Civ IV combat odds are rigged.

I have won many times on a "only 10%, what the heck, might as well" just as I have lost many favored battles. I don't even look at the odds anymore for the most part. Generally the units that are supposed to win do.

About reloading, unless you do from much earlier or check the box for "random seed on reload" (or something to that effect) you will get the same results. I know you can throw a crappier unit up to lose the battle you know you are gonna lose, but if you reload 4 times you will not win will that 75% battle on 3 of them.
 
It's def. not a true rng, personally this is not up to debate for myself.
In my last game i lost about 8 fights in a row, ranging from 50% to 80% victory odds.
This is mathematically almost impossible, a fact and not speculation.
 
8 losses after another is statistically not at all surprising considering a typical Civ game. People have problems understanding streaks in a sequence. In fact when people "fake" a sequence they tend to give themselves away by avoiding streaks.

Sent from my GT-I9001 using Tapatalk
 
It's called confirmation bias. You notice the hits that support your theory and ignore the ones that don't. It's a perfectly natural human shortcoming, and it's responsible for a lot of myths, such as the "busy full moon nights" idea of nurses and cops that says nights with a full moon are busier than other nights.

Edit:
It's def. not a true rng, personally this is not up to debate for myself.
In my last game i lost about 8 fights in a row, ranging from 50% to 80% victory odds.
This is mathematically almost impossible, a fact and not speculation.
Click to expand...
Highlighted the improtant part for you. Almost. See what I wrote above.

How many such battles have you fought, from the day you purchased Civ4 up until now? How many times have you attacked a stack with a superior one of your own? Consider how routine it is to first bombard a city and attack it with collateral damage units until its defenders are weakened, for then to charge it with a stack of attack units. You fight strings of battles with 50-80% odds countless times in every single game.

Let's say the odds of losing seven such battles in a row are, oh, 1:1000.
You fight 1000 battles.
What do you think will happen?

It's like when people dream of someone the same night they die. Creepy as hell... until it dawns on you that there are seven billion people in the world, and that most of them sleep and dream every single night.
 
Nope it's not that, i know other games where such streaks happen way too often also.
You don't need more than a feeling for it once the amount of battles you did fight is so large, as you wrote, and those strange outcomes occured more often than they should ;)

I can compare it to f.e. Everquest, where i leveled up my tradeskills.
It would happen that you get 3 skillups in a row (with the chance of getting one being maybe 3%), and then get none over 150 combines.
These are huge 1:1000 type of chances that i've seen way more than i should, and you will have peoples there arguing about it just like here. Some think it is not a true rng, some say it is just luck or bad luck.
But looking at it mathematically, you would have won the lottery with some of those combined outcomes. Think about how rare that really is ;)
 
But looking at it mathematically, you would have won the lottery with some of those combined outcomes.
Click to expand...
But people do win the lotteries, even though the odds of winning them can be astronomically low (like less than 1:5 000 000). Are lottery drawings rigged, too ;) ?
 
Dirichlet said:
8 losses after another is statistically not at all surprising considering a typical Civ game. People have problems understanding streaks in a sequence. In fact when people "fake" a sequence they tend to give themselves away by avoiding streaks.

Sent from my GT-I9001 using Tapatalk
Click to expand...

I agree completely, it is certainly counterintuitive. That was my point in this thread when the discussion turned to randomness. It wouldn't be random if there weren't streaks once in a while.
 
Somehow I really often loose with 9.1% odd when on forest protected archer get attacked by Barb Archer (without vs. Barb. bonus).... Same time I win more than I should if my galley is attacked by Barb. galley (last 5 or 6 wins in line)
 
Rigged LOL, AI cheats like it does in every other CIV, it is pretty obvious. I wonder why some peoples does try to fight back. It cheats in combat (like it's predecessor so in CIV 4 a bunch of knights can kill a a tank), it cheats in economy and science and ever single aspect to give at least some challenge.

And of course it puts barbarians out from nothing when there is settler or defenseless city around, LOL.

As veteran who played all Civ's until IV i can feel in bones when i meet AI that is cheating, in 4 it is VERY blatant.
 
vipper said:
Rigged LOL, AI cheats like it does in every other CIV, it is pretty obvious. I wonder why some peoples does try to fight back. It cheats in combat (like it's predecessor so in CIV 4 a bunch of knights can kill a a tank), it cheats in economy and science and ever single aspect to give at least some challenge.

And of course it puts barbarians out from nothing when there is settler or defenseless city around, LOL.

As veteran who played all Civ's until IV i can feel in bones when i meet AI that is cheating, in 4 it is VERY blatant.
Click to expand...
Civ 4s combat is not rigged in favour of the AIs, it has been tested thouroughly and no evidence of rigging has ever been found. The issue you brought up is simply a result of the combat mechanism allowing quantity to overwhelm quality, you can do exactly the same thing to AI Tanks if you have enough Knights....

The 'cheats' an AI has in science, production and related things are better though of as handicaps, above noble the AI gets advantages, below noble you get advantages, at noble your equal.

Barbs will spawn regardless of undefended targets nearby. Of course your much likely to remember it if you were dumb enough to leave something undefended as it will cause you to lose it.

The only things that can really be described as cheats you haven't even mentioned, namely the large reduction in upgrade costs, AI-AI trades and knowing some things about your trade history before you meet them.

