[Spoilers]Pindicator With All the First Strikes in PB71

[pindicator]

I'm more worried about the copper. But yeah Krill is pretty obviously going to come for us. It's been evident since he picked up HBR (or so I presume). Still might be a mixed stack of vulture and horse archers so .... yeah, it's been a hopeless position for a while

[scooter]

Ok, I need an explanation for this deterministic combat stuff. As you see, this 1.5h Archer 1S of the city attacked into the city, and for the second consecutive turn it withdrew from  combat. Last time it practically redlined an axe, and this time it brought a warrior down to half health despite having 0.9% odds. If I'm following correctly, this deterministic combat is supposed to cause a withdraw when it was otherwise going to win. Are we sure this is working? Because if it's working, this is absurdly bad luck two turns in a row for this archer to severely wound key defenders and just walk away. This time it had 0.9% odds and not only did it not lose, it did not even take damage. I think something is broken here.

Charriu, you around? I need to understand what's going on so I don't lose a city to barbs or something here.


FWIW, it is not pindicator's turn yet (I mistakenly thought it was), but I'm not especially comfortable playing before I know if there's a bug or if I'm missing intended behavior.

[Charriu]

This definitely looks like a bug. The archer should not withdraw as it does not have a withdrawal odd. According to what I'm seeing you should have won against the archer. For a quick fix I would advise to contact Ramk and delete the barb archer

[pindicator]

Oh I should have been speaking up about this earlier. This is definitely not the first time this has happened. Thanks for reporting it scooter

[RefSteel]

Wild guess: Could this result from an unintended interaction between deterministic combat and First Strikes? The game's combat calculations around those have always been wonky (resulting in e.g. archery units defending ahead of melee units with better odds) so there may be more than one system for calculating combat odds (e.g. for the displayed odds and for selecting the defender) - and/or if the odds are being calculated on the basis of just the first attack, a first-strike might confuse the game since the (stronger) non-archer can't do any damage that round but the archer doesn't have odds to win.

[scooter]

Ok I've sent a PM to Ramk linking him here and requesting he delete the Barb Archer - not sure if that's the most preferable way to get his attention or not.

Going forward it does seem like this ought to be looked at and hopefully patched because it seems likely to recur at some point, and we don't really want to be asking him to remove these units constantly.

[scooter]

Wild guess:  Could this result from an unintended interaction between deterministic combat and First Strikes?  The game's combat calculations around those have always been wonky (resulting in e.g. archery units defending ahead of melee units with better odds) so there may be more than one system for calculating combat odds (e.g. for the displayed odds and for selecting the defender) - and/or if the odds are being calculated on the basis of just the first attack, a first-strike might confuse the game since the (stronger) non-archer can't do any damage that round but the archer doesn't have odds to win.

Feels like a reasonable guess, especially as in both cases the Archer did deal significant damage.

[Tarkeel]

Might also want to alert the other players to this behavior.

[Ramkhamhaeng]

I deleted the archer.

Feels like a reasonable guess, especially as in both cases the Archer did deal significant damage.

Yeah, the significant damage might indicate that's not just the withdraw was changed?!
Maybe critical because of the the second archer. On the other hand, its two units in the city and an archer in the city nearby

[scooter]

Thanks, appreciate it. Yeah, I'm definitely unclear on what's going to happen with this other Archer. On one hand it doesn't happen every time, as an Archer on the other side of the empire did indeed suicide into me this turn too. I do think the First Strike theory has a good chance of being an culprit here where potentially the Archer "winning" the first strike roll result in a withdraw.