[question] Combat rating aka Threat - does anyone use it?

I tend to think of it more as a guideline ... though I'd say it calling "Waerloga the Dragon Lord" having an EPIC stack to be quite accurate

No. 

I look at the threat level.  Then I look at the unit(s) stats and make an assessment.  Then I look at the threat level again.  Then I usually shake my head.

Nah. I look at attack, defense, and hit points. The threat levels don't seem to really mean anything.

It'd highly inaccurate.

I care about HP, defense, and attack. The individual importance of those all depend on my own army's strengths and weaknesses. If I have a high-attack army,  my enemy's defense is less important to me.

A good rating system is not an individual index, but a direct matching of my army versus another's.

Me too. Also check the type of units in the stack.

I imagine the tactical layer makes it very difficult to ballpark actual threat levels, because of what a player mind can do on a tactical grid that an AI can't, and the things the AI cant take into account, like movement and special abilities.

If I were playing an Ironman game in roguelike fashion, I would definitely pay attention to it, as in that situation I would be erring always on the side of caution.  In a casual game, not so much.

One thing I would like to see is a ballpark threat level indicator for ruins/caves/quest locations.  While the specifics should still be a surprise, If you want to me to accept the wound system  I need to feel like I can make a sound strategic decision on whether or not I can do something.  It's so random now, you can wander blind into these things and just laugh at the lethal BS that comes out of nowhere, flip the game off, and reload, knowing you never had a chance.

First of all you have to make it clear what the threat level means.

a ) How difficult the battle will be for YOU

b ) how difficult the battle will be for the average human player

c ) how difficult the battle will be for the average AI player 

Usually games use C, because that is easiest to calculate. A and B need lots of data and statistics being collected, but Brad says they plan on doing something like that so it is feasible.

option C requires very good AI, otherwise the numbers will be inaccurate if you don't auto-resolve. I personally can't think of any game that has accurate threat levels, or even consistent ones. Usually certain enemy types will be much more dangerous than others, and it varies from player to player and from game to game.  

So theres a few ways to make the numbers better, but A and B might not come until after the game launches, and C might never happen.

All those things change with the stack it's being compared to though.  I think about the best we can realistically expect is a ballpark evaluation of HP/ATT/DEF, unless you want the processor overhead of the auto battle simulation when looking at any stack... which still wouldn't be accurate, because it oversimplifies what can be done on a tactical map.

In the end, it's not really important to know how dangerous the game thinks a stack really is to a given army. We only need to know how dangerous other stacks that the game labels weak/ medium/ dangerous have generally been within a certain range, and expect those results to be fairly consistent.  The human can make a better decision about that at any rate, being able to more accurately gauge the strengths of their army.

Well, I'll admit it will be important for the AI to know more accurately what combat effectiveness really means.

EDIT: Wrong thread.

This

I upped the value of unit level's threat addition so it works pretty well most of the time. Level is the biggest factor right now with difficulty.

I always thought that the threat rating was more of a indicator of a stacks's Special I.E. Magical capabilities.