27-01-2004 22:57									#1
	Spearman vs. Tank Probability Put an end to popups!

Clearly the Spearman vs Tank issue has ignited great passion among the Civ-playing population. As much profound thought has gone into whether the current combat system is appropriate, and if not what better alternatives there are, the time is ripe for a poll to gauge popular opinion. Stand (err... type) and be counted!
-bvc

	27-01-2004 23:13									#2
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I voted never, which is how often I have seen it in the last 20-24 months.
I thought I was going to have a chance yesterday. A spear showed up at a city full of tanks. The sender must have send it long ago from another contient or something. I actually hit it with an elite calv.

	28-01-2004 00:38									#3
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Very rarely, as is currently the case in CivIII.

Frankly, the loss of a Tank to a spearman is more likely to make me laugh than actually get upset, because if I've got Tanks and the opposition has spearmen, I'm kicking some serious ass anyway.

Far more irritating (though fine from the perspective of the combat system) was what happened to me last night: attack regular warrior with elite mounted warrior. Elite mounted warrior loses 5 straight combat rounds and dies, regular warrior unscathed.

That pissed me off. But **** happens in war, and I'm willing to accept it. The next elite MW killed the pesky warrior (though my MW lost 3 hp, IIRC, so that warrior took a total of 8hps of attacking MWs!).

-Arrian

	28-01-2004 00:56									#4
	Remove this text

As much as people complain about this, it's never happened in one of my games. So I would be inclined to just leave it alone.

OT: And a Happy Birthday @ vmxa1....

	28-01-2004 01:28									#5
	Avatar Enlargement: We've got the solution

quote: Arrian sed: the loss of a Tank to a spearman is more likely to make me laugh than actually get upset

Skywalkers' avatar illustrates this nicely.

	28-01-2004 01:30									#6
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beat me to it

I voted "always"

	28-01-2004 01:37									#7
	Increase Your PM Length

If it happens, it happens. I'd laugh at it too. I have however been irritated when losing elite knights to regular warriors unfortified on grassland. That happened in AU208 (Apolyton University course 208) and was part of a long string of depressing RNG defeats.

	28-01-2004 01:40									#8
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quote: Originally posted by Rhothaerill If it happens, it happens. I'd laugh at it too. I have however been irritated when losing elite knights to regular warriors unfortified on grassland. That happened in AU208 (Apolyton University course 208) and was part of a long string of depressing RNG defeats.

Lies.

	28-01-2004 01:51									#9
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Back! Back, foul troll!

:makes sign to ward off evil:

-Arrian

	28-01-2004 01:54									#10
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quote: Originally posted by Arrian Back! Back, foul troll! :makes sign to ward off evil: -Arrian

Just take your own advice and ignore him. Let him go back to Utah and troll them.

You CAN laugh at him though. It amazes me how many people think they're funny when they troll.

	28-01-2004 02:31									#11
	Help yourself to an AD-FREE life

Don't don't troll to be funny.

	28-01-2004 04:28									#12
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" OT: And a Happy Birthday @ vmxa1.... "

Thanks, she who must be obeyed as proclaimed no gaming tonight and is forcing me to go out to dinner. Oh well it will be another year before I have to do it again.

	28-01-2004 06:25									#13
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I think it should be rarer, in that I think the combat points should go up exponentially like someone suggested. I think it is realistic that a spearman could kill a tank (maybe he's quick, or puts his spear into the gas tank), but it should be incredably rare. I think it should even be rare for an archer to be able to kill a medieval infantry on a mountain, or for a medieval infantry to lose to an archer on open ground with no fortifying.

	28-01-2004 07:10									#14
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Although I truly am fine with the current combat system, I just HAD to vote for bananas.

There's all this justification about tank traps, molotov cocktails, etc. Screw that... the crafty Spearman snuck up in the middle of the night, crammed a bunch of banana peels in the tank's gas tank, and put the pointy end of the stick in the driver when he got out to figure out what the heck was going on.

(The Spearman obviously being a 'poly regular.)



C'mon Tass... admit it: even you would think of such if caught in such an imbalanced situation. You'd check with your Spearmen comrades, do a quick poll about what to do, include a banana option as a matter of habit, and VOILA, problem solved.

Enough said.

	28-01-2004 07:54									#15
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happens so rare hard to think of it once happening...

	28-01-2004 11:13									#16
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I voted never, but I think it should be statistically possible.

