes through a players head is that they were screwed by the RNG, not the hypothetical scenarios that might enable a spearmen to get lucky.
Ok, i think that if you said "my" instead of " a players" head things would be more correct ;) Now think, what passes through "a players" head :devil: when , due to bad luck, "they" find themselfes in need of throwing the kitchen sink to the enemy , and then discover that he has exactly 0 chances of winning that fight?
You still have to determine the amount of damage the weaker unit deals.

Sometimes battles are one sided. The loser general knows he's in a bind and gonna lose. If he decides to fight it anyway, it's not because of a lack of confidence in his own ability to predict the battle outcome.
No battle is completely one sided in RL and God knows how many battles were lost/won due to deficient evaluation of the chances they really had ;) But that is besides the point.

You are actually echoing me ;) Would you buy the ticket for a basketball game where the only thing to know was to know if the big team was going to win by 100 points or 200 ? That is not a game, is a beat'em up ;) OFC, you might like beat'em ups ( no wrong with that ), but it is highly discussible that beat'em ups should have places in a minimally enjoyable strategy game.
I'm just saying that there is a point where too much risk makes the game less fun. And in general, real life things have more risk then you want in their video game counter parts.
That is a reason for less risk, not to take the risk at all from some areas. Nothing I haven't said so far.
Having combat less predictable doesn't make it more fun, even for the disadvantaged side. Sure it feels nice when your spearmen is the one doing the tank busting, but if the game looks like a loss, the theoretical 1% chance of tank busting isn't going to make most people keep playing. And the fact that plans are more likely to go awry still sucks for the disadvantaged player.

You do want to make it so that a moderate tech lead doesn't equate to total military domination, of course. Don't construe anything I've said to say otherwise.
And exactly how does a tank rolling over everyone will make the player stick more to a strategy game, regardless of the side of the tank you are in? Ok, it feels good at the first times to simply roll on top of all those guys wearing sticks, but that wears out fast ( why do you think shoot'em ups have such a little shelf life ? ;) ) and only leaves the sour taste of "no strategy inside beside getting tanks fast enough" in the aftermath [/sarcasm] That argument works both ways ...

Anyway we are going away from the issue. The fact is that Sid construed a argument regarding pretending that high odds are certains just to pamper some players ego and infact adopted a highly dubious truncating algorythim in CivRev ( IIRC 1:7 odds and the weaker unit insta runs away from battle or something like that ) and I suppose that Civ V will act close from that. I do not like from that pampering, but that is not my point: my point is that making a combat engine that gives 1:7 odds and then pretend that 1:7 = 0:7 is both stupid in terms of programming when there are alternatives that give similar results with less result tampering and will not add a iota in terms of game satisfaction overall, because some players will be pissed with that odd manipulation as much or more than the others that :cringe: when they see the odd :spear:
 
Ok, i think that if you said "my" instead of " a players" head things would be more correct ;) Now think, what passes through "a players" head :devil: when , due to bad luck, "they" find themselfes in need of throwing the kitchen sink to the enemy , and then discover that he has exactly 0 chances of winning that fight?
And this is where you go off the road. :)

There's exactly 0 chances of winning one fight. And properly, since how can you count on winning a kitchen sink vs tank fight?
However, if you'll gather up several kitchen-sink slinger companies then yes, eventually, after sacrificing enough of them you will wear down the tanks and they'll lose. Eventually. But certainly not on a first fight.
 
And why not in the first fight? Give me a reason, just one ... bruised egos aside , that is.

EDIT: The fun thing is that this kind of code does not eliminate the :spear: , if we consider it's aspect of "high tech unit being beaten to pulp by low tech unit" ... it just forces people to pay a tax on a couple of units before being able to have a chance of getting a :spear: event. People will continue to not understand how a musket can kill a gunship, no matter how many muskets are used before, if didn't understood the concept of a musket having odds to beat a gunship in the first place ( said in other words, it requires the exact same understanding of odds ... if makes no diference to it if it is musket #1 or musket #23423 ). In other words, little to no gain in there at the cost of tampering the combat odds .
 
And why not in the first fight? Give me a reason, just one ... bruised egos aside , that is.
Logic.

