Originally posted by a4phantom
"No, why shouldn't it be able to be taken? You just will need some attackers... The rest lays in the hands of the... ahhh.. RNG."
Please explain this Randomn Number Generator to me. There seems to be more to it than simply rolling the dice for each side each round and adding the relevant attack/defense strength. Does it link rolls that should be independent? i.e. if that spearmen luckily wins the first round against your modern armor, he is strangly likely to win the second and third rounds?
"Remember, the army *might* heal during the inter-turn phase.."
Explain this *might* too please, I don't have Conquests yet.
The RNG in principle is a small computer (sub-)program. As especially Windows-users know, computers are predictable in their behaviour
In general that means, if you press button A, you will cause reaction B. Always. That is, what computers are constructed for, and at the current moment, anything different from that would imply a severe hardware problem. Period.
But, this of course is not at all, what we want for games' purposes.
Now the RNG enters the stage. It just doesn't do anything else than calculating rows of numbers (something between 0 and 0.99999999999999999....), according to a certain inherent algorithm. To avoid to have the same numbers all the time, the RNG is fed by a socalled "seed" (you may have seen this on the first page, when creating a new game in C3C 1.15). That seed is the base for the calculation to start. Now, different seeds then mean different rows of numbers. Typically, a RNG is fed multiple times by various seeds during the course of a game. Often, the time between two user inputs (mouse movement, pressing a key) are used for that, since we humans are unperfect and for that, unpredictable. So, even if you try to click on a certain key in constant frequency, there will be very small differences. But the computer is quick enough to measure those and for that gets different seeds, then.
Now, taking all of that into account, it is obvious that the determining factor for the "quality" of a RNG is the algorithm, which is used for it. Different algorithms may mean different rows of numbers while using the same seed.
Nevertheless, as soon as you know the seed and the algorithm, and the number of calculations already made, you would be able to predict the next number. For that, a computer's RNG in fact in just a SRNG = semi-random number generator. It just seems to be random, what number comes up next since you don't know the seed, the algorithm and the number of calculations already made.
Next thing. As I understand it, in Civ (PTW, C3C) the RNG doesn't roll dice for both, the attacker and the defender, but it "rolls" just on "dice", that is, it creates a number in the above mentioned interval between 0 and 0.999... To allocate the outcome to one of the two sides, it does the following:
Assumed, you have an attacker with A=4 and a defender with D=2. Then the probability for a win(attacker) would be 4/(4+2)=4/6=0.6666666
That means, you may say that every result of the RNG below 0.666666 would count as a win for the attacker (or, you just reverse it, and would say everything above (1-0.66666666) would be the attacker's win)
Hmm.. that's in principle, what I recall from my university about RNGs.....
About the "might heal". As far as I have experienced it, YOUR units will need a complete turn without action to heal completely in a city with barracks. Sometimes I get the impression, that for the AI units the inter-turn is sufficient to be healed.
