Are there any tricks to naval combat? Why do my battleships suck?

[ChaosSlayer]

I tend to notice that RNG somehow always favors AI..
Yeah maybe I am biased, but hell, whenever I attack AI unit with less than 60% win odds, I ALWAYS LOSE. To be more specific I loose 9 out of 10 fights, while I should in fact be winning at least half.
AI on other hand has no problem attacking my units with only 40% chance and still win 8 out of 10 times.
I do realize that AI intellect is actually flawed and AI makes VERY DUMB moves (strategically), so it kind of balances it out.

However, Civ is NOT Chess, loosing 4-5 battles when game just started will haunt you fr the rest of 8-80 hours of the game (I play on Marathon + my own mod which TRIPLES play time).

Therefore I solve RNG weirdness very simply: when RNg pulls weird crap 2-3 times in a row (like I loose 3 times in a row despite having 85%+ chance to win), I reload
I try NOT to get too excited with it, because otherwise it becomes cheating

 

[rbj2001]

Yeah maybe I am biased, but hell, whenever I attack AI unit with less than 60% win odds, I ALWAYS LOSE. To be more specific I loose 9 out of 10 fights, while I should in fact be winning at least half.
AI on other hand has no problem attacking my units with only 40% chance and still win 8 out of 10 times.

Well, I hope you know that that's just your perception, and not what actually happens, if you measure it.

One thing that I've noticed sometimes happens is that if you select a bunch of units and let the computer decide which to attack with, it shows the odds for your strongest attack (or your strongest siege unit), but then decides to actually attack with a weaker unit instead - say you're attacking longbows with a mix of knights and horse archers, it'll sometimes attack with the horse archers to soften the longbows up and preserve the stronger knights for the coup de grace. So your horse archers will die a lot, being somewhat disposable, while you're seeing the relatively good odds your knights would have got. A bug? Probably. But the actual odds for the battle were still correct, even though they weren't displayed on screen. (Hey, anyone remember playing Civ4 vanilla, when it didn't show odds at all?)

Therefore I solve RNG weirdness very simply: when RNg pulls weird crap 2-3 times in a row (like I loose 3 times in a row despite having 85%+ chance to win), I reload
I try NOT to get too excited with it, because otherwise it becomes cheating

Hey, stop that!

Spoiler :

Actually, no-one else cares, cheat as much as you want!

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Can I just chip in and say that good RNG is not a hard thing to achieve. I've been programming a VERY basic darts opponent simulator in C++, and I'm hardly a seasoned coder, and I've had essentially zero problems achieving this. And yes, I have also written a standalone app to test the engine and make sure the results that come out are what they should be when repeated hundreds of thouasands of times. You don't even have to do anything clever yourself, there are tonnes of free and even standard libraries which you can use to do this.

It would actually take MORE effort to do it incorrectly than correctly, so I don't find claims that CIV IV has poor RNG to be really credible.