We play a game which depicts our history in a simplified way in order to have some fun. That's true that you can think of a cases like that company of Spearmen could get drunk a whole Armour unit, pour sugar into gas tanks and slaughter everyone while they sleep. But such action would require a whole story in order to make it believable.
We have no weather in Civ (like sandstorms etc) that could create a reason for such unbelievable outcome of a Spearmen vs Armour encounter, therefore it's been simplified so now you'll win if you'll attack Spearmen with your Armour.
You can be damaged, how damaged can be random, but you know that in the end you'll get the better end of the stick.

I think that best thing about Civ5 is that you no longer have die:live battles, that's much more realistic and fun imo.


EDIT

And that's the thing, I still can't see that tampering, cheating, lying about combat odds you're talking about, when you simply have combat results rounded up into classes. There's still flexibility, and adding several units into the fray can create all sorts of results.
 
Logic.

We play a game which depicts our history in a simplified way in order to have some fun. That's true that you can think of a cases like that company of Spearmen could get drunk a whole Armour unit, pour sugar into gas tanks and slaughter everyone while they sleep. But such action would require a whole story in order to make it believable.
We have no weather in Civ (like sandstorms etc) that could create a reason for such unbelievable outcome of a Spearmen vs Armour encounter, therefore it's been simplified so now you'll win if you'll attack Spearmen with your Armour.
You can be damaged, how damaged can be random, but you know that in the end you'll get the better end of the stick.

I think that best thing about Civ5 is that you no longer have die:live battles, that's much more realistic and fun imo.


EDIT

And that's the thing, I still can't see that tampering, cheating, lying about combat odds you're talking about, when you simply have combat results rounded up into classes. There's still flexibility, and adding several units into the fray can create all sorts of results.
Logic? lol.. let me rephrase it: what is the logic to force spear #1 to don't have a chance at all to destroy a tank ( not even a snowball chance in hell ) while spear #10 has chances just because spear #1 got beaten to pulp ... and how exactly that makes the :spear: go out ?

On your edit: It is me that doesn't see the relevance of classes of results for this. My problem is not the classes, is the fact that you are rounding a non-certainty to a certainty ... and the fact that you are assuming that results of a battle should be decided before the battle happens, even if in specific situations ( with the battle only serving to know how much scratches the stronger guy catches ) , a thing that doesn't deserve the name of battle IMHO. And all of this would still not eliminate the :spear: ....
 
The problem Sid mentioned is with the idea of having complex combat odds in the first place.... combat should be FAR more simple in its calculations.

Unit loses hp proportional to other Str Ratio. With a 50:50 Possibility of losing 2x hp or 1/2x hp.
 
Logic? lol.. let me rephrase it: what is the logic to force spear #1 to don't have a chance at all to destroy a tank ( not even a snowball chance in hell ) while spear #10 has chances just because spear #1 got beaten to pulp ... and how exactly that makes the :spear: go out
:deadhorse:

Because 7:strength: unit under normal conditions (and as I said in the same post there is no fog, night/day, storms, sandstorms, morale, unit supply line and bazillion of other factors) has no chance to beat 40:strength: of an Armour. But seven or more units of 7:strength: units surrounding it should logically be able to eventually wear that monster down and win.
It is believable that one hunting dog can't win the encounter with a boar. But a pack of them will, it's just a question of time.
 
1)Vicious circle fallacy detected: " As the first unit can't win,, they should not be allowed to win"

2)Again, exactly how does this do anything to remove the :spear: ? it will be beaten by a spear anyway :p

3) Units in civ games do not gang up ( edit ,except Civ III and Civrev armies. Anyway, pretty marginal ) :p The battles are independent, so no pack effect. We don't have 7x1 battles , we have 7 1x1 battles. If the first spear has no chances , the last should have not as well. If the last one has chances, the first one should have ... because there is no fundamental diference between spear #1 and spear #7. There is no logical aternative ;)

4) Don't mix up logic with beleivabilty, even if believability depends a lot of what the people in question consider believable ;)
 
Whilst I can sympathize with players who feel hard done by when they loose
battles which were in their favour with a 99% chance to win or something, I personally
dislike the idea of a totally (or even partially) deterministic combat system. I like the
fact that in CIV combat result are never completely predictable, I think it's more
realistic and fun. That being said I don't really have a problem with the new Civ5
combat system from what I've seen, but I can't really say more until I play. It seems
as though some strength ratios result in entirely predictable outcomes, but at least
I don't feel that I'm being lied to with victory % chances which do not reflect the
reality.
 
