Siege of The Voice

[fed1943]

So, each skirm is 4; each archer 5,85 (still the half first strike pro
skirm to be factored in).

That's for 1st and 2nd combats.

Then, 4 (+said half 1st strike) v. luckier archer,??.

I just do not know go beyond.

Best regards,

[Beta]

Originally posted by notyoueither
If anyone wants to spend time doing it...

Use the world builder. Make sure to not save random seed.

Put up a city with palace and quite a bit of culture. Put a city def 2 archer in it and fort it. Skip 5 turns to give it the max fort bonus.

Put 3 skirmishers down and declare war. Move adjacent to the city.

Save the game.

Open it 100 times and attack with all 3 skirms. Report back how many times you win and how many times you lose.

Anybody built a civ4 combat calculator yet? Probably too hard to work in all the variables needed. More complex than civ3.

[binTravkin]

Here's one

http://c4combat.narod.ru/c4c.htm

but I'm not 100% sure it works exactly like the in-game one.

[UnOrthOdOx]

Originally posted by PJayTycy
can't you see the odds in the in-game log ??

One would think so...

[vulture]

Last I remember, the in-game combat odds didn't include the effects of first strikes. But I may be mistaken about that, obviously. If not, the odds for this case are not going to be particularly close to what the game says.

[Arrian]

We did some simulation, and IIRC we thought we had better than even odds. Given the payoff, we took our shot. I was one of the main proponents of attacking. Obviously, it didn't work out. I still believe, however, that it was the right move.

Hey, if the odds are 60/40 or so (I honestly don't remember our exact calculations), you're gonna lose 4 out of 10 times. What happened wasn't being royally screwed by the RNG. It was unlucky, but not horribly so.

-Arrian

[Arrian]

Originally posted by Jon Miller


I am pretty sure we had over a 60% chance of victory.

JM

The third skirmisher had a 42% chance of victory.

But that's just the last battle. We ran sims with all three battles. The *overall* odds were better than 50%.

Once we got to the final skirm and still had a coin-flip chance of victory, we pressed on. We lost.

-Arrian

[Blake]

Yup.

This gamble definitely made sense for us. We were under no delusions that it was not a gamble - but it made perfect sense.

I mean 75 hammers, for a 60% chance of gaining a holy city and eliminating a rival.

The basic game theory looks like:
60% chance of losing 50 hammers and gaining a holy city + eliminating an annoyance.
40% chance of losing 75 hammers.
Expected losses = 60h
Expected gains = 60% of Vox Holy City.

Even putting the value of The Voice at the nominal value of 100h as a settler, you can see that the gamble was worth it. And when you pile on all the extras (population, religion, thorn removal), Vox was mad to give us the oppurtunity.

Of course we don't know whether it was a calculated move by Vox - they know they're dead so a 40% chance of gaining temporary respite from a choke is better than nothing, arguably (if Vox have game theorists, they would have known that GS, as rational players, would have no choice but to attack).

[Jon Miller]

I intended you to attack. I thought (still think) that I had better then 40% chance of victory.

JM

[Jon Miller]

I agree that it was perhaps worth it to you, although it did give us a bit of resptie (Since we won).

It looks like we couldn't take advantage of it though.

JM

[Jon Miller]

We needed you to attack, or we wouldn't ever be able to build oursecond city, which was the only way we would ever hav ea chance.

JM

[Blake]

If we thought that failure could have given you a chance, we wouldn't have attacked! ack !