Wow.. the odds..

So where, pray tell, is this documented ?, and how exactly does one "play the odds" to ones favour, is this witchcraft, a hidden skill ?,

Ah, a good question.

Attack with overwhelming force. That is a truism in the real world as well as in Civ.

Face it, history is rife with examples of technologically or numerically inferior forces winning the day through creative tactics. These are the exceptions, of course, just like your tank's loss to an archer was the less likely than the alternative. If you had 100 such tanks attacking 100 such archers, the tanks would win quite a bit more than they lost.
 
Ah, a good question.

Attack with overwhelming force. That is a truism in the real world as well as in Civ.

Face it, history is rife with examples of technologically or numerically inferior forces winning the day through creative tactics. These are the exceptions, of course, just like your tank's loss to an archer was the less likely than the alternative. If you had 100 such tanks attacking 100 such archers, the tanks would win quite a bit more than they lost.
Fine, then how do you explain the fact that four Archer armies, one with with medic rights gets defeated by one pike offensive army ?, the Archer armies were in City, defending, this happened to me at "King" level. Besides, there isn't time to build up a force of a hundred tanks from king up, hypothetically, by the time you've built a hundred tanks you're get these wonderful views of your opposition in space, game over....
 
They aren't random, it's probability, it's a dice roll. If you have 50 attack and the defense has 50 defense, you can expect to win that battle 50% of the time. That means you will lose 50% of the time.

I don't think it's quite this simple - I pretty much never lose when I have, say, a 4:1 advantage in combat even though I should be losing those 20% of the time.

I think naval combat works differently somehow too. I had a German galley parked outside one of my cities, so I built three separate veteran galleons (3 attack v 1 defense) to take it out. All died.

I've also had a submarine (2 defense) get attacked by 4 different veteran cruisers (9 attack) and win each battle.

You know, you may have a point. The game behaves exactly as I expect it to from several years of playing civ games on and off but to a newcomer, the way the odds work with the combat system may not be obvious. If they don't explain it clearly in the manual or the 'pedia, they should. Right now, away from the game, I can't remember if they do.

I dunno, it feels pretty transparent to me. The Civilopedia has attack/defense stats for all the units and it doesn't take that long to memorize them - once you have that down then you can really calculate the #s in your head since the bonuses are simple (+50% for vet, +50% on a hill or defending from forest, -50% crossing rivers, +50% fortifying, +100% fortified, +100% city walls, add naval support, etc etc). And all these #s are presented to you during a battle to show you what the components of each unit/army's attack/defense #s are.
 
Fine, then how do you explain the fact that four Archer armies, one with with medic rights gets defeated by one pike offensive army ?, the Archer armies were in City, defending, this happened to me at "King" level. Besides, there isn't time to build up a force of a hundred tanks from king up, hypothetically, by the time you've built a hundred tanks you're get these wonderful views of your opposition in space, game over....

Which is why I qualified my statement with "If". Probable does not equal certain. You're bond to have some bad luck and good luck as you continue to play Rev. In Civ, you don't get to personally command your armies. Therefore, a combat system was implemented to take into account not only relative unit strength, but the randomness of the battlefield, with idiotic blunders and moments of tactical genius represented by probability.

Edit: Back when I used to read these forums more, most threads of this nature were about tanks losing to spears.
 
I think naval combat works differently somehow too. I had a German galley parked outside one of my cities, so I built three separate veteran galleons (3 attack v 1 defense) to take it out. All died.

How's this different? Each battle is independent of each other in the outcomes as long as the galley starts at full health for each.

Yeh you have a pretty good chance of winning each time, but there's still about a 4% chance you'd lose 3 in a row. Odds are in your favor, but not hugely so.

Better question is why you didn't save those galleons, form a fleet, then have had an overrun advantage over the galley and a guaranteed victory?
 
