Panzer vs Cavalry?

[noedigsineetar]

Hello all,

I'm quite new to this game and probably will be forever after what I witnessed yesterday.

I was playing a normal game on noble with Germany. I was attacked by China from the other continent and they took a city with cavalry, cannons and Grenadiers.

I counter attacked with Panzers and they were beaten (in the field) by Cavalry!
Come one! WTF is this? I easily beat galeons and frigates with submarines and destroyers. But get my panzer *ss kicked by grenadiers and American civilwar cavalry!

And just to be clear it didn't took them a whole stack, see. They beat a tank with one unit of grenadiers in the city and some cavalry and old cannons in the field.

Can somebody explain me one and other about this? Thanks.

[Unimatrix11]

First and foremost: Chances are never absolute, at least not in Civ - you can have 99.9% chance of winning the battle, but that also means, that you have a 0.1% loosing it, which means it still occurs occasionaly. BTW, when you attack, the chances of success are labeled in the bottom left corner of the screen and you can see details of past battles in the game-log (press a button in the top left corner of the main screen in order to access it).

Secondly: Your decription of what exactly happened is rather vague. From what i can tell from the sentence ´They beat a tank with one unit of grandiers in the city and some cavalry and old cannons in the field´, it was not you attacking on your turn, but them on theirs; and that they did attack a single unit multiple times during that turn. That means, that your tank took damage from previous attacks, during the same turn, before it was finally destroyed. Note that Cavalry can retreat, so some of them might have survived the attack, despite not having destroyed the tank.

Thirdly: One doctrine of gamedesign in Civ is: ´gameplay beats realism´. The game would be utterly unbalanced, if a (one!) tank would be practically unbeatable, even by an army of otherwise outdated units. You can come up with Poland ´39 and whatnot, and clamor all for realism, but ultimately you´d have to admit, that if the AI (or another human player) would attack you with a tank, while you only have older units, and you then would be utterly unable to gain any chance of defeating it, no matter how much you throw at it, the game would suck - big time. A techlead in military units gives you a big advantage, but it doesnt mean, that you are guranteed to win at every ratio of forces - you still have to field enough of that units to make it work (and ideally mix it with other units as well, as civ-wars are basically a game of rock-scissors-paper).

Excuse me, if i may have not gotten you decription of what happened right. If so, please explain further and maybe post a save (for other to look at, cause i probably wont look at it - frankly, i´d be too lazy for that ).

EDIT: And 0-ly: Welcome to Apolyton !

[joncnunn]

Current firepower of a given unit is always based on the average between max health of the unit and current health, so as it gets damaged, it becomes weaker.

Also, a canon could do a fair amount of damage to a Panzer as long as it hit the Panzer in the side or rear.

[Ming]

Cannons remain effective for a long time. Their ability to do collaterial damage weakens many units in the stack they attack, and allows other inferior units to kill the injured units. But again, you don't provide enough details to let us know exactly what happened

[noedigsineetar]

Well, didn't build up my militairy enough was attacked by mao and tried to kill them with my new invented panzers.

Unimatrix' post made a lot of sense for me already. Case closed. Thanks a lot everybody.