[spoilers] wetbandit prioritizes civ4 over more profitable endeavors, again

[wetbandit]

This was my primer for looking at collateral mechanics.  I believe it is up to date for BTS, but not certain.

https://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/strateg...explained/

Selecting targets

The target of each “round” of collateral damage is selected randomly from the list of potential targets, as defined above. I don’t think the list is updated each round (so that a unit at the maximum damage mark could be selected), but I’m not certain.

Maybe I rolled like complete dogshit, but there is a stack of 59 cav at 13.45/15 str and a stack of 73 infantry at 13.47/20.  No cav were really touched in the general attack, so 65+ arty did virtually nothing to a whole host of units.  

The game seems to be preferring immune targets which are above some hp threshold.  I took some screens of combat rolls, and I can post them later if folks are really interested.

[Commodore]

This does match Mr. Cairo's sims, if it's any help. 

[Fintourist]

Yeah, sorry. Not sure if you were unlucky of if the target selection is not truly random..

[wetbandit]

This does match Mr. Cairo's sims, if it's any help. 

If I'm the victim of a low roll situation, I could live with that much better than what we have here.   I'm more frustrated from my own lack of realization of how it would work out in practice.  I would have built far more tanks than arty.  The arty essentially did very little as they have virtually no chance of surviving the combat and if they only deal collateral to on average 3ish units, and often less than that, there was no real way I was going to do anything.

Of course, my stack composition may have been the only reason why I was allowed to walk to Florida's capital unmolested.  Who knows.

In any event, I think it's Florida's game.

[wetbandit]

The aftermath:



Florida:



This was the point where the table was at risk of being flipped:





It wasn't until I sent in the tanks and reduced the hp of or eliminated some MGs that I began again to get results from Arty.  I sent in the arty mainly for research purposes.



I'm ci



All of this was in their capital less 50 infantry, 5 AT and 1 cav (and a number of airships).  So they had 90 collateral immune units to 207 collateral victims.

Oh well, gg Florida!

[Charriu]

Rest assured I will investigate the actual implementation in the code and summarize it for you guys.

[wetbandit]

Rest assured I will investigate the actual implementation in the code and summarize it for you guys.

There's no need to do that on account of my grumblings.  For the record, I certainly don't want to insinuate that I think something unfair happened to me.

[Charriu]

Oh no, I didn't want to imply that. It's just curiosity and I promised Mr Cairo the same. I also already had a look and will write it down for you after the fighting. It's certainly interesting how units are selected

[Mr. Cairo]

If you think you're Artillery wasn't that effective, it would have been even worse for me. In my sim, even on flat ground, my Artillery did very little collateral damage. So when I realised the effect of collateral-immune units it turned out better for me to just keep my Artillery in my cap, reducing collateral damage instead of dealing it.

[Mr. Cairo]

I decided to see what would have happened if I had attacked your stack this turn. Unfortunately all my Arty were promoted to City raider by the AI, as I had turned on auto-promote for the last couple turns. But they were not useful at all in any case, probably averaging 2-3 units of collateral each attack. Then I went in with everything else and it was a bloodbath, on both sides:

the signs were from my last turn.

Anyway, that was a very good game, I can't believe you managed to come back from that dogpile to still be in a dominant position for the rest of the game. It was certainly helped by my questionable decision to attack DZ in the middle of it, but still, very well done. I'm not sure who would have come out on top in the end if I hadn't got that Great Artist, it would probably have depended on who lost the most units killing me. But you and SD were probably in better positions than JR4 in terms of land and tech.