Originally posted by ainwood
On a related issue, the more rounds of combat you have, the more likely you are that the 'average' result is the 'average' of those expected. Therefore, you would expect a higher proportion of "screwy" results when you have conscript vs conscript, simply because there is a lower number of combat rounds. This is what Zachriel is hinting at with his trippling the hit-points idea.
Yes, it will tend to make it more predictable, but I, for one, think this would be boring.
I agree wholeheartedly. I understand the frustration when combat results, especially when using large stacks of slightly superior units, go against the player. Especially when all the careful planning players like Killer put into their gameplay still fails to pay off.
But then I recall civ2, which had introduced hit points and "firepower" (eliminated in civ3) to reduce the totally chaotic and unrealistic results of single "die roll" combats that were the system in CIV 1. In civ 2, the discovery of gunpowder meant that you could build musketeers and be pretty much immune to attack by knights. Warfare in civ2 favoured a tech edge much more than numbers, so much so that if you had the tech edge you were in good shape even if the enemy had 5x as many units.
So now we have civ3, which still has hit points, so combat is (usually) determined by more than one die roll. However, the "firepower" concept is gone, so a musket does the same "damage" as a sword. This may or may not be realistic, I really don't know. It would seem obvious that a gun beats a sword every time, but then guns have to be reloaded and swords don't. Guns (especially the older ones) jam, or even explode in the shooters face.
The point is that civ3 includes a system that tries to balance the good and bad of both civ1 (wildly random, spearmen had a 1 in 18 chance of sinking a battleship, IIRC) and civ 2 (random but with preditable outcomes, big edge to more advanced units).
When Killer plans for an unlucky outcome (very wise!) and still loses the battle (i.e. the outcome was so bad it set him back several turns or worse, despite his contingencies), then we tend to think the system has failed to acknowledge his superior playing style. Indeed, what happens when you plan for the worst, but the very first knight kills the tough defender with no damage? There is no immediate payoff for having 10+ extra knights around - it's still up to the player to turn that into a significant advantage by sending those knights somewhere else where they can engage in another random contest.
Is this a problem? Not for me. I tend to plan like Killer does - have lots of extra attack units, Just In Case. But this won't translate into an advantage over a riskier strategy that gets lucky, in fact the cautious player has spent more to win than the risk taker. HOWEVER, the cautious style DOES pay off if you know how to turn the lucky breaks (which you never count on), into real advantages.
I like the civ3 combat system just fine, even though I tend to play cautiously. Why? Because it allows for an alternate stragtegy: high-risk, high payoff gambits. I'd love to see how the two strategies hold up in an MP session.
So Killer's suggestion (also I've seen other mods that basically steepen the bell curve, reducing the occurence of extreme outcomes) for upping HP is great if you want to increase the rewards for cautious, meticulous planning. Be warned, however, this system (IMHO) will reduce the variety of strategies available for waging war in civ3.
