Thoughts on combat strangeness

[Kheldar]

You know, from my experience, and from reading the experiences of others, it almost sounds like Civ III has some random number generator problems. Let me explain. It seems to me like most of the time I see an unusual win/loss (I've seen it happen in my favor and in favor of the AI) what happens is an "amazing" lucky streak where one of the battling units just can't seem to lose any hitpoints for the entire battle. This sounds like the random number generator is not sufficiently random, and is spitting out closely related sets of numbers. Anyone else think we should request some raw output from their generator so we can do some analysis?

[Fidel]

yeah, sounds like thermopylae to me. such things never happened in history, right?

okay, modern warfare:
volokolamsk road (14 panzers destroyed by 28 russian soldiers)
brest litovsk ( a garrison withstood 28 day siege by germans)

it just happens...use some ranged units to soften the bastards up and keep pressing

[Kheldar]

Actually, I am personally not too concerned with the issue. It's always a good idea to have overwhelming force in a battle (no such thing as overkill), and in that case it really isn't much of an issue. BUT, it does kind of behave as a random number generator problem, and (being a programmer) I just kind of feel like that is inexcusable...

[Sevorak]

I mentioned the idea of a dependent pRNG myself in a thread (now disappeared?!) called Please Fix the Combat or something like that. I agree that pRNG dependency does look like what's going on, I'd love to see some raw output to analyze.

-Sev

[Antonin]

I don't think an amazing lucky streak for a particular unit is a problem, as long as it doesn't happen in every battle.

It makes victory in battle less certain. I don't think you should be able to count on victory if you throw enough of a particular type of unit into a fight. Being able to reliably calculate your chances for success before every battle would make the game boring.

There should always be some uncertainty, no matter how favorably the odds SEEM to be in your favor.

[Special_K]

Usually if I get a really off balance battle I reload and capture a worker or fight an extreemly easy battle to use up that crappy random number, then everything is good. If a bad battle happens between turns you can reload and move a unit into another civs territory. When they yell at you for violating their borders it uses up one of the random numbers.

[Fidel]

of course, you do not reload when YOUR musketman kills their tank, eh?