You decide - who lives? who dies?

[rjmatsleepers]

You have a mini stack of 4 axemen attacking a barb city defended by 2 archers. You have to take the city this turn. All your units have a Combat I promotion. One has a Combat II, the next Cover, the next Shock and the last Medic I. The probability is that your first 2 attacks will fail, but inflict enough damage that the next 2 attacks will succeed. So what order do you attack in? Who lives? Who dies?

RJM

[Thedrin]

Combat II
Shock
Cover
Medic

I always use medics as my last attacking unit, if I use them at all. I would choose cover third since I can't know how damaged either of the archers will be after their first victories. Cover axeman can beat the less damaged archer.

[Addled Platypus]

shock
cover
combat II
medic

[rjmatsleepers]

Both Thedrin and Platypus want to preserve their medic, but some disagreement about the others. Is it better to achieve the greatest damage on the initial attack or have a good attacking unit (cover) in case you need it for the second? (Or perhaps Platypus is just trying to preserve his combat II axeman.)

RJM

[Mr Justice]

i agree with Platypus Rex,

becuase i place less value in those 2 promotions.

[Diadem]

I agree with Platypus on trying to perserve the combat II axe. It's a more generic promotion. It's always useful, while cover and shock are only situationally useful. So use those while they are useful, even if they die.

But cover first, strongest axe vs. strongest defender makes sense.

And perhaps the shock third. Bit of a waste to sacrifice an anti-melee units against archers. Then again, shock axes are stupid anyway. By making a unit so overwhelmingy strong against melee you make sure they will never fight melee, on the offence at least. On defence they do make sense, though.

[trev]

A lot depends of potential future uses of the axes, ie are they more likely to front up to archers or melee units in a future fight. Generally I think it is best to preserve the strongest units situationally though, rather than generic promotions unless the combat 2 is a lead in to the horse bonus, so I would use
combat2,
shock,
cover,
medic
although if I know I will face horse/chariots next, then combat 2 is 3rd, if I know I will face other axes/swords next then shock unit will be used 3rd. If a new battle is unlikely within a few turns, the medic unit may be used first to soften the resistance too. So the right order is very situational.

[couerdelion]

Well the first problem is that you might not be able to take the city this turn so the order has to be the one that gives the greatest chance of capture. This means using your strongest attackers first so that’s

Cover
Combat II

In the normal course of events, you’ll be left with the shock and medic axe anyway but just in case one of these is at risk of losing also, send in the Shock one first.

[rjmatsleepers]

Originally posted by couerdelion
Well the first problem is that you might not be able to take the city this turn so the order has to be the one that gives the greatest chance of capture. This means using your strongest attackers first so that’s

Cover
Combat II

In the normal course of events, you’ll be left with the shock and medic axe anyway but just in case one of these is at risk of losing also, send in the Shock one first.

You are saying that attacking in the order Cover, Combat II, Shock, Medic gives you a greater chance of capturing the city than (for example) Medic, Shock, Cover, Combat II. Is this a "well known" fact? Is it obvious? Is it something you've calculated?

I think it's clear that if you don't use Cover in the first two attacks, it should be the third one used (to give you the best chance of success against the strongest defender). Similarly if you still have Combat II, this should be used for the third attack rather than Shock or Medic. But I'm not clear about how the initial use of Cover and Combat II affects the overall chance of success.

RJM

[SirIlya]

Originally posted by rjmatsleepers


You are saying that attacking in the order Cover, Combat II, Shock, Medic gives you a greater chance of capturing the city than (for example) Medic, Shock, Cover, Combat II. Is this a "well known" fact? Is it obvious? Is it something you've calculated?

I think it's clear that if you don't use Cover in the first two attacks, it should be the third one used (to give you the best chance of success against the strongest defender). Similarly if you still have Combat II, this should be used for the third attack rather than Shock or Medic. But I'm not clear about how the initial use of Cover and Combat II affects the overall chance of success.

RJM

But in your hypothesis you specified that it was likely that the first two would fail and the second two succeed. That means the question is what two units have the most valuable promotions.

There are at least three good questions the answers to which might be different:

1) If the first two attacks are guaranteed to fail, which two units are best to keep?

2) Which order of attack gives the *best* chance of capturing the city? (My non-statistical guess is: medic/shock-cover-combat II. The two weaker units to soften up. Then Cover to kill off the strongest of the two and finally combat II to kill the last one.)

