Evaluating combat Risk

I'd like the combat risk evaluation to be based on your scouting skills. Something that will make scouting skills worth while, something like Heroes of M&M IV!

Perhaps an odds calculation would be useful for auto-resolve battles.  However, for tactical battles I hope that the outcome would be sufficiently dependent upon the skill of the players to make any odds calculation irrelevant.

Using your dragon turtles v/ death knight example, what I used to do was to move my flanks forward and my center back, always keeping my turtles just beyond range of the deathknight until I was ready.  My goal was to get him into the center of my forces so that I would be able to attack him with eight (or all nine, if fortunate) of my turtles on the same turn.  His strength was from taking my turtles down one at a time and regening his HP between my attacks.  If all of my attacks come on the same turn, he died.

So my point is that the tactics matter.  If you let the enemy use their strength then you deserve to loose, and vice versa.

So I hope that the tactical battle will allow so much variation that odds calculationis are not useful.  I also hope there will be no 'invincible' units in late game.

I prefer that learning how to evaluate what is a strong vs. weak army come from experience of playing the game, not some little advisor popping up to tell you that you are about to get creamed.

It's annoying that some people their first response to losing a battle is to reload the game. I guess the soccer moms win the culture wars. Nobody loses.

I prefer that learning how to evaluate what is a strong vs. weak army come from experience of playing the game, not some little advisor popping up to tell you that you are about to get creamed.

Normally, I would say yes. The problem is that there is too much variables that can influence battles and there are many different units. So you have no basic point of comparison. It's not like for example In romance of the 3 kingdoms where I can make solder ratio. Like if I want to kill 100 000 soldiers, I need 150 000 soldier.

Here it's like comparing bananas with tomatoes.

Also there is the problem that the next time you play, you will not necessarily remember all these evaluation.

I suggest the computer auto-resolve 100 battles internally and report the % chance to win.  If you want scouts to matter in the analysis make the number reported back +/- X based on the quality of the scout.  A number near or below 50% should signal significant losses for the attacker.  A player's skill could overcome poor odds.  In fact it would be nice to know as a player that you won a close/tough battle.

Maybe you will be able to mouse over the opposing stack and get info cards on the units, you can see their relative strength and how many there are and then you evaluate your chances?

No no no - you are on the wrong path people Dont join the dark side...

These odds cannot be calculated. They can in CIV IV cause its all based on known values, but not in Elemental. If we are going to control our army in any way during the battle (think Heroes of Might and Magic or even as a little RTS game) then its not possible to calculate. A good player will always have better odds than som calculation based on AI settings.

A scout skill that reveal the number of units, the type of units and such is great, but serving battle odds is out of the question if the battles of Elemental will be interesting at all.

just a thought, if it's really too difficult to compute... how about making it a spell, pick your army, pick the target - the computer plays the battle and gives you the results (or you see the battle), much more powerful spell does the same thing but with the % chance of victory from 3/5/10 battles

Like this guy, and agree with him indeed!

Yes, it is possible to calculate. You might not be able to calculate the odds of a complete tactical battle but you can do 2 things.

1 Calculate the odds and expected damage of individual attack (advance wars does it).

2. When doing battles in strategic battle mode, since you are not doing all the tactical manuvers, it could be possible to caculate the odds since the battle itself is only resolved by calculation.

Im gonna agree with joasoze and Norseman on this one, i think scout skill should have more of a purpose if its going to exist

The frog himself is probably laughing at us since we discuss a battle engine that hasnt been released nor revealed in the beta. Still I refute your suggestion that a battle can be calculated. The battle should involve choices like maneuvers (flanking or direct attack), special skills (like berserk or luck), magic (use firebomb or blessing?) +++ This would involve choices DURING the battle and therefore cannot be calculated properly.

I guess we will just have to wait and see.

I like the calculating odds being tied with the battle calculator. Therein, with NO scouting ability, your scouts will give you a 40% range. AKA it says your odds are between 15-55%. Your odds could be 30%, 16%, or 54% just as easily. I think best scouts in the world should have a 5 or 10% spread.