That is, about as possible as as winning the lottery (the 1 in 20,963,833 odds for Canada's Lotto Super 7 sound about right).

jon.

	28-01-2004 12:18									#17
	Avatar Enlargement: We've got the solution

Considering it is 16 to 2, or 8 to 1, old fashioned board game odds charts would have tanks stopped (not killed) by Spear happening frequently. Add in defence bonuses and you could get into odds where an exchange would not be unlikely.

I think the problem is the image, myself. It is too bad that the worker graphics upgrades with the ages was not extended to obsolete units. Call them militia if you want.

	28-01-2004 12:49									#18
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i guess if people fed u[p with this maybe the should [play Multipalyer more or try harder levels ....

	29-01-2004 02:28									#19
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quote: Originally posted by notyoueither I think the problem is the image, myself. It is too bad that the worker graphics upgrades with the ages was not extended to obsolete units. Call them militia if you want.

They can't. They have no imagination.

	29-01-2004 04:34									#20
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This "use your imagination" or "pretend they're militia" stuff has got to be the weakest argument in favour of keeping the current system.

There is a militia system. It's called conscript.

There are irregular soldiers. They're called guerillas.

If you like the current odds for advanced vs. obsolete units, by all means defend it. If you can rationalize away the problem, good on you.

Me, I happen to like the GPT bug in the unpatched C3C. I tell myself its the reverse side of corruption. Bribes for the emperor and the like. But you don't see me going around telling people who don't like it that they just need to use there imagination more.

jon.

	29-01-2004 04:41									#21
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id be suprised if elite fortified spearmen on mountainous fortress surrounded by rivers and radar tower lost to a mere tank.

	29-01-2004 06:13									#22
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quote: Originally posted by joncha This "use your imagination" or "pretend they're militia" stuff has got to be the weakest argument in favour of keeping the current system. There is a militia system. It's called conscript. There are irregular soldiers. They're called guerillas. If you like the current odds for advanced vs. obsolete units, by all means defend it. If you can rationalize away the problem, good on you.

I didn't say the player should imagine it. I said that it is too bad that automatic upgrades when a unit is too old are not part of the design of the game. They should be, and then there would no longer be these squabbles over spearmen.

No matter how you stack the numbers, and they are only 8 to 1 at the moment, there is going to be a possibility of the lower value winning a combat. No matter how small you make that possability, within reason, it will still happen sometime to someone. The solution is then to change the design so that when that event does happen it does not offend the sensibilities of the player(s).

	29-01-2004 06:42									#23
	Avatar Enlargement: We've got the solution

what i think is worse than the spearman/tank scenario, is the apparent lack of randomness in combat.

Last night: i plopped a toe-hold city onto the babylonians continent, few turns later i had 4 vet spearmen +1 elite, vet bowman, city walls, barracks, temple the whole nine yards. here come babylonian swordsmen...

elite spearman lost to regular swordsman. Next spearman lost 3 and was promoted. the other spearmen all lost. . . to regular swordsmen...

so i was pissed. so i reload the game from right before that conflict, and everything happened the exact same way. same patter of health loss, same everything.

why have a random generation system for anything if it's not going to be used at the core of the game? and if the answer is "to keep ppl from cheating in single player" why not let ppl do what is fun to them?

some ppl might accept it as part of the game when 6 health deals out 21 highly defended health, but there are also people that, like me, don't find it fun when the statistically improbable happens regularly.

like the unfortified warrior on grassland getting ambushed by knights. the warrior should lose almost immediately. Wasn't that the whole point of putting in the hp system in civ 2? to minimize the effect of "lucky shots?" sure a 3 pt standing warrier might crack off a lucky defense against the knight, but statistically is he going to do it 5 times? in a row? wtF? and then couple that with the fact that if you reloaded to right before that fight, it would have happened the same way because combat isn't randomized... either that or my version is screwery.

Last edited by Monsto on 29-01-2004 at 06:48

	29-01-2004 07:21									#24
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not very random no ,

but remeber this, if you toss a coin it can come down heads or tails,,, 50 :50

if you toss it again it still 50:50

so no matter how many times you toss the coin, even if all previous tosses were heads, it still 50:50 .. so another heaqd could quite possible occur. that is the strang ething with randomness, it is often not as radndom as you would expect it to be.

	29-01-2004 07:22									#25
	Lose 30 kilos (of popups)

Monsto, do you have Preserve Random Seed turned on? It is an option when you start a new game. If you do and you reload 1000 times from just before the combat, you will get the exact same results 1000 times.