Ok I'll go to the hack and slash the wall of text this time.

Ok, i think that if you said "my" instead of " a players" head things would be more correct ;).
Sid disagrees :p.

Now think, what passes through "a players" head :devil: when , due to bad luck, "they" find themselfes in need of throwing the kitchen sink to the enemy , and then discover that he has exactly 0 chances of winning that fight?
The difference between 0% and 0.001% isn't that much, but it's still worth defending to try to deal some damage.

No battle is completely one sided in RL and God knows how many battles were lost/won due to deficient evaluation of the chances they really had ;) But that is besides the point.

You are actually echoing me ;) Would you buy the ticket for a basketball game where the only thing to know was to know if the big team was going to win by 100 points or 200 ? That is not a game, is a beat'em up ;) OFC, you might like beat'em ups ( no wrong with that ), but it is highly discussible that beat'em ups should have places in a minimally enjoyable strategy game.
It's a beat up either way. You attach too much value to a very tiny difference in odds.

]That is a reason for less risk, not to take the risk at all from some areas. Nothing I haven't said so far.
There's still risk in the game. Sometimes you decrease risk by lowering the odds of catastrophe, other times you decrease the number of possible catastrophes.

And exactly how does a tank rolling over everyone will make the player stick more to a strategy game, regardless of the side of the tank you are in? Ok, it feels good at the first times to simply roll on top of all those guys wearing sticks, but that wears out fast ( why do you think shoot'em ups have such a little shelf life ? ;) ) and only leaves the sour taste of "no strategy inside beside getting tanks fast enough" in the aftermath [/sarcasm] That argument works both ways ...
Look, the chance of doing enough damage to a tank in time can be modeled as a normal distributed dice roll of how much damage is done. All that's happening is that that normal curve now has a smaller standard deviation, and the precision at the extremities is less. Apparently it makes a better combat formula.

That's far from removing all the strategy from the game. The strategy is the same, just the variability is less. This actually makes the strategy deeper, because a player can be more sure of his plans.

The weaker side makes plans too. Enough units at a single weak point should be a viable strategy. But if the damage that can be done to the stack of units has a wide range, you may loose way more than you expected. And the higher chance of reward does not balance the risk, just like putting all your money in stocks is a bad idea. On top of that, since plans can't fail as dramatically or as much, the player is kept in the moment more. There's more small adjustments to plans, and less total failures.

Anyway we are going away from the issue. The fact is that Sid construed a argument regarding pretending that high odds are certains just to pamper some players ego and infact adopted a highly dubious truncating algorythim in CivRev ( IIRC 1:7 odds and the weaker unit insta runs away from battle or something like that ) and I suppose that Civ V will act close from that. I do not like from that pampering, but that is not my point: my point is that making a combat engine that gives 1:7 odds and then pretend that 1:7 = 0:7 is both stupid in terms of programming when there are alternatives that give similar results with less result tampering and will not add a iota in terms of game satisfaction overall, because some players will be pissed with that odd manipulation as much or more than the others that :cringe: when they see the odd :spear:
It's not 1:7 becoming 0:7, as that would presuppose existing odds and establish that they are wrong. Rather 7 and 1 are strength ratios, and in Sid's algorithm, and with such a large difference, it's not possible for the weaker unit to win a combat.
 
