unlucky

[Horyu]

I am attacking with 1 heavy infantry and 1 unicorn. Sadly
I wonder anyone do encounter this kind of mishap at early game
anyone able to help me on estimating odds to win each neutral city attack

[KGB]

Horyu,

The battle is a 3 and a 7 against a 5. Without running my simulator I'd say you should win this battle 80% of the time. So you were unlucky but not extremely unlucky. This kind of battle happens about 1 in 5 times.

I've had similar thing happen and much worse luck.

Without writing a program, the easiest way to estimate the odds is to look at the unit in the neutral city + the city walls. In this case the defender is 5 strength. You need two 5 strength units of your own to have a 75% chance to win that city. Or about four 4 strength units, or about four 3 strength units, or five-to-six 2 strength units. Going in the other direction you need one 6 strength unit + two 3 strength units to have a 75% chance or one 7 strength unit + one 3 strength unit.

KGB

[Horyu]

The game still go on cross my finger no more mishap happen to me again

[joasoze]

Happenes very often. I have had much worse.

[Pillager]

I have been playing various warlords titles since 1993. I currently have deluxe II (and darklords III) running on my machine, and I have watched thousands of warlords battles play themselves out. I don't crunch the numbers, preferring to play by feel. I have to say that this online remake has a very different feel. A more random and capricious feel. Its different, I tells ya!

It seems like I have been wading through a (seemingly) endless horde of light cavalry and elves since I got here. These are fine units in warlords II, but 8 stacks of them won't dominate the game. Here they can, and do.

Some might applaud this shift towards unit equality. I, however, am not one of them. You see, if everyone is somebody, then no one's anybody.

[KGB]

Pillager,

I also have both games and have played over a thousand games on each version.

I believe the hordes of Elves/Lt Cavalry are a result of the game still being in early beta version. So not all the game features are present yet (ruins, temples etc). Nor is game balance fully worked out.

Beta3 should make some excellent strides toward addressing this with the fact that Lt Cavalry will be reduced in strength, temple blessing will be in play and ruins will provide more gold which will allow players to buy and build better units. Right now due to lack of money Elves/Lt Cavalry is all you can afford.

KGB

[Pillager]

KGB,

I'm happy to hear that change is in the wind, but I have some misgivings about the combat resolution itself. How closely does it model actual warlords II combat? The results seem a little more....wild west. Iike an intensified "intense combat". Or maxing out the number of dice in warlords 3.

[KGB]

Pillager,

They are using the exact combat rules that War2 uses minus a couple of minor differences (elf archer/wizard bonus against fliers, elemental bonus when attacking, first strike (assassination) roll to get an instant kill).

I wrote a separate simulator to model the one that Piranha has. I get the same results as his gets when we run 10000 battles and compare winning percentages for the 2 stacks. So I'd say everything looks right.

There *are* a few known bugs in the Beta2 combat. These are going to be fixed for Beta3. But they are mostly special cases involving bonus's, not general combat bugs.

You do realize that the battle screen only shows the true numbers for *your* side and not your opponents. To see the true numbers (after all bonus's) for both sides you have to replay the combat and look at the data on the right hand side. So this may be causing you to think a combat should go one way instead of another.

KGB

[Pillager]

I hear what you are saying, but my personal experience say different.

[KGB]

Pillager,

How long has it been since you've played War2?

I recently dusted the game off in Dosbox and was playing some custom scenarios. I reloaded battles and fought them multiple times to get a feel for how things felt. You can see some surprising results when you reload the same battle multiple times (ie 8 light infantry vs 8 light infantry can leave anywhere from 1-6 men left for the winner).

The reason I asked is that 90% of players remember only building a super hero stack of Hero/Pegasi/6 Gryffons then blessing them a couple of times and conquering the whole map with those bad boys especially if the hero had a speed item. You could easily reach 13 or 14 strength for the Gryffons against cities with a command item/leveled up hero. That's not possible here because of no blessing, no super cities giving +1 strength, no items, harder to accumulate Gryffons etc. So you end up with many more non-hero stacks roaming around the map. The other thing is that here there are no stupid AI's, only human players. So the stuff you could pull against the AI's isn't going to work here.

I have the source code for DLR so I know the combat routines there are what is being used here.

KGB