RNG combat. Can anything be done about it?

[1SDANi]

As I said before, if you have more than the minimum health you survive combat and your health becomes the minimum value. If you have minimum health you die.

Optionally, perhaps if an entire stack has minimum health they die all at once, instead of the player/ai needing to carve though them one at a time.

 

[Enyavar]

My idea was that any unit, regardless of odds, would survive death.

Well, now you've gone and embarrassed yourself.

As I said before, if you have more than the minimum health you survive combat and your health becomes the minimum value. If you have minimum health you die.
Optionally, perhaps if an entire stack has minimum health they die all at once, instead of the player/ai needing to carve though them one at a time.

Okay, this looks more reasonable than the other quote, at first glance, but it still requires the winner to have a huge surplus of units. And I can't imagine a stack of units on minimum health. There's always one that has at least 20% health remaining.

Knoedel has posted the 1.15-Pyrrhus-Merge, so go try it out with the withdrawal-threshold down to 10% odds instead of 90%. ["units that would die in a >10% odds fight retreat instead and survive with a sliver of health"].
Aside from scripted events, the AI sucks in warfare, and I'm pretty sure with the threshold down that much, the AI will barely complete any conquests.

(Regrettably, I only play 1.15 since two months or so, and so I don't really have a base knowledge to compare the world-wide results.

 

[f1rpo]

I wrote the Pyrrhic Victories mod when I started modding about 4 years ago so that I wouldn't "have to" reload all the time. I had actually set the odds threshold to 65% , which certainly made warfare with a tech advantage too powerful. I abandoned that mini mod pretty soon and changed my reloading habits. Recently, I've had a discussion about a combat round limit (like in air combat) with @devolution. He's contributing to the Religion and Revolution mod, which has such a limit. This sounds more elegant to me than guaranteed survival at high odds, but may create the same balance problems. Adding a cost to unit healing might help, but would be a major change. Anyway, I'm not recommending that (or anything) for DoC because, for one thing, I still haven't played DoC (I've been meaning to).

 

[1SDANi]

Well, now you've gone and embarrassed yourself.



Okay, this looks more reasonable than the other quote, at first glance, but it still requires the winner to have a huge surplus of units. And I can't imagine a stack of units on minimum health. There's always one that has at least 20% health remaining.

Knoedel has posted the 1.15-Pyrrhus-Merge, so go try it out with the withdrawal-threshold down to 10% odds instead of 90%. ["units that would die in a >10% odds fight retreat instead and survive with a sliver of health"].
Aside from scripted events, the AI sucks in warfare, and I'm pretty sure with the threshold down that much, the AI will barely complete any conquests.

(Regrettably, I only play 1.15 since two months or so, and so I don't really have a base knowledge to compare the world-wide results.

Oh the idea definitely isn't perfect, it needs a lot of refining to be viable. Also if I embarrassed myself then it was because I trusted you guys to have read my previous posts.

 

[ozqar]

Oh the idea definitely isn't perfect, it needs a lot of refining to be viable. Also if I embarrassed myself then it was because I trusted you guys to have read my previous posts.

I think they're just teasing you because you wrote "survive death" instead of "survive combat" some posts ago. That would definitely have important ramifications for the game, and existence itself.

 

[1SDANi]

Recently, I've had a discussion about a combat round limit (like in air combat) with @devolution. He's contributing to the Religion and Revolution mod, which has such a limit. This sounds more elegant to me than guaranteed survival at high odds, but may create the same balance problems. Adding a cost to unit healing might help, but would be a major change. Anyway, I'm not recommending that (or anything) for DoC because, for one thing, I still haven't played DoC (I've been meaning to).

Also a very good idea, though if we implemented it we'd probably have to increase the number of turns in the game, which wouldn't be very good.

Also, you have to play DoC, it is the single best 4X game I've ever played.

I'd also like to shout out @merijn_v1's compilation of new civs for DoC, of which I forked my Community Mod Compilation project from.

 

[ngazi]

So some people want every unit to have built in withdraw but also protection from dying.

Doesn't this hurt the AI immensely by making all their kills 1 xp? On defense, they either get killed or withdrawed on, forcing the AI to finish for only 1 xp or walk away with no xp. Of course this is easily manipulated by human players to bait and bypass terrain defense.

 

[Genghis Khaiser]

How about if, by default, chances of losing are changed from 100% chance of dying to 50% dying and 50% withdrawing?