I dunno, it feels pretty transparent to me. The Civilopedia has attack/defense stats for all the units and it doesn't take that long to memorize them - once you have that down then you can really calculate the #s in your head since the bonuses are simple (+50% for vet, +50% on a hill or defending from forest, -50% crossing rivers, +50% fortifying, +100% fortified, +100% city walls, add naval support, etc etc). And all these #s are presented to you during a battle to show you what the components of each unit/army's attack/defense #s are.

Keep in mind that I understand the combat system, I like it and it works just the way I expect it to work. I'm just saying that the dude has a point about the system not being explained very well in the manual or the pedia, which is probably why all the newbies are having fits when things don't go their way.

The combat section of the civilopedia does bring up the attack and defense values and does an excellent job of explaining how the various bonuses are computed and applied but... it never actually says anything about how the final offense and defense values are used to determine the winner of a battle. Having played Civ before, we're taking it for granted that the numbers are used to determine the odds of winning or losing, but there's nothing in the doc about that at all (that I could find).

Without that explanation, a new player would be justified in expecting that the higher number should win. Of course, after being told how it actually work, a new player would be also expected to stop whining about it, but that doesn't seem to be happening... ;)
 
I think people need to play the odds and understand that as long as there is 1% chance, you can still fail. Thats actually pretty historically realistic. There have been many cases of improbable victories throughout history. I can't count how many times the barbarians have beaten my warriors despite being inferior. It's part of the game.
 
I have seen that the tech might actually have some effect to the fight. I pretty usually get win with tank(s) against pikemen/archers--even against the odds.
 
I have seen that the tech might actually have some effect to the fight. I pretty usually get win with tank(s) against pikemen/archers--even against the odds.

That leads me to another interesting thing, because it really feels to me like the bigger troops (archer armies etc.) has more wins against close to equal single units (like a single tank), or is it just me?
 
That leads me to another interesting thing, because it really feels to me like the bigger troops (archer armies etc.) has more wins against close to equal single units (like a single tank), or is it just me?

My guess would be that each individual attack is a dice roll. So, if you have 9 archers vs. one tank you have many more dice rolls to beat the odds.
 
That leads me to another interesting thing, because it really feels to me like the bigger troops (archer armies etc.) has more wins against close to equal single units (like a single tank), or is it just me?

Yeah i have noticed it too.Interesting.

And Plasmidjunky, nice theory.
 
If they had gotten rid of the combat display on King and up, it would have made more sense. That way there would be no surprise. Seeing combat odds in your favour, but always losing doesn't really suit the purpose of displaying them.
Or, display the correct combat odds+the random factor. Little things like this would make it frustrating to those climbing in levels.
I notice in a post, "I lost four archer armies in my city to a pickman army"
I share you pain, but, on King and up, it's often better to have your defensive units out side the city. 1 off army + 1 def army inside, the other two on a hill, or separated protecting resources. There's nothing more fun then forcing the Ai's to attack across water, use the terrain bonuses.
 
How's this different? Each battle is independent of each other in the outcomes as long as the galley starts at full health for each.

Yeh you have a pretty good chance of winning each time, but there's still about a 4% chance you'd lose 3 in a row. Odds are in your favor, but not hugely so.

Better question is why you didn't save those galleons, form a fleet, then have had an overrun advantage over the galley and a guaranteed victory?

Perhaps I should have clarified this, but from what I've noticed there are a lot more "upset" victories, especially when one unit has a massive advantage/disadvantage over the other, in naval combat than in land combat.

Also, there's no way the game combat is as simple as "chances of winning an attack = att / (att + def)". I win, say, 45 v 22.5s (typical tank vs pikeman army) way more than 66% of the time.

I didn't build a galleon army because the same city produced all 3 galleons, and since I didn't know beforehand that the AI would win 3 straight 3v1s I foolishly assumed that it would be safe to commence attacking before waiting for the city to produce two more galleons.
 
My favorite the other day was how a squad of Bombers was defeated by an army of Pikemen.

Because apparently Bombers that fly thousands of feet in the air are no match for a group of men armed with sticks...
 
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