Think of the Pokemon example given, if there wasnt that random chance for the underdog to get the win.
It still doesn't support your argument. Bad players wouldn't ordinarily be playing people outside of their own skill level routinely...they'd be playing other bad players, where they would in fact have a chance.
A chance not just to win, but to identify bad strategy more readily and improve (rather than having idiot strategies rewarded in a semi-pavlov type experiment).
Besides, I could stomp rookies/people who don't play competitive pokemon 10-20 times straight clean through the crits. It's when they decide a well-played and strategically engaging match in favor of the guy who was out-played by the other that they simply suck. They don't really make anyone at that level rationally happy, though some people deal with it anyway. It's actually very grating for me to watch strong battlers on youtube and see them lose on a crit or parahax x3 draw or something. That crap is just stupid...penalized after making the best choices. Derp!
Besides, the pokemon example is bad anyway. A big part of the game is predicting what the opponent will do next. Bad players can occasionally take a game off someone by getting a good stretch of decisions, even if a good player would generally predict correctly more often. The game does NOT need crits. Civ doesn't either.
He means there is no fun playing against a good player if you are sure you won't win. That's why those 'unfair' features, like critical hits and the like, are added.
And I posit that argument is terrible, because these luck factors most drastically affect close games (which is logical, they have a higher chance of bridging a skill gap as the gap shrinks), not lopsided ones.
A lot of that argument boils back to the ridiculous and baseless assumption that a player who is slightly better will always win the game unless he gets lucky. That's not how life works though.
As for pokemon, is it impossible to make a crit build? that would mean crits wouldn't be a viable strategy.
Pretty close. Most you can get it to is ~1/8 or in one case ~1/4 but a lot of matchups allow for 1 or 2 hit kills (or the ability to disable something) so a strategy that relies on crits is pretty piss poor. The poke with "super luck" (increased crit rate) has the added bonus of being too slow to use the crit-chance boosted move and is frail enough that a lot of neutral hits will kill it...so that 1/4 of often 0.
However, every poke has a small chance to crit each turn. You absolutely can't rely on it, but across a single match a couple crits are likely for one side or the other (but they're not so likely that they will even out in the VAST majority of games)...but what happens is some will occur on hits that would otherwise kill anyway while others will break through setups or an important physical/special wall and completely change the outcome of the game in an instant...all this in a game that ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT REQUIRE them (it would play fine without them).
) ), you can assure a 
if you have more units that can attack a certain enemy unit in one turn than thr hit points that the unit has. In fact, this does not turn in a complete wreck the Civ V combat system just because the 1upt rule prevents most of the times that enough units can attack a certain enemy unit 
. "self-conflicting" and "buggy" are not design philosophies...well not viable ones 
