so did combat get nerfed?

[Poliorcetes]

I haven't played with the air force yet so started a new game. But I am getting whipped in combat now. Against equally equipped troops, with better leadership, appropriate tactics, fully rested, etc. I am routinely fighting 8:1 to 27:1 odds battles and losing with 3:1 troop loss ratios. Frankly it's only my ability to recruit 1,000 or more troops a turn and good strategic positioning that is keeping the war going. Now this is against a Major house, combat against marauders seems to be acting normal.
Given that I just got light tanks in the mix and it still barely made any difference (ie. still losing despite all numbers saying otherwise) I am