3) Which order of attack minimizes casualties and damage to the attacking force while preserving a > (say) 70% chance of capturing the city? (i have no idea on this one )

In order to answer the last two I would propose that we assume the archers are 1 garrison I, 1 unpromoted and the city is a barbarian city on a flat tile with no rivers.

[Edit: In my "guess" I temporarily forgot that a 'shock' unit will have combat 1. Duh ]

[Snotty]

medic shock cover combat 2

throw your weakest units into the meat grinder and mop up with the strongest ones

[rjmatsleepers]

Originally posted by SirIlya


But in your hypothesis you specified that it was likely that the first two would fail and the second two succeed. That means the question is what two units have the most valuable promotions.

There are at least three good questions the answers to which might be different:

1) If the first two attacks are guaranteed to fail, which two units are best to keep?

2) Which order of attack gives the *best* chance of capturing the city? (My non-statistical guess is: medic/shock-cover-combat II. The two weaker units to soften up. Then Cover to kill off the strongest of the two and finally combat II to kill the last one.)

3) Which order of attack minimizes casualties and damage to the attacking force while preserving a > (say) 70% chance of capturing the city? (i have no idea on this one )

In order to answer the last two I would propose that we assume the archers are 1 garrison I, 1 unpromoted and the city is a barbarian city on a flat tile with no rivers.

[Edit: In my "guess" I temporarily forgot that a 'shock' unit will have combat 1. Duh ]

I didn't mean to imply that the first two attacks were certain to fail. I was thinking of a "typical" case where the first attacks have about a 20% chance of success. (In my experience this translates into 1 victory every 20 attempts. ) Also, I didn't intend to imply that the 3rd and 4th attacks were certain to succeed - I was thinking of a chance around 80% - 90%.

Your comments made do some more thinking. If I'm expecting a better than 90% probability of success in the 3rd and 4th attack, I'll probably base my decision on which units I want to survive. If the probability of success in the second round is only around 66%, I'd be more interested in maximising my chance of capturing the city. But that's very subjective.

Which order maximises the chance of success? My intuition says Cover, Combat II followed by the other 2 in either order. But both you and Snotty suggest softening up with the weaker units first. It seems to me that the risk of this is that one of the archers will have so little damage that the chance of success on the second round becomes much smaller. But I don't know how the mechanics of combat work, so I can't do the sums.

RJM

[SirIlya]

Originally posted by rjmatsleepers

Which order maximises the chance of success?

RJM

Okay... I took a few minutes to build this scenario in WB and used this site ( http://c4combat.narod.ru/c4c.htm ) to calculate the odds.

Round 1 (Archer with City Garrison I defending):

Cover 66%
Combat II 63%
Shock/Medic 33% with average damage to archer of 57 hps.

Round 2 (base Archer defending):
Cover 73%
Combat II 70%
Shock/Medic 65%

Any of the axemen is going to have over 95% chance to win against the city garrison archer if it is reduced to half strength.

So it would seem to me that the best chance of taking the city is as I stated: Shock/Medic, Shock/Medic, Combat II, Cover. But if your goal is to maintain a guaranteed win while minimizing losses you should do: Medic/Shock, Cover, Combat II, Medic/Shock since that gives you the best chance (73%) of winning the 2nd combat and therefore only probably sacrificing 1 unit.

If your goal is to create the highest chance of preserving all four axemen it would seem to me that going strongest first is not a bad decision. With Cover at 66% vs the first archer and Combat II at 70% you will have all four axemen left 46% of the time, which isn't bad.

(ps- statistics was decades ago, so I will not be offended if someone corrects my assumptions)

[couerdelion]

The odds of success look high. Are the archers fortified and is there any culture defense?

I think the trick is to minimise P[lose at least 3 out of 4 combats] although even this looks a little complicated because the probability of winning the third combat – and possibly even the second – will depend on the combat result from the first.

[SirIlya]

Originally posted by couerdelion
The odds of success look high. Are the archers fortified and is there any culture defense?

No culture (the hypothesis was a barbarian city).

The archers were fully fortified (+25%) in an unwalled city on a flat tile with no river.

The raw strengths I used were:
Combat II 6
Shock/Medic 5.5
Cover 5.5

The archer strengths were:
garrison 1 5.85
base archer 5.25
garrison 1 vs cover 5.1
base vs cover 4.5