1)Vicious circle fallacy detected: " As the first unit can't win,, they should not be allowed to win"
It was all done in order to simplify things, and I see no viciousness in that.
2)Again, exactly how does this do anything to remove the :spear: ? it will be beaten by a spear anyway :p
It doesn't, and I have no problem with the fact that ten units of 7:strength: each can be sacrificed to wear down one tank unit at 40:strength: I dislike however when my 40:strength: tank falls victim to one measly Spearmen unit.
3) Units in civ games do not gang up ( edit ,except Civ III and Civrev armies. Anyway, pretty marginal ) :p The battles are independent, so no pack effect. We don't have 7x1 battles , we have 7 1x1 battles. If the first spear has no chances , the last should have not as well. If the last one has chances, the first one should have ... because there is no fundamental diference between spear #1 and spear #7. There is no logical aternative ;)
Yes they do gang up now :) They get bonuses for each allied unit in vicinity, also presence of Great Generals improves their strength too. Wounded units fight less efficiently (unless they're Japanese :D)
4) Don't mix up logic with beleivabilty, even if believability depends a lot of what the people in question consider believable ;)
Exactly. We're not talking mathematics here, we're talking about simplified depiction of a world, where certain things have to be removed or changed in order to entertain players. Losing at 97.5% wasn't enjoyable and was causing people to reload, so in order to change that Sid introduced different combat model in Civ5. Which you can dislike of course, and (on the contrary to other crappy developers nowadays) you'll be free to mod it out :goodjob:
 
@Souron

Well, will try to consensate stuff this time.

The only thing that Sid agrees is that some very vocal people don't like tanks being beaten by spears ( or similar ) and that things will probably get quieter if we remove that possibility ( that is very theoretical already in civ IV, btw ... in fact the only time I actually seen a spear beating a tank it involved a barbarian tank in a level with free barb wins for the human ). I can live with that, but :

1) I don't see exactly how that can be acheived with what is being proposed, as i already pointed, since it does not remove the biggest gripe around this, that is be visual effect of a spear beating a tank ... just drop enough spears first :D

2) I really don't see how this add a iota to the game value either in realism ( in here it even takes out ), gameplay in general , or to honest , in anything at all. And all the arguments I've heard so far trying to contradict me in this point boil in pretending that a thing that is certain and a thing with high/low enough odds are the same thing ( but then you would have to define what is high/low enough ... for some persons it would be in the 90% area, but I've seen people arguing with seriousnesss that any battle above 50% should be a assured win ) and/or some very vague and dubious stuff regarding how this will add to the flexibility of plans or something like that... that is stuff we can't prove or disprove without seeing how the rest of the game interacts with this feature ... in other words, ATM meaningless as argument.

3) You are accusing me of putting too much emphasis on small diference, but think, in the 1:7 CivRev system, 1:6,99 is fundamentally diferent of 1:7 while 1:7 and 1:700 are equal for all proposes. IMHO there is no minimal justifcation for putting a brick wall in combat behaviour like that and infact, the features that behaved like that in Civ IV are bitterly loudmouthed even today ( like the military deterrence factor ... ). said in other words, why does a 1 str unit has a admitedly small chance of winning the fight with a 6,99 str unit , but no chance of winning vs a 7.00 str unit? With all the defects a behaviour like civ IV might have, it has no jump of faith limit like that... The only reason I make diference between 0% and 0,001% is because they are diferent : one is a certain the other is a chance ( admitedly low ). Can you justify any ratio of strenght as limit like that? Using your own words liberally, you attach too much value to little diferences between strength ratios.

I had more to say, but it looks I made another wall of text. Not that walls of text are a bad thing it self, but I agree they can hurt the eyes :p

BIG EDIT @ Guardian_PL

1) You are using a proposition to justify that same proposition. That is the very definition of vicious circle ... especially when we are discussing the validity of that same proposition :lol:

2) The issue is that your tank will continue to fall in the hands of one meansly spear, since, AFAIK there is nothing like civ III armies in civ V. If you are arguing in terms of suspension of disbeleif ( and assuming that it will be broken by a spear beating a tank ), it will still be a event that will break it, because it will still be a spear beating a tank. That was my point.

3) Not the same thing , and you know it :p You were talking of a multi-spear attack on a tank, and that simply doesn't happen in civ V as far as we know ATM. Anyway, due to 2), irrelevant.

4) It was you that brought the word "logic" when talking about believability and I was just pointing your error :p Anyway, as every people believes in diferent stuff, beleivability is a very bad gauge for anything ... On being enjoyable losing at 97,5% odds ... well, since when losing is enjoyable ? :D By that line of argument, you should make the not human units simply surrender at sight while in war, because having odds of losing is unfun and can cause people to reload ( like i pointed above at sauron, I've seen people unhappy to lose battles that were basically a coin flip and considering that unfair ... ).

