Originally Posted by lethiel View Post
The units basically always withdraw if they are about to loose which is of course wrong.
I don't believe that's it, as it sometimes (but rarely) happens that the attacking party loses. But in my experience only in combat with a party that is very clearly stronger (95% winning chance or more), there is a large chance the weaker unit gets killed. But the AI obviously never attacks if its winning chances are that low.
I recall someone saying that combat stops automatically after 5 "combat rounds." If this is it, then perhaps that number can just be increased to 6 or 7. I believe that
Commander Bello programmed it, se perhaps he knows that.
It is quite simple.
Meanwhile, the combat is performed in (internal) rounds where the upper limit has been set to 7.
In each of the internal rounds, either the attacker or the defender will hit the opponent. There aren't any draws. If the attacker hits, he hits and not the defender. If the attacker does not hit, this is counted as hit by the defender (this is unchanged vanilla).
Depending on the relative strengths, per hit a certain portion of hitpoints will be subtracted from the opponent's total health.
If after the 7 rounds not all hitpoints have been subtracted, the unit survives (which is true for both, the attacker as well as the defender, obviously).
As typically the human player as well as the AI will do an attack only if the chances are good, the likeliness for the attacker to survive is quite good, too.
If the combat ended without the attacker been killed (vanilla: if the attacking unit has been killed but had a retreat chance which resulted in retreat = true) then a message "Unit retreated" will be issued.
This means that in the vanilla combat, the unit actually would have been killed if not the random calculation for retreat would have been applied.
I hadn't bothered to change this message, as in principle this message is correct: your unit did not continue the combat (which is some kind of retreating from the combat). The real life examples would be losses of the attacker too high, nightfall, whatsoever.
There is no such functionality as to end the combat prior to the 7 internal rounds, only death of one of the two units involved.
Even now, only if the attacking unit would have been killed within the range of the 7 rounds, the "real" retreat would be calculated (if the attacking unit would have a retreat chance, in other words would be a mounted unit; or as a special case, would be a ship with evasion chance - but then you'd get a different message).
One word to the whole concept:
The number 7 was chosen by experience.
In vanilla, a combat between two almost equally powerful units can last up to 10 internal rounds (that is due to how the combat, the chances, the hitpoints are calculated). For two units of exactly the same strength the combat would last for max. 9 turns. The higher the difference in strengths, the longer the combat (theoretically) may last.
Unfortunately, the random generator often returns "streaks" of results leading to the infamous "99 percent victory chance and got killed nevertheless" results. This can still happen, but the chances have been drastically reduced (once again, just because the number of internal rounds has been reduced; there has been no other modification to the combat system).
I personally really prefer it that way.
Now, I can understand that at first glance it may lead to your attacks ending with no result. But that is only if you're looking at just this gameturn. In the next turn, both, attacker and defender are still there (if not the defender ran away) and based on their strengths you can engage again.
This offers some new options now, as you as the human player now can make use of this feature to soften enemy positions. On the other hand, as mentioned, the defender may have taken the chance to retreat (after the combat).
The higher the level on which you're playing the sooner the enemy (the AI) may recover which adds another facet to warfare.
In total I think the battlefield has become a bit more "living" by this change.
I admit though, that many weaknesses of the whole combat system are still in place and that much work still is to be done.
. Thats one way but I'm definitely not a fan of it. Last time I played Civ V, which is a while ago, the AI was utterly incapable of handling the combat tactics. I fear the same would be true here since these things are presumably hard to teach the AI (and if you succeed it becomes very powerful like a Chess computer). 
and is rather realistic to how battles were fought. This system should be strengthened not replaced.