Was it really worth reviving this thread to post that? :rolleyes:
 
Sinyail said:
Civ IV BTS I have been playing for awhile now. I used to just rub off those 98%, 99%, 99.6%, 99.4%, 99.8% odds that were in my favor when I lost, but now I can't stand it anymore. This is total bull crap. You don't understand. This happens every single game that I play. No joke. There seems to be a sequence to it though. When I slaughter say 5 of the ai's units and then go for a sixth, no matter how high the ods are, I always lose. I specifically remember losing at 99.8% odds because I was so mad I almost chunked my keyboard. lol It happens too consistently for it to just be "Oh well you didn't have 100% odds" or "This is just player frustration." No. I'm talking like every 5 battle I will lost a 99.9% battle. Why doesn't Firaxis just add that little 100% battle so I can lose that too? Oh, wait, they did. I would like to be corrected if I'm wrong by some hardcore proof that the civ iv combat is not rigged. Just saying that it's not rigged and that whoever says it is rigged is a conspiracy theorist doesn't do it. Well thx :D
Click to expand...
Boy am I sick of these types of threads.

[tab]I always seem to lose 99% win prob battles

Now, before you post this sort of thread again ... come with some evidence ... here is what I want you to do:
  • Install BUG (or BAT)
  • Turn on the logger
  • Set the logger to log combat results (turn the logging on everything else off)
  • Start a large scale game that will involve lots of battles
  • At the end of the game, take the logger file and run it though excel
  • plot the probability of winning against the results
  • plot the sequences of winning by combat odds
  • post those graphs (and the excel file) here to show that they support your statements.
ParadigmShifter said:
Yay, another teeny trauma thread!:popcorn:
Click to expand...
too funny
 
Here's something I dont understand...

According to Hawking, et al., the Universe exists only because it was probable that A Universe would someday exist, and given that all matter is simply "strings" that vibrate to certain frequencies and can change, and given that everything you or I or anyone can think of is probable, in 15 billion years, including and especially the 10 billion before the Earth probably existed (according to theory, we do NOT actually exist and are just a hologram on a black hole somewhere, including everything we see in the Universe, including other black holes) Should NOT the Universe's RNG have rolled a snake eyes by now, and it all gone kablooey? (according to the black hole hologram physicists it HAS)

In other words, MATH sucks! Get over it!

"Compound interest is the most powerful force in the Universe" ~~Albert Einstein
 
Without having any knowledge about Soren's RNG, it's common knowledge that the word "random" is a bit misleading. As far as I know, computers are unable to produce results that are completely random, since the numbers are usually based on the internal clock or something like that.

In many games, the RNG can be manipulated in the most ridiculous ways, such as running back and forth 45 times, because then that box with the 1/256 chance of containing a weapon will suddenly contain the weapon every time.

It wouldn't surprise me if there are simular ways to manipulate the RNG in Civ as well, for example to trigger certain quests.

Anyway, the point is that the RNG will never work exactly as a dice roll, which means that these one in a million scenarios may happen much more frequently. The RNG will only be random if the player makes decisions that are entirely random.
 
Didn't you know every time the AI wins a battle, beats you to a wonder, or God Forbid wins the game, they're cheating?

It's never your fault. The game is supposed to let you win. If it doesn't, it's obviously cheating, and you should go complain to Firaxis about how terrible they are while distracting everyone from actually relevant issues.

Tl;DR L2P :p
 
Archon_Wing said:
Didn't you know every time the AI wins a battle, beats you to a wonder, or God Forbid wins the game, they're cheating?

It's never your fault. The game is supposed to let you win. If it doesn't, it's obviously cheating, and you should go complain to Firaxis about how terrible they are while distracting everyone from actually relevant issues.

Tl;DR L2P :p
Click to expand...

I finally saw it happen: the Mids built instantly with a GE.

Ordinarily the Mids are what I go for because the AIs are racing for all the other early wonders. For me, the Mids are a safe bet unless I have marble and of course I play for the Oracle.

This time someone got a GE and instantly popped up a Pyramids. :lol:
 
Well, time to spend 500 hammers on troops to capture it I guess. :p

Sadly, this attack will miraculously fail, leaving the AI with a damaged archer that kills your last 3 attackers, just because the game says trolololol.
 
Olso one thing that is unballanced with civ 4 is certain units have counters for example

axeman kill mellee units
chariots and horse archers sually kill axeman
pikeman and spearman kill chariots and horse archers


However those counters usally don't have a decive role.

Because if you're enemy has a stack of different unit types for example some pikeman and axeman

WHen you atack with you're horse archer he will fight the pikeman not the axeman so he will mostly lose


If the rule was : units of the same typ can be on the same tile then combat could actually work good


Same with grenadiers/ rifleman and so on...
 
apocalypse105 said:
Olso one thing that is unballanced with civ 4 is certain units have counters for example

axeman kill mellee units
chariots and horse archers sually kill axeman
pikeman and spearman kill chariots and horse archers


However those counters usally don't have a decive role.

Because if you're enemy has a stack of different unit types for example some pikeman and axeman

WHen you atack with you're horse archer he will fight the pikeman not the axeman so he will mostly lose


If the rule was : units of the same typ can be on the same tile then combat could actually work good


Same with grenadiers/ rifleman and so on...
Click to expand...


That's because of games like Age of Empires and Empire Earth where they started that nonsense.

The older Civ games didnt have that.

You can always change it in the XML. There was a thread about axemen...

BUT Historically, Egyptian 3 man chariots were archer platforms that never actually physically engaged the enemy, Immortals were just a bunch of dumb guys in WICKER armor (but there were a lot of them!) that were EASY picking for the Bronze armed & armored Hoplites of Sparta. That's how 300 could hold off an army of 100,000. They wore metal!

For realism, make the Immortal a swordsman in wicker armor, and give Hoplites a +100% against...

Etc, Etc, Etc. :king::goodjob:
 
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