Does human player get treated unfairly in battles?

[Salah-Al-Din]

I've run extensive tests on Civ4 combat when it came out, and never found any combat bias.

Many people think that they are losing "too many" battles with odds in their favor, but I think they just misunderstand how probabilities work. For example, while a 95% chance to win sounds very high, it actually means that you are expected to lose every 20th battle. Now take into account that a Civ game can have hundreds of such battles. If you have 200 battles with 95% odds in the course of the game, you are expected to lose 10 times. We tend to remember these losses very well ("WTH?! I had 95% odds and I LOST?!"), while we mostly ignore the wins because we take those for granted when we have high odds. Hence we easily fall for the illusion that we lose more often than we should, when we actually don't.

Yeah that makes sense...

Didn't think about it like that. Thanks. I was always cursing my luck, whenever I lose and I had like 90% odds.

 

[BeefontheBone]

Yes, they are.

Slightly out of date reply here, but since it's been bumped, that answer is only true if your game has been patched - the original release and some of the subsequent patches continued to neglect first strikes in displayed combat odds.

 

[Old Spice]

Has anyone tried fighting when your odds where only 0.03% chance to win? I can say I have won more then my fair share of those fights.

 

[Elandal]

I don't know about exact percentages, but sometimes I feel my cats should get medals.. what's the odds needed to get 10XP for winning?

 

[phaves]

Has anyone tried fighting when your odds where only 0.03% chance to win? I can say I have won more then my fair share of those fights.

Exactly I won a suicide catapult attack the other day with a 0.06% chance of winning! AI must have cursuing the RNG gods.

 

[ratrangerm]

I'll admit I sometimes find it frustrating when a unit has a 99.1 percent chance of winning and the unlucky roll comes up, especially when my attacking unit outclasses the defending unit and the defending unit is badly damaged.

But yeah, I can understand that there's that small chance that could happen. Frustrating, yes, but it's part of the game.

That's how I learned how to make smart use of promotions and of siege units. Catapults are fast becoming my favorite unit, just because they can do so much for attacking cities... first they strip away the defenses, then they can be used to go on suicide runs, sometimes withdrawing, and once in a while, winning a battle. Then it's mop-up time for your city raiders.

 

[Elandal]

Most people remember the bad roll especially when it hits a high level unit. However, to get to the high level, what odds has the unit beaten already?

In a recent game (BetterAI 07-01-08 with the handicaps by Blake, played on Prince) I had a SoD of some 30-40 units, mostly artillery and infantry. Of the arties, one was L8, half a dozen L7. I'm quite sure they had beaten odds like hell in their time, but still it hurt some when the L8 arty finally took the bullet

I think I'll have to find the unit stats mod again so I can see the overall odds a unit has beaten when it dies - will definitelly make me feel better even if it loses one fight at 99.x odds when I see it's total chance of being alive at all before that was 0.01%