Even if scouting has nothing to do with it, I would like for battle-calcs to be a "spread" of percentages based upon your possible leadership skills, tactics, and army vs their possible leadership skills, tactics, and army.

what would be really cool is for the AI to track roughly how well a player handles a certain soldier/unit, or hero, and takes that into account. So asides from even your general's "leadership score" or your morale bonuses, or even raw soldier strength .... player skill is stored and accounted for in the analysis. Like ... this player is REALLY good with cavalry, but right now his army is mostly archers ... you possibly have a significant advantage in this encounter.

Or ... this player is using his customized elite troops who he knows inside out, and they are like carpenters, slicing away at the battlefield to craft a high quality victory ... you need to gtfo, reinforce, or pray to your maker.

Some method of evaluating combat risk is nessisary.

Frogboy hinted that in late game many people will let thier hero's guide battle, based on thier 'leadership ablility'. Personally this strikes me as suspicious, but i trust Frogboy and team to do thier best to make this true.   (hopefully without inforcing a leadership ablilty limit on how many orders you can give in or to a battle baced on your soverins 'leadership', and or distance from battle....)

One simple option is to develope a dynamic mapping of probabilty. 

Each time the caclulator says 47.5 - 52.5% chance to win, your success / failour is binned into a histogram,  when the probabilty is presented to you,  you see both the raw probabilty (possibly skewed by poor scouting) and your 'corrected' probabilty baced on how well you've done in the past when you had a raw probabilty in that range. 


*The scout reports a 40% chance of victory, but your war advisor tells you that "your advanced skills mean your likelyhood is closer to 55%" / or "your truely abysmal leadership virtually garenties you'll be pwned".... whichever*
I agrre though units whom are better trained in scouting aught give tighter approximations, and more accurate approximations for your success.

 Robbie Price

I would like to repeat that the calculation of such a percentage is not possible! Far to many variables combined with the crazy choices you as a player will make during the battle. This is not gonna happen in any game of this kind.

Take Kings Bounty as an example. It would be nigh impossible to make a sensible number. And that is a turnbased simple combat system. It just cannot be done. There are skills, spells, random events (some skills have a percentage chance to work or not)+++. It is chaos theory at its best. A small change in one element at the start of the battle (first unit get a luck strike for example) will change the whole battle.

goodmorning,

one can still calculate a probablisitic number.  you can always calculate a probabilty,  It may not mean much but you can always caclulate it.   and then all you need to do is take the number caclulated in a standard way, and map it onto historical battles, how well the user actually does when the probabilty is caculated to be <7%, between 7 and 14%,  14...

As long as you have a sandard number, you can then translate that standard number into a less useless one.

Plus there are cases of Scout vrs Dragon outside your chanallers casting range... that's an easy outcome to caclulate a win probabilty of.  i'll give you a hint, less then 1%.

I think we have to agree to disagree You cannot always calculate a probability. Many things are too complex to compute. That is why we have chaos theory. Some day a computer will calculate the perfect game of chess that cannot be beaten, but we are not there yet. And chess is in many ways less complicated than your choices in a battle of Kings Bounty.

In every round of battle you chose between many kinds of magic, many creatures that can do different things. I have hundreds of options in each round, and each of them will change the rest of the battle. First round. Do I bless those archers, do I move the archers before I shoot, do I move my swordsmen to protect the archers, do I put stoneskin on the archers +++++++ It goes on and on, and cannot be simulated.

You can PRETEND that you simulate a battle. Count the units, hitpoints and levels and make a simple calculation based on this (this is done in many games). That is not the same as getting to a percentage of probability of the real fight.

I think perhaps that "percentage chance of victory" might be the wrong way to approach it.  What might be more reasonable is to display relative combat power of each side.  For instance, you might assign a value to attack power, defense, and hitpoints and then represent the rough total sum of each side. 

