Gamey combat odds

This is regarding one of the changes in the December patch with combat results to make it abit more 'random'.

Pre December patch i found the combat results to be generally good, it usually did the listed damage. For example an archer firing at a spearman, combat results list 4 damage, it would normally do 4 damage. This is good!

Post December patch i find myself constantly frustrated by what i consider downright 'Gamey' cheating AI combat results which are almost always in the AIs favor. Now my archer will never do its listed damage, majority of the time when its needed to do atleast listed damage it will do HALF damage, making me lose a unit or city unfairly. Only when the combat is pointless(AKA your going to win anyway) will it do normal or damage in favor of you, (probably to reduce your exp gain)

Its like to make the game harder because of the bad AI & to combat human players better ability with units, they added in a hidden bonus to AI which doesn't show up in combat results. I don't understand why they would try to make the combat like this, its incredibly unfun & gamey/irritating, who enjoys it this way?. Why change it to be like this... I now go into battles expected to do less damage & to take more damage when its important. I completely disregard the odds now because they're always wrong.

I also don't understand why every battle ends with atleast 1 damage, Giant death robot attacks archer, takes 1 damage lol, stupid.

December patch added some good changes which gave better balance which is awesome... but added in things which ruined some of the fun (2 tile city spam & 1 tile island cities, & gamey combat results to name a few)

I love for the game to be more difficult i just hope firaxis can do it right next time by actually improving things without the need to resort to cheap cheating tactics...

I would vote for removing the 1 automatic damage 'feature' too. It just gets silly when the power discrepencies get bigger. As for the gameyness with the damage, I think they mean the range for damage was increased, but I've seen my units do more damage than expected as well.

I doubt they can truly fix anything at this point. They're just not aware that doing stuff like this makes the game less fun. However, I cannot agree entirely that the damage is reduced from the player. I didn't really run a statistical analysis, but come to think of it, it does seem a little less favorable in my last war. Hmm...

Many times I have been promised 5 or 6 damage, yet I wiped out the opposing unit..."one shot, one kill"....

so it works both ways.... you could always use the "new random seed" option... then re-load if you think you're getting hosed on die rolls...

I, for one, really don't want this game to become purely a math problem

The issue with this kind of random dice roll is that people tend to remember the time their full-strength battleship lost to a red-strength spearman; but they tend to forget how their red-strength spearman killed a full-strength battleship. People tend to be more geared towards not repeating a mistake, and to know better than to test the odds when they aren't in their favor. The AI just seems to be getting lucky because, in short, they don't care what the odds are.

I havn't had any issues with the odds. I have had plenty of times when I've done more damage to ai and received less damage then predicted.

Can't remember any times when the rolls have gone badly against me - maybe the bad rolls only happens on the ai's turn when I don't get to see the odds

Combat rolls are more random now, but it goes both ways equally. I think it was designed to make the human player loose units now and then.

A 100% healthy unit has only 10 hitpoints.
During a battle each unit will lose an amount of HPs according to the combat odds + some extra HPs from a random number.
This random number can be 0,1,2,3 or 4, which is insane.
It's very bad game design to have a chance to lose 40% health because of randomness.

Further, the combat + promotion system is meaningless anyway.
I've seen too many 10:1 situations, mainly because of strength differences.