Basically, I don't blame Sid for doing this to try to heal some bruised egos . I simply don't agree in the method he used, because IMHO it is inconsistent, very close of odds tampering and will add little to none ( maybe even take a little ) of gameplay value to the game. You are free to disagree, but so far neither you or anyone could make a plausible case on that besides basing on "I don't like to lose", that BTW no one does ;)
 
I know that this discussion has nearly reached its end already, and I apologize to contribute to the walls of text already flying around here, but I just watched Sid Meier's keynote address in full, and I think it contains a lot more to talk about.

People, how about you just watch the damned thing

I just found the time to do that, and have to say I found it a bit disheartening. Sid Meier basically reflected (in a not very cohesive way) some psychologically-based notions that lately found their way into game design, and mixed this with a couple of personal anecdotes.

In this speech, we learn that the player ...

1. is too dumb to grasp basic probabilities, so game designers should rig the system so that it meets the player's false assumptions (e.g. losses at victory chances higher than about 80% shouldn't happen)

2. is too dumb to grasp statistical independence, so game designers should again rig the system (e.g. two improbable losses in a row shouldn't happen)

3. is an egomaniac, paranoid, delusional entity (but also very imaginative)

4. has huge problems to accept setbacks (and is therefore unable to experience a comeback after a setback because he will simply reload or quit instead), so game designers should not put setbacks into their games

5. will attribute brilliant AI moves to cheating, whereas dumb AI moves will either be accepted as a proof of the player's superiority, or criticized as weak game design; as a consequence, AI should steadily and reliably contribute to the experience, but shouldn't try to do brilliant things and surprise the player.

6. has an unrepressable desire to cheat and frequently reload the game and should be protected from destroying his own enjoyment by limiting this behavior

7. should not get many options to fine-tune the game to his liking, because that's the job of the game designer (but somehow, modding is good)

Well.

I won't dispute that there are gamers for which this description fits. However, I - considering myself as a grown-up who actually can understand statistics and odds, can accept defeat and enjoy comebacks, who uses options to enhance his experience, and who appreciates a strong AI - find myself feeling somewhat worried after listening to this speech. Because it seems that Meier presents this dumb, stupid, immature, self-destructive player as the target audience that game designers should gear their designs to. And for players that are actually grown-up and not all that dumb, this will result in games that they enjoy less.

The solutions that Meier proposes actually diminish the game's enjoyability for mature players. For example: Meier, if I understood him correctly, says that they rigged the combat engine so that it won't produce two improbable losses in a row. Now let's say I'm in a game situation where I just lost a battle, despite having 4:1 odds of winning, and I now have the following choice: Either I wage another battle with again 4:1 odds, or I retreat the unit in question. As a mature player, I may come to the conclusion that a 20% risk of losing he battle is too high, so I retreat. However, the odd thing is: If I were immature and stupid enough as Sid Meier apparently believes the players to be, then I'd say "4:1 odds, and just lost a battle that I was destined to win at the same odds, so this time I'm gonna win for sure!". And I'll attack and actually win because the combat system is rigged to prevent two improbable losses in a row. The stupid player will get a better result than the smart one, unless the smarter player learns about these tricks and consciously mimicks the behavior of a stupid player. The rigged combat system that Meier presents is rewarding stupidity.

What I find most discouraging about Meier's approach is that he sees the players' stupidity as inevitable and unchangeable. His solution is to pamper the players and cater to their non-understanding of statistics, instead of helping them to understand it.

Here's an example to illustrate that: Daddy plays dice with his kid; each of the two throws a dice, and they compare the results. Since daddy thinks that the kid won't enjoy losses, he implements the rule that daddy only wins a game if his result is at least 3 higher than the kid's result. This means that the kid will win about 83% of the games. So the kid is used to mostly winning. Since daddy also thinks that his kid can't handle two losses in a row, he rigs his own result so that he never wins twice in a row. All goes well until one day daddy's out of town and mommy takes over. The kid tells mommy about the "larger-by-3" rule (because that was an obvious, overt rule), but can't tell mommy about the "no two losses in a row" rule, because that rule was kept hidden from the kid. As chance would have it, mommy indeed wins twice in a row. Kid is enraged since it was certain to win, two losses in a row have never happened before. Kid throws a tantrum and accuses mommy of cheating.

