Group ambush cap in place

[piranha]

Group ambush is now capped at 70 in battle. It will still display the same as before when you group several units in ver 0.8 if you mouse over your units but in battle it will be capped.

[LPhillips]

This should be a good move for the balance of power among super stacks. Let's try some examples!
Unlike KGB and some others, I do not have any form of battle simulator to provide statistics on very specific examples, so I must stick to theory and leave the hard figures to the "professionals."

Maxed Ambush stacks fighting each other:
Before 70% cap, the ambush of the first two units would cancel out, and then dice would determine the winner of the first matchup. After that, the players would alternate instant kills (ambush rolls) until the winner of the one-time dice fight had one unit remaining.
After the 70% cap, two stacks with maxed group ambush (and no individual ambushing abilities) will experience an ambush kill/death approximately what % of the time?
First matchup: 21x2% successful for one side, 9% no successful rolls, 49% successful for both sides. This leaves us with a 42% chance that there will be an ambush in the first matchup, and any winner fights without ambush in the next round. This trend of unmatched ambush rolls then continues throughout. The winner of any given matchup is always matched against a 70% ambush with no roll of his/her own. This means that on average, given a battle with 12 casualties, (0.7)(11)+(0.42)(1)=8.12 kills are accomplished by the Group Ambush skill, and the remaining 3.88 are determined by dice and HP.
Conclusion: Ambush stacks will still produce high casualties when fighting each other, but 32.3% of battle outcome will rely solely on traditional stats even when both sides employ full group ambush.

Maxed stack fighting non-maxed stack:
Before the cap, in our example we have 100% vs 40%. 40% of the time, the first battle comes down to dice. 60% of the time, the 100% stack gets an instant kill. So the dice play a small role here, but the 100% side experiences 7 guaranteed kills. Huge difference between this and the cap. It's impossible to provide any figures beyond the first battle without specific unit stats and a battle calculator.
After the cap, the example looks more like 70% vs 40%. Less ambush kills happen here, approximately 55% total instead of 70%. No more guarantee of maximum casualties inflicted by 100% side. Suffice it to say the margin of battle decided by dice increases. Mathematicians, do your worst!

In the end, Group Ambush doesn't act much like warding past the first fight in any scenario. Right now, it evens the field to some degree by increasing the opponent's ambush casualties, but high Group Ambush still does its job of taking down heavy units. The only major difference in stack-to-stack battles is that Group Ambush can never guarantee the death of 7 or 8 units without dice input as it previously could (precisely, it was 7 or 8 guaranteed kills depending on the presence or absence of ambush in the enemy army). Now, you'd better have the strength/HP to back it up or there is no such thing as a guaranteed victory.

On defense in a city, Group Ambush can no longer absolutely restrict the number of units lost against any attacker to 7 as it previously could. The casualties from a superior stack of 8 should range up to 13 now. It's still one hell of a defense, but it's not completely absolute. Previously one could fill a city with Crows if desired, and it wouldn't matter one bit whether the enemy brought dwarves or dragons.

Finally, units with innate Ambush have just become very valuable. If you can use Wolf Riders to get 86% ambush and 20+ strength, your Assassin stack will greatly benefit. I'd probably lobby for Wolf Riders up to 20% now (not up to 25% as previously). A good mid-high ambush orc would be nice too, something like 12%+.

Edit:typo