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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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