	29-01-2004 08:06									#26
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Well I think it was fairly good the way it was before, a simple x/y chance. Just because a swordsman has 3 attack, it doesnt mean it should always beat a warrior. it should win 3/4 and warrior win 1/4. And was 1/4 a warrior wins only takes 1 life --> this means it would need to win around 3 sets without dying:

1/4*1/4*1/4 (although chance is higher, this is just to illustrate) this is ~1/64 chance, whilst its rare, it does give a warrior a chance.

Look back at our history, when great battles were fought and the outcome was sometimes surprising, it is ridiculous to want the higher number to win all the time, this is a strategy game and its not designed like Age of empire games etc.

They have already made the game pretty bad by "calculating the outcome 4 times and looking at the most common result". This has greatly further reduced the change of a warrior vs swordsman(though it still happens) and such things.

The problem is we cna't use multiple units to attack at once, this means that they cant make a battleship for example to always and easily beat a cruiser (now with the 4x calculation the whole game has changed, more expensive units are much more valuable than equivalent shield units of other type.. MUCH MORE...)

	29-01-2004 09:04									#27
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quote: Zero asserted: id be suprised if elite fortified spearmen on mountainous fortress surrounded by rivers and radar tower lost to a mere tank.

Actually, you should be surprised, as the odds are that the veteran tank will win 79.8% of the time (4 hp 16-strength attacker vs 5 hp defender with strength of 7).
Mathematically yours, bvc

	29-01-2004 09:22									#28
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quote: notyoueither stated twice: No matter how you stack the numbers, and they are only 8 to 1 at the moment, there is going to be a possibility of the lower value winning a combat. No matter how small you make that possability, within reason, it will still happen sometime to someone. The solution is then to change the design so that when that event does happen it does not offend the sensibilities of the player(s).

I think that your conclusion is reasonable.
The numbers deserve correction though:
The base odds for each ROUND of the fight are determined using the ratio of 16 vs 2.2 (extra .2 comes from minimum 10% defense bonus (for flat terrain)).
So in the first round the Spear has a 2.2/18.2 = 12.09% chance of hitting the tank.
The odds are the same each round, until one of the two units fighting has lost all of its hp (life).
From this math the odds become very long with each successive round. For example, the odds of a Spear doing 4 straight hits on an attacking tank will be (0.12089)^4 = 0.00021 (.021%).
When all of the combinations and permutations of hits done to each unit are considered, the probability of a veteran Spear with no defensive bonuses defeating an attacking veteran tank are only 0.6% - much less than 1/(1+8).

Obviously the odds get a little closer as the defender adds bonuses (fortified, difficult terrain, city/fortress, river crossing, radar tower, etc.).

I expect that these odds are still long enough so as not to offend the sensibilities of most players. The probability is non-zero though; some people will always find that unacceptable.

- bvc

Postscript: Firaxis are apparently investigating problems with streaks of abnormally high or low numbers in the RNG. If true, this could cause worse results than the math would predict.

	29-01-2004 18:34									#29
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quote: Originally posted by homan1983 They have already made the game pretty bad by "calculating the outcome 4 times and looking at the most common result". This has greatly further reduced the change of a warrior vs swordsman(though it still happens) and such things. The problem is we cna't use multiple units to attack at once, this means that they cant make a battleship for example to always and easily beat a cruiser (now with the 4x calculation the whole game has changed, more expensive units are much more valuable than equivalent shield units of other type.. MUCH MORE...)

Actually, this 4 roll combat change was never added to the C3C patch. It WAS proposed, but was widely denounced by lots of people, both here and at CFC, for exactly the reasons you describe. A 4-roll system would greatly unbalance the combat system. For this reason, Firaxis decided NOT to implement it.

	04-02-2004 07:30									#30
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quote: skywalker stated: I voted "always"

While it is understandable that skywalker would vote 'always', it is funny to see that at this point more people have voted that a vet Spear should defeat a vet Tank 'always' (9) than the number who have voted for 'never' (8).
Do we conclude:
a) people just don't grok the combat system
b) Apolyton posters are anti-establishment deviants
c) Apolyton posters have a sense of humor ; or
d) All of the above

I -bvc

Postscript: I see now that a couple more 'Nevers' have rolled in. Personally, I think neither answer is right... but who am I to question the democratic process as practised by Civ players?