Combat in this game broken?

[nfw]

Of course, this is the real key. How often in history have soldiers attacked at what they perceived to be 10% odds of winning? Extremely rarely. The first time they might attack out of ignorance of what awaits them. After that you either need fanatics, or the internal security police with massed machine guns behind them to make them go forward in such situations. Otherwise most commanders don't even bother to try, as certain death almost always means certain desertion. For game mechanics, however, it's probably only fair that the AI couldn't care less about the lives of it's soldiers. It gives the AI a fairer chance against the more flexible human mind, and the exploits that we humans use.

"I do not expect you to attack, I order you to die. In the time which passes until we die, other troops and commanders can come forward and take our places." - Ataturk to his soldiers who are out of ammo. It's extreme, but if the situation calls for it, a commander will send his soldiers to the death.

 

[Iranon]

More how humans have crippling cognitive biases that they are too arrogant to recognise.

Quite likely. For example, I never got the impression that the RNG was skewed against me, but I felt that <1% results weren't as rare as they should be.

Which prompted me to check how much fighting at extreme odds a game typically contains (more than I had expected) and my understanding of iterated probability maths.
--> happens often enough to be suspicious but not enough to cry foul without proper testing, and I'm not THAT geeky.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Quite likely. For example, I never got the impression that the RNG was skewed against me, but I felt that <1% results weren't as rare as they should be.

Which prompted me to check how much fighting at extreme odds a game typically contains (more than I had expected) and my understanding of iterated probability maths.
--> happens often enough to be suspicious but not enough to cry foul without proper testing, and I'm not THAT geeky.

Losing at extreme favorable odds is pretty common; players who warmonger fight 100's of such battles every game on high difficulties, so getting screwed on a few 1% battles (or less) isn't rationally unexpected.

More rare are extreme low-odds wins. I've observed them but only because in the past I've been willing to try crap like warrior rushes where you do occasionally see that 2% win (you can consistently warrior rush w/o inca on marathon below deity and AGG makes it pretty easy :/).

Combat odds problems are only really an issue when the result of a low #battles can have a large impact on the outcome of the game. Typically, this is only seen in the very early game, but it can definitely hurt. Take the case of a barb warrior killing my warrior, then attacking an archer fortified in a city and capturing it. One wouldn't typically produce more than those units to stop 1 warrior from a minimal amount of fog so early on, but now the RNG has handed me something where the very outcome of the game could change (ultimately it didn't, only because I was lucky though because I got slowed down a LOT). Of course, the odds that I'd lose my 2nd city that way were less than 1 in 1000, but that doesn't help much when it happens anyway .

Later on collateral and sheer #'s make such things astronomically close to impossible; in the beginning not so much. This is part of the reason I hate relying on the early rush excepting pillage/choke tactics where viable.