I believe combat is rigged in this game and it ruins it for me

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by vee4473
Along with my above comment, I would like to register as one of those who have had...ummm, unlikely losses, but at the same time they were much, much, much less frequent than probable victories.

If the outcome is dependent on random numbers, there will always be unlikely losses and surprising wins. There's nothing unusual about this.

[vee4473]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


As I understand it, combat resolution is not skewed at any level, with the exception of fighting against barbarians (low levels for the human player, all levels for computer players).

well, then i stand corrected.

I always thought everything AI was skewed except at noble. Either for or against the player.

[vee4473]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


If the outcome is dependent on random numbers, there will always be unlikely losses and surprising wins. There's nothing unusual about this.

I totally agree with you UR.

I am posting to say that my combat experiences have been well within the percentages and I am satisfied.

[Urban Ranger]

I guess the lesson to be learned is this: always bring a sufficient force to any combat you can't afford to lose, then add some more units for insurance.

I also wonder why anybody would fight any 50-50 battle? Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War that, one should not fight a battle that he does not have confidence to win.

[Aro]

Originally posted by vee4473

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


If the outcome is dependent on random numbers, there will always be unlikely losses and surprising wins. There's nothing unusual about this.

I totally agree with you UR.

I am posting to say that my combat experiences have been well within the percentages and I am satisfied.

I'm doing the same.

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
I guess the lesson to be learned is this: always bring a sufficient force to any combat you can't afford to lose, then add some more units for insurance.

My kind of war.

I also wonder why anybody would fight any 50-50 battle? Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War that, one should not fight a battle that he does not have confidence to win.

Sun Tzu… I really miss this wonder.
And yeah, I only fight this kind of battle when I just can’t run away. If I’m defending my city from a sneak attack, for example.

[killthejoe]

As a slight aside, I would like to mention the developers have done an excellent job incorporating the other elements into the game like diplomacy and culture. However, as an unfortunate result, I think the combat element in the game has almost been overcomplicated.

I would love to go back to Civ II for a day and send my massive force of tanks against the Russians in one final swoop of their continent!!

[rjmatsleepers]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger

As I said, you are not a trained scientist. A control is always, always necessarily in any experiment, regardless of how trivial it is.

I believe Dr Spike is a trained statistician. I am trained as a statistician and a scientist - although I admit this was a long time ago and in another country.

A control is necessary in many experiments, but not all. A simple dice rolling experiment to determine whether a dice is "weighted" does not need to have a control. If the results are controversial and as a result there is a suspicion of accidental or deliberate bias, then some sort of double blind control is appropriate.

In this case, the OP told us his methodology - perhaps not with the rigour that a purist might ask for, but this is only a game. Others have now attempted to replicate his results and failed.

Perhaps the original result was one of those random events that happen. Perhaps there was something about the test conditions that caused the result. Perhaps when he is able to provide a save that duplicates his results, we may learn a little more about the game.

RJM at Sleeper's

[Blake]

The claim is that the program rigs against human players (when they play against the computer). Thus, you must rule out the possibility that the same kind of events also happen when a human plays against another human.

I would like to hear reasoning behind this, and suggested experiments for determining human vs human rigging, how does it determine which human should be rigged against? For example, how do you make a control against possible combat advantages based on player order? The fact of the matter is there is no such thing as a "controlled*" Civ4 fight. It is possible to test for certain hypothesis.

* a control as in "Known results". If we suspect under the cover shenanigans then there is no fight with known results since these shenanigans could be doing literally anything based on anything, from player vs ai to the alignment of the moons of jupiter.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by DrSpike
A string of odd results can occur by chance, as several have posted, but anyone with sufficient skills to crank through the binomial calculations can see that winning 40 out of 50 in independent bernoulli trials with fixed probability of 0.5 is incredibly unlikely, certainly unlikely enough to warrant further investigation.

This is not true.

I am not sure how many people realise that there is a major overhual of the combat system in Civ 4. Each combat now consists of multiple rounds during which either side could get damaged. As a result, you aren't looking at Bernoulli trials anymore.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Blake
I would like to hear reasoning behind this

That's because the claim is the program rigs the results when a human player fights against a computer player.

Originally posted by Blake
and suggested experiments for determining human vs human rigging, how does it determine which human should be rigged against?

The control is the baseline case. The assumption is that human vs human is always fair. Thus, if combat results between human vs human and human vs computer are different statistically, the claim can possibly be true. OTOH, if none such difference exists, there is no intentional rigging. At worst, sloppy programming.

[DougM]

Originally posted by rjmatsleepers


I believe Dr Spike is a trained statistician. I am trained as a statistician and a scientist - although I admit this was a long time ago and in another country.

A control is necessary in many experiments, but not all. A simple dice rolling experiment to determine whether a dice is "weighted" does not need to have a control. If the results are controversial and as a result there is a suspicion of accidental or deliberate bias, then some sort of double blind control is appropriate.

