How can this be?? Warrior beats modern armor!

F

FredAstaire

Chieftain
Joined
Nov 9, 2006
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Hi guys, im playing C3 vanilla on a standard map on a diety level. China vs Japan. I was attacking a city using my stack of full-health veteran modern armor...and i was down to the very last unit defending the city...an elite warrior ( i think, he had 5 bars of health). So using a new full-health veteran armor I attacked the warrior...in just 6-8 hits...my modern armor was destroyed while the warrior was still yellow-lined! How can this be?? The computer MUST be cheating.........what are the chances that a freakin 3500 BC warrior beats out a 2000 A.D. Modern Armor?
 
what are the chances that a freakin 3500 BC warrior beats out a 2000 A.D.
Click to expand...

There are several combat calculator around, though I can't think of a link at the moment.
Anyway, the chance of this happening is very small, but still above zero!
 
I have come very close to losing an MA to an archer or a spear before. Ugly things can occur with the RNG.
 
there is no doubt that at some point it has happened or will happen. it's very rare, because:

A) Many players win the game before MA appear
B) Most of the time, the AI doesn't have warriors by that time

so we don't hear about it that much.
 
It's happened before to me, so it is not impossible. Me, modern armor, them, one freakin swordsman.
 
I've study the RNG pretty thoroughly and can answer this one decently well for you ;) The RNG randomly picks a number between 0 and 1 to three decimal points (0.853 for example).

Lets take a random battle to demonstrate on... Swordsmen vs spearmen (discount terrain bonus's for simplicity). attack 3 vs defence 2... 60% for swordsmen and 40% for spearman for each and every round. The RNG selects a random number, if it's below .600 the swordsman wins... If it's above, the spearman wins and a health is subtracted. Repeat choosing random numbers until one of the units dies.

Modern armour vs warrior (for the fun of it, we'll say the warrior is fortified in a metro) 24 attack (I think?) vs 1 defence + 100% for metro and +25% for fortify and +50 for a defence network for a total of 2.75. This leaves the warrior with a little bit more than a 10% chance of winning each round (0.102 to be exact). If the RNG choose 4 numbers under .102 before it chooses 5 numbers above, the warrior will win. Due to the random seeding the generator tends to use, this actually happens much more commonly than it should.

If it means anything, you've likely had times where you attack a spearmen with a swordsmen and lost because the random number generator chose numbers that would have made a modern armor lose to a warrior.
 
This why we argued to bring back the Fire Power rating. Then you further check the number based on FP and make it much harder for the underdog (when it is a large margin) to win.

They wanted to have old units be useful, we wanted them to go back to having little chance to win.Who wants to see gallies sink battleships?
 
Well wait, a warrior defeating a tank is actually quite realistic. If you use strategy, you can just walk up to the tank and well, yeah.
 
But can a unit of warriors defeat a unit of tanks? The units in Civ represent more than one guy.

I do think that yes, it is possible, but it won't happen often.
So yeah, in that regard, the randomness in Civ3 is more realistic than some people who complained about it seem to think.

I think they did a better job in civ4.
In Civ4, they made it so a healthy unit of way superior tech can't be defeated by one old unit, but can be damaged, and loses strength as it is damaged, so it can still be defeated if overwhelmed with bigger numbers.
 
I've seen it happen before. But only once before.
 
You should go back to the days of civ 1 when it was only 1 random number to decide the winner and loser instead of a series of battles over HP's. It didn't take too many battles for a bad number to come up and lose your Battleship to any number of much weaker units!
 
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Sorry. Had to do that.
 
I dunno - it just seems like it's not as unrealistic as you may think.

I look at Vietnam and Iraq and see untrained groups doing serious damage to soldiers.

Yes, it seems odd that a modern tank could be defeated by a bunch of guys with stone axes... then again, it's kind of odd to consider that a bunch of guys with stone axes could live for 4000 years to go up against a modern armor!!

There is a book by terry pratchett - one of his diskworld series - where he has a barbarian horde of really old guys in wheel chairs and walkers. At one point, they wipe out a set of attackers - how do they do it? Well, they are very good at not getting killed... that's how they got so old...
 
I look at Vietnam and Iraq and see untrained groups doing serious damage to soldiers.
Click to expand...

Errr, not sure if I agree that whats going on in Iraq is from 'untrained' groups... But that aside, it makes little difference in Civ3. Training level has notta to do with a unit or it's type and only is reflected by hitpoints (conscript, reg, veteran, elite). 'Untrained' groups would simply be conscript units.

Just to echo VMXA... The firepower trait is by far the best solution to this (in Civ2), and can be filed under civ3 designer screw-ups as much as anything else. Although screwup might not be the best term... How about "undesirable result with the current system in place"?
 
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