IIRC, in civ4 they tweaked the combat rules so that elite swordsman would rarley if ever beat tanks. Back in the earlier civs like 2 if you had a high level unit in the right spot it could kill anything that attacked it.

And, does anyone remember that one scene in baldurs gate 2 where you are in the underdark and run into a party of adventurers. When you encounter them control is taken away and you talk with them for a bit, eventaully giving them a quest to go kill a beholder tyrant and bring its eye back. It does time passing. The party comes back talking smack about how they crushed the beholders. They start talking to you, but in the conversation, they choose the "attack other party option. Keep in mind control is still taken from you, this is like an in-game cut-scene.

Anyway, they attack, and your character transforms into the Slayer, avatar of the god of murder. And you procede to rip their party apart with only your main character in 10 seconds flat. Right before the leader of the adventurer party dies, the game pauses. The menu screen comes up. The cursor moves over to 'load game'. Click. Rolls down to a save right before they attacked you. Loads the game.

Adventurer party talks to you, this time they give you beholder eye and adventurer leader says 'sir' at the end of every single sentence with pleases and thank yous.

So the computer did get a chance once to save-load to avoid a bad outcome.

EDIT: was not the underdark. was in a pocket plane during quest. You unpetrify adventurers, then send them on quest.

Are you serious? Thats bizarro! How did it fit into the game, like what did you think when it happened?

Amazing.....

Yep, you are assuming tanks are just one massive hunk of steel that floats magically above the surface.  If battles took place on a completely flat, indestructable surface with no where to run and hide then, yes, a bowman would never be able to beat a tank.  But that's not the case.  We can assume that in Civ, whoever is piloting the tanks at least have to eat and, presumably, the tank must consume something as well.  With that vulnerability ALONE, we can come up with a thousand scenarios where a bowman could beat a tank.

I just can't fathom why certain people get so offended when a bowman unit, stacked with massive terrain advantages and upgrades, has a 1 percent chance to beat a tank.  Think of it this way.  There are 10,000 elite bowman sitting in the forested hillside across a river above 50 tanks.  The tanks are attempting to defeat them and move into their position.  If this battle took place 100 times, can you imagine the bowman winning at least once?  If you can't, you have a very bad imagination.

You've been watching Avatar?

If the tanks just blow stuff up from long range, are careful where they go and return when out of ammo then they won't lose. Maybe a few tanks would be destroyed because of traps but not many and certainly not all. But if the bowmen got other weapons beside bow and arrow then they might halt their advance.

You don't get it, don't ya? Swordsman vs. tank in Civ4 -> Random results all the time. Just reload the game 20 times, and attack the tank with an elite swordsman. Civ4's horrible RNG based combat system is destroying the game for me. Tiny bit of randomness is cool to have, but that is all.

Personally, I thought Avatar's Ewok reinactment was retarded, so I think you are missing my point.  Once again, you are assuming the empty field   If a bunch of bowmen are hiding behind a hill while tanks are pounding from long range, nothing is going to happen.  And besides, you are creating a strawman argument in which tanks have no vulnerabilities, which they obviously do.

And so you see my point right?  That bowmen CAN defeat tanks, but it isn't likely.  Cavemen with Clovis tools could beat a tank if they are lucky enough or have enough advantages stacked on their side.  Personally, I would find it unrealistic if bowmen had no chance at all to defeat tanks.  It doesn't offend me if they do actually suceed, in fact, it will be remarkable and exciting.  No, it would not be exciting if Bowmen beat tanks all the time.  Let's look at it from the perspective of a football game.  Let's say one team is so behind that onlookers ascribe the losing team only a 1 in a thousand chance of winning.  If they make a come back and succeed, do commentators throw their hands up and complain about randomness?  No, it's remarkable.  It's special because it doesn't happen often.  Yes, the team that was ahead will be angry, but its these occassional improbabilities that make almost certain defeats exciting: there's always the chance of an improbably come back.   

