Another First - Loss on 100% odds

[Jaybe]

The Wig continues to be himself.

Re the lifestyle advice, those stereotypical values are for the herd. I do it my own way, thank you.

[Lancer]

Originally posted by Theben
Besides, this gives me hope that the Giants can beat New England on Sunday.

[Brutus66]

Originally posted by Jaybe
The Wig continues to be himself.

They don't call him the king of subtlety for nothing...

[chuckdelicious]

In the game I'm currently playing, I declared war on the Vikings. We previously had open borders and he had a single Berserker get kicked to an open square deep in my territory. I send a cavalry over to dispatch him, but while he was on his way, the Berserker traveled three squares over to one of my cities. The city had an 85% defense and was defended by a Rifleman with City Garrison II. Now, I'm not sure what the odds were for the Berserker, he had Combat II, but not only did he defeat my Rifleman, he took no damage.

End results: my city razed: Vikings removed from the face of the planet.

[DaShi]

I usually subtract about 10% from my odds against the AI.

[Verrucosus]

Why would an apparently damaged praetorian unit attacking a full strength scout unit that enjoys a combat upgrade and a defensive bonus have a 99.9 % chance of success?

[Lancer]

Seems there's alot of this goin round! GIANTS WIN!!!

[Theben]

[Supr49er]

Originally posted by Lancer
Aha! I know what the problem is. Bruce Banner took up scouting.

Are you sure it wasn't Chuck Norris?

[Gibsie]

Originally posted by Verrucosus
Why would an apparently damaged praetorian unit attacking a full strength scout unit that enjoys a combat upgrade and a defensive bonus have a 99.9 % chance of success?

Well according to some basic maths the odds of a unit with Str 1.3 beating 5.2 7 times in a row are 0.0016% (Giving the Praetorian odds of 99.998%). I can't be bothered to work out the exact odds for every permutation that leaves the Praetorian dead and the Scout alive, but it's probably ten times as likely for the Scout to have survived whilst taking damage, leaving odds of 99.98% in favour of the Praetorian. Or greater than 99.9%. But not by much!

[snoopy369]

He has to win 7 out of 9 battles; not 7 in a row. 7 out of 9 gives you perms of (off the top of my head)
1 perm 7 of 7
7 perms 7 of 8
28 unique perms of 7 of 9 (7*8/2)
36 perms total. If the chances of any of these are around 0.0016%, which they should be somewhat higher but I'm not doing the math right now - let's say 0.002% just for rounding - then it's 0.072% or 99.93% chance of praet winning. Pretty low for a 99.9% all things considered, but it's certainly not nonzero; it will happen 7 times in 10,000, give or take.

[Verrucosus]

Thank you, both. I had failed to take into account that even the damaged preatorian has a much bigger firepower. Thanks to the convenient in-game odds calculator, I don't think I did such a calculation properly since the Civ2/SMAC days. Now, if only we had reliable statistics about the total number of preatorian vs scout battles fought by Apolyton posters ...

Verrucosus

[snoopy369]

Zero on my end...

[Common Sensei]

I was on the flipside of this once. I declared an early war against a neighbor and forgot about a Scout I left fortified on a bare hill who was attacked by an enemy Axeman.

The scout won and gained a large chunk of experience for it.

[snoopy369]

I think the scout would get 10xp for that, if I remember the relative percentages... maybe a bit less, but IIRC an axe is 2xp*str.rat, and that would be 2*5 for a scout