In this case, the OP told us his methodology - perhaps not with the rigour that a purist might ask for, but this is only a game. Others have now attempted to replicate his results and failed.

Perhaps the original result was one of those random events that happen. Perhaps there was something about the test conditions that caused the result. Perhaps when he is able to provide a save that duplicates his results, we may learn a little more about the game.

RJM at Sleeper's

Actually, a control is necessary in the dice rolling experiment. You have to know what the proper outcome for an unweighted die is in order to understand whether or not the weighted die has a different outcome.

Now, you could claim that you are comparing the outcome to an ideal die for which the outcome is always perfectly evenly distributed among the six outcomes: in which case, the model is your control.

Otherwise, you need to compare against the actual outcome of a real unweighted die, in which case the real unweighted die is your control.

Either way, your experiment always has a control.

[TheHateMale]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


This is not true.

I am not sure how many people realise that there is a major overhual of the combat system in Civ 4. Each combat now consists of multiple rounds during which either side could get damaged. As a result, you aren't looking at Bernoulli trials anymore.

Provided both units have the same strength/HP and the fight is to the death it should still stand. It's like flipping a coin 11 times and repeating the test 10 times. The number of results where you get more heads should be (roughly) the same as the number of times you get more tails.


--
I thought there was something up with the combat before, but I'm pretty sure I just had a run of bad luck after installing the patch. Either that or results are only rigged on weekends. This would make sense seeing as people who play most days don't seem to think it's rigged, and casual players tend towards thinking it is.

Correlation implies causation (and pirates prevent global warming) and all that.

[billones]

As an aside,

In short, you have to prepare for losing every fight, pretty much regardless of odds, unless the odds are 2.5:1 or better, altough I have lost one (and only one) 2.75:1 fight. In any case the chance of losing a 3:1 fight is extremely low, if you do it's something to celebrate because it's just that darn unlikely, it's like winning lotto without buying a ticket.

By an amazing coincidence, modern military theory is that that the attacker in a real fight needs to have a 3:1 advantage to make the attack worth prosecuting. Funny how that works out

[MikeH]

Originally posted by Hauptman
Well I will be willing to buy the thought that the RNG just hates me. But I just have unfair fights go against me far more often than I used to it seems.

Last night for example. playing my unoficial AU game, I beelined machinery and started cranking Cho-ku-nus at about 1ad. Now a chokunu vs archer in a city gives me a small advantage (6 +25% archer bonus against 3 20% city bonus etc etc) so loosing the first is close enough to 50-50 anyways that its not too big a deal. But the collateral damaged next archer is weaker, and I'll then use another, and loose. Now the next unit (a double collateraled phalanx) is ripe for the picking, with 2 to 1 odds at 98% I then lost, again. Ok if this happened once its the unluck of the RNG. But this same senario happened 3 different times in my conquest of greece.

3 losses of superior units on 3 different occasions against 3 different cities at 3 different times all in one game.

Am I really that unlucky?

Only 3?!! In a whole game?!

I think you are either very lucky or don't do much fighting.

The other day I was pissed off with a stack that got almost wiped out (ok it was my fault, bad scouting) the AI left one very weak cavalry alive so I decided to sacrifice it by attacking the city I was after at odds of 0.02% to win or something and I won!

Thing is, as human players we very rarely make attacks with units we expect to lose because we are smart. I sometimes attack when the percentages are against me because I know there's a chance I can take out (or weaken) a good unit with a bad one. I wouldn't risk a veteran with loads of upgrades but a newbie? Why not.

The AI is happy to wage wars of attrition and sacrifice loads of bad units to wear down your units so it often gets lucky.

[Hauptman]

Originally posted by MikeH


Only 3?!! In a whole game?!

I think you are either very lucky or don't do much fighting.

The other day I was pissed off with a stack that got almost wiped out (ok it was my fault, bad scouting) the AI left one very weak cavalry alive so I decided to sacrifice it by attacking the city I was after at odds of 0.02% to win or something and I won!

Thing is, as human players we very rarely make attacks with units we expect to lose because we are smart. I sometimes attack when the percentages are against me because I know there's a chance I can take out (or weaken) a good unit with a bad one. I wouldn't risk a veteran with loads of upgrades but a newbie? Why not.

The AI is happy to wage wars of attrition and sacrifice loads of bad units to wear down your units so it often gets lucky.

no this wasnt one game, this was 1 war in a game.

i had the exact same scenario happen in 3 out of 4 cities! i think the only reason it didnt happen the first time was that it had a different number of units in it. so in short is it possible the rng seed will keep giving the same result any time it see's the same numbers???

i have often i mean often had instances where 2 of my units, both the same, would attack 2 of there units, also similar, result in 2 wins with both of my units at exactly the same health....

maybe ill just disable the random seed, its not like i abuse save games when it takes half an hour to load one anyways.