I don't see why people refuse to accept this.  I think people are failing to understand what probability is.  I think people tend to ignore the 99 time that they defeat a bowman with tank, and then throw a hissy fit the one time they fail.  That, or they are crappy Civ players and ignore the fact that they are attacking bowmen when they have extraordinary defensive advantages.  A 99 percent chance of victory doesn't mean that you will always win, and if you lose, that doesn't mean that the "forces of randomness" carry the day.  It just means that you caught the sore end up probability for once.  Accept it.

The thing people have to remember is Civ IV combat is not tactical, it is high level general combat between armies.  If you use the units in the way they are intended, you almost never lose.  If you have tanks you also have artillery that can soften up an entrenched position.  If you come across some elite medieval units that are entrenched in a fort on a hill across a river, just soften them up with a couple artillery attacks first, and you will roll right over them.  I think Civ IV is one of the best strategy games you can play, not to mention the free mods Rise of Mankind, or Fall From Heaven II are better than most games period. 

And SERIOUSLY, I find just having iron age swordsmen when the enemy has no copper or iron lets you demolish them, so I just don't understand people who complain about their tanks not being tough enough.  If you gave me tanks when the rest of the world was still using longbows, I would take over the planet so fast it wasn't funny.

You know? I've never had a problem with macemen occasionally beating a tank. As long as the enemy has a good understanding of the technology, a less technologically advanced foe could beat someone more technologically advanced, as evidenced by the amazing cavalry vs. tank battles in the Ethiopian Italian war.

I just imagine those macemen sneaking up behind the tanks and hitting them really hard with molotov cocktails on sticks

TBH, this is all a moot point, since we will have tactical combat control we can prevent the random bowman from killing the tanks, or we could guide the bowman to victory. Yay for tactical control.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that the Dev Team is smart enough not to make mistakes like that in Elemental. It's good to have concerns though

You sound like someone who has never actually played the game. There is an option not to reseed the game when you reload it so outcomes won't change.

Changing the seed or not changing the seed on reload had nothing to do with it. He meant that the extreme randomness that the has RNG had allowed the swordsman to beat the tank often for no apparent reason. Its not just the number of tries, but the fact that in a single run through, the swordsman actually had a pretty good chance of winning, no reloads required.

In what world is a 1% extreme. Hell how often in a game do units even reach other one on one in a game if Civ that has advanced to modern tanks... almost never. So not only would you need a high advanced hunit of an old age unt meeting up with a tank in an advantage fortification being attacked by a tank you'd have to roll a 1 out of 100, so to speak. He also talked about reloading 20 times and causing different results which, if it really bothered you, can be fixed. I still think a number of you have not played Civ IV but are just rehashing the same bitching from the older titles. I've played Civ IV well over a 100 times, never seen it happen.

Cerevox != tormy-

His refrence to reloading 20 times was just an example of how you could check this yourself to see if a swordsman beats a tank. Not his complaint.

And like i said, in civ4 the issue almost never comes up. After all the complaints from earlier civs they fixed the system so it dosen't happen except in extremly rare situations, like once every 100 games. TBH, much as i seem to disagree with you on damn near every post i make, you are right, this just dosen't happen in civ4 enough to register as a blip, much less as a problem.

And actually, getting very backward civs is not that hard, they just need to get beat up by a war early on, then get trapped in just a few cities. They never have the money to upgrade units and thier tech is super slow. Compared to another civ that rushes foward across the tech tree its possible, although not common, to get bowmen on tank battles.

This is bull****. Macemen and longbowmen does not destroy any stack of tanks in CIV IV. If the units are undamaged we are talking about 99% chance of a win for the tank in every fight. So for 5 macemen to destroy 5 tanks you would need 10000000000 tries to make it happen or thereabouts.

Because that is fixing the horrible RNG based combat system. Riiiight.

You're not exactly a majority in that opinion. The Civ series has done very well for a very, very, very long time. It's not horrible and it's not broken, and I have yet to see you actually verify that yo have played Civ IV for an extensive amount of time or if you are just bitching about the older versions and applying it to the newer version with no first hand knowledge.

I think that we can give him the benifit of the doubt and assume that he has actually played the game. No point in complaining about a game he hasn't even played. And i think we have pointed out enough times that the ability of swordsman to beat tanks received rage from the players and was serverly decreased to the point of being gone in civ4.

RNG = Good

WTFRNG = Bad

Simple enough.