Don't you love it when your combat odds are 99.9%

Honestly the combat system in CIV 4 is the one thing I don't like about the game. It's luck based which I dislike and it's rather opaque with many things not working as you might imagine them to or just being unexplained completely. Like what do first strikes even do? The game doesn't tell you,

If it was me I'd have just made it real simple. Each unit gets a single stat called strength. And when two units hit each other they subtract each others strength from one another and that's it. So like Warrior (3) vs Axeman (5) means one dead warrior and one axeman reduced to 2 until he heals. None of this dice rolls and custom rounds and other junk.
 
dont care, its still infinitely better and more tactical than civ5s garbage combat where its basically just infinite stalemates for 300 turns and tactics literally dont matter since theres no space and you cant even have the damage per turn to kill enemy units before they run behind their army or kill anything ever.
 
PPQ_Purple said:
Honestly the combat system in CIV 4 is the one thing I don't like about the game. It's luck based which I dislike and it's rather opaque with many things not working as you might imagine them to or just being unexplained completely. Like what do first strikes even do? The game doesn't tell you,

If it was me I'd have just made it real simple. Each unit gets a single stat called strength. And when two units hit each other they subtract each others strength from one another and that's it. So like Warrior (3) vs Axeman (5) means one dead warrior and one axeman reduced to 2 until he heals. None of this dice rolls and custom rounds and other junk.
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some of the promotions aren't even explained at all.
 
jnebbe said:
When I was a big civ noob I didn't know promotions are cumulative :lol:
"Why would I get City Raider 2 for an extra +5% city attack when I could get Combat 1 for an extra +10% strength?"
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Eh, that's better than trying in real life to get 100 in all four car tires.
 
At least the combat system is better than Civ 3, I remember Spearmen taking down Tanks, sure the Tank was injured but how realistic is a Spearman taking down Armor
 
Spearman vs tank has never seemed unrealistic to me. There's a hundred other things you can't explain away but a tank at 5% HP can be thought of as a blown up tank with 1 dead and two injured people climbing out of it. Those injured people while in disarray can get killed by someone basically unarmed. As for a spearman beating a tank at < 0.01% odds, that can be thought of as the tank catastrophically misfiring. There's always some inherent risk in a combat situation - casualties from friendly fire, disease, weather, accidents, etc.
The issue is that an HP system in general is a bit unrealistic, but once you interpret it into something meaningful, the spear vs tank issue disappears.
 
I haven't wasted a lot of my limited brain power on this subject, but to me a full health spearman is an army of dudes wielding sharp objects and a tank at low health is a broken tank. I'd also think people who value realism highly would not care that much about turn based games.
 
drewisfat said:
Spearman vs tank has never seemed unrealistic to me. There's a hundred other things you can't explain away but a tank at 5% HP can be thought of as a blown up tank with 1 dead and two injured people climbing out of it. Those injured people while in disarray can get killed by someone basically unarmed. As for a spearman beating a tank at < 0.01% odds, that can be thought of as the tank catastrophically misfiring. There's always some inherent risk in a combat situation - casualties from friendly fire, disease, weather, accidents, etc.
The issue is that an HP system in general is a bit unrealistic, but once you interpret it into something meaningful, the spear vs tank issue disappears.
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sampsa said:
I haven't wasted a lot of my limited brain power on this subject, but to me a full health spearman is an army of dudes wielding sharp objects and a tank at low health is a broken tank. I'd also think people who value realism highly would not care that much about turn based games.
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It's one of the unique beauties of the game to me, that, while obviously unrealistic by any real metric, it nevertheless somehow still feels like it strikes some kind of a happy medium where you can still take it seriously enough as a platform for your imagination imitating some kind of real scenario. With few exceptions, the 4th game feels like it approximates real things closely enough that your imagination can be passively immersed while your deliberate thoughts focus on the real meat of the game: its strategic depth.
 

Don't you love it when your combat odds are 99.9%​


sabo said:
And you lose?
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NO.

Oh wait..sarcasm...

I mean, "no."


I was watching something newish from Sulla and it happened to him and I was raging by proxy at him losing the first 4 rounds of a combat in row in an initial 50/50, yet still getting in a hit, and it not mattering one bit. The combat system is downright absurd as the RNG always trumps probability and yet yields absolute results -- you win the decisive round and the enemy unit is destroyed, or vice versa. Even the multi-round system going on behind the scenes doesn't alleviate the sheer feeling of being undercut in such a dirty way, and it's not satisfying to abuse it either -- if you REALLY want, you could save scum an equal # of warrior versus archers against every AI city and crush them...sure you'd be there all day, but the fact it's possible at all is infuriating.

IMO the combat needs to have floor/ceiling thresholds if it's not going to include a type of withdraw mechanic for unit survival for every fight, precisely to prevent the Tank vs. Spearman scenario in entirety. I don't lend any merit to expanding the scope beyond each combat either ("well, it's injured and another unit can kill it easier now") because not only are the parameters of the initial combat non-transitive to any other combat simulation, but you can always just say "bring more units" ad infinitum until they cannot possibly survive follow up attacks though this isn't a practically feasible thing. But it WOULD be if you introduced minimum floors of power to EVER win, and minimun ceilings to NEVER lose. It would make bringing like 30 guys with sticks to attack a self-propelled armored gun more justifiable when you KNOW one of them will NEVER win, but enough of them could injure it into "possible" territory.

Difficulty allowing the AI to cheat is already enough. I don't need to be cheated by the system too. Even though some find it funny, it just makes me want to drop the session :p
 
Personally I like the idea of being able to overwhelm a tank with hundreds of warriors.
 
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