I think Larienna's point cannot be ignored, either.  This isn't an issue of people being wusses and loading their game, as Denryu would accuse.  Having to get creamed by every single monster type and their variations to understand whether you have a chance to beat them is tedious, even if you are 100 percent okay with losing the game and not loading upon such a defeat.

I would propose a sort of "volatility" score next to my affore proposed combat strength score when assessing an army in relation to your own.  The volatility score represents how terribly a battle can swing against you due to exceptionally powerful special abilities that units or monsters might have in the opposing army.  Volatility could be calculated from the difference between your best special abilities and your opponent's best.  So if you combat strength is super high and your opponents is low, you can still beat them if volatility is high.  However, whenever volatility is high, you will go into the fight knowing that your units might be utterly antiquated in the face of their foes.  In the case of the Death Knight vs. 8 Dragon Turtles, the volatility would be very high.  

In other words, the volatility score will help you avoid situations where your sovereign would be struck down by a single "doombolt" during the first 5 seconds of combat.

yea ... saying things like "weak" or "average" or "tough" might be a way to look at it ... also having extremely funny names for armies that completely outnumber you would be funny. Like "run, run away" or "the mile long army" or I guess something that actually says what it is like "massive horde" ... unless they are an organized force ... in which case it might be called "legion of death" "or legion of valor, what ever faction they are, ect"

some kind of diologue for when you start such a battle, perhaps voice acted to be one of your advisers/liuetenants, or some old veteran to say something like ... "run, run away ... why are you doing this? well, im packing my bags. So good luck with that and all, and oh yea, you should probably prepare to meet your maker"

perhaps such dialogue only if anyone OTHER than the sovereign is leading the army. If the sovereign is .... "King? um ... are you really ... oh dear. I'll start praying now"

I would like something like this:

Scouting level 1 - You get info about general numbers - like small band, hoard, swarm or such

Example: Swarm 

Scouting level 2 - You get level 1 plus a list of what units are in the enemy army

Example: Swarm of wolves, wolf cubs and spiders

Scouting level 3 - Info as level 1 and 2 plus a list of enemies and how many of each

Example: 56 wolves, 67 wolf cubs and 180 spiders

Goodmorning all,

You still need something more then just how many and of what, because there are going to be too many differnt unit types and different non standard names. 
not to mention the risk of dishonest naming 'instead of 'death knights of curbstomping' i name my calvary 'starving and disorganized peasants' '  So when your scouts pop up you see 

411 'starving and disorganized peasants' . . . .   well if you believe it for a second, you're going to be soundly sorry when you charge into battle and get rightly curbstomped...

Some system needs to exsist to actually quantify(or at least qualify) the army in a way that can be compaired.

Such a system would also benifit by having a uncertainty expliciately given, like 'Volitility', to warn you of deceptively weak or strong forces.

The point is that just number and name, isn't enough,   and number + all atributes is Way too much.  Some mid ground where a good scout can give you a meaningful report which at a glance provides enough information to decide to or not to go into battle.

Robbie Price

perhaps something like average attack value, average defense value, average strength value, and numbers. A melee/ranged ratio, and a footmen/cavalry ratio.

Seperate indicators should notify of outliers (and outliers would not be included in the average) like a Dragon, Sovereign, or Groglock

Right, which is why I suggested a "volatility score."  It would basically take into consideration the risk of a unit having a special ability that might make your other units helpless against it.

I sounds like you want to know everything about a battle before its played out. I would say that there should be some risk here. This is not chess

If I know what units I have and what units the opponent have, then that should be enough. The rest is the guesstimation of great leader Joasoze

In a game where you can nuke something with magic it's hard to pre-calculate battles. Doing the math and having the AI balance a mundane army system is easy, but that doesn't include the possibility that your Sovereign could remotely cast a battle altering spell and win the day.

Unless they somehow produce a number value in a battle system for every spell and ability in game and then factor in the likelihood that it would be used by the Sov or other magic caster I don't see how it could be balanced to auto-calculate effectively.