Of course, no two parents in their right mind would ever play a game with such stupid, secret rules which in fact give their kid a totally wrong grasp on random dice throws. Parents know that their kid is able to learn. So, instead of rigging the game to prevent two losses in a row, they will point out how rare this event is, but that even rare events may happen, and have to be dealt with.

Now, let's transport this to Civ. We all know that players get angry over improbable losses, and that players overestimate the number of such "unfair" treatments in a game. Meier's approach, as told in his keynote, is to prevent such improbable losses from happening. But how about treating the players like intelligent beings with a capability to overcome wrong assumptions? For example, imagine the game keeping track of the player's actual combat results. Instead of telling the player: "You have 92% chance to win", it tells the player: "You have 92% chance to win. So far, you had 72 battles with victory chances in the range between 90-95%. Of those, you have won 93%." This removes the common intuitive (but wrong) conviction that one lost "too many" of these battles at high odds, because the player can see that he won about as many of those battles as he should. He may even actually learn to question his intuition in this regard, which would be a good thing.

Now, the suggestion above probably isn't ideal, but I'd like the principle to be understood: You don't have to pamper your player's wrong intuition by rigging a perfectly fair system until it meets their expectations. You can help them to actually learn how things really work. It may require a bit of thought, but I think it's a way better solution.
 
Thanks for putting a compreeensive presentation of your point of view, Psyringe. I pretty much agree with all of it and that is the point I've been defending, unfortunately not in a so cohesive way as you did :(
 
The problem with the 'A would NEVER beat B' type of thinking though, is that you can't account for all cases.

Consider an archer versus a knight. An armored knight on horseback is, in the real world, basically unkillable by an archer. Bows in that era don't have the penetration power to get through armor, and hitting something on horseback is very difficult. Add in the closing speed, and you've got a pretty much no win scenario.

Similarly, attacking a walled city without proper wall busting tech is just as futile. What is a longswordman going to do against a wall a foot and a half thick? Even if it just has a few people with rocks defending it, he doesn't have a way to penetrate that surface with his sword.

These are just a few of a myriad of less obvious, but likely reasonable scenarios where certain units would NEVER win (not just be unlikely to win).

For the sake of making a game, though, we simply make them modifiers.
 
Consider an archer versus a knight. An armored knight on horseback is, in the real world, basically unkillable by an archer. Bows in that era don't have the penetration power to get through armor, and hitting something on horseback is very difficult. Add in the closing speed, and you've got a pretty much no win scenario.
I don't know about the planet you live in , but in this planet archers were pretty good beating knights. In fact a certain Civ IV unit got famous exactly by excelling at that job :D Ranged attack + lots of arrows + no complete armor in most cases ( even if the knight it self had it, the horse normally didn't ) meant that it was pretty much assured that a knight in charge would be injured before getting close of a archer company .
 
Simply put:

I do NOT want the odds manipulated behind the scenes. Present the odds, let me take the chance.

Psyringe summed up the problems very very well in his post above. This is rewarding the stupid players in a horrible way. And since when did a game stop being something that can present something to learn- such as odds.

I know when I play Blood Bowl online a LOT of players complain about how the odds and such work- because this game works on real odds and dicey odds- but then they review the stats and see how there was nothing wrong with how the dice worked. It stuns them, so Sid is right in his analysis, but he is WRONG in his conclusion that all players want some padded room experience.

I do not.
 
Similarly, attacking a walled city without proper wall busting tech is just as futile.
And there are a number of historic examples of this. Many times, people attacked Constantinople showed up, looked at the walls, sat around for a while, then packed up and went home.

I don't know about the planet you live in , but in this planet archers were pretty good beating knights. In fact a certain Civ IV unit got famous exactly by excelling at that job
Ancient era shortbows != late medieval English longbows.

I do NOT want the odds manipulated behind the scenes. Present the odds, let me take the chance.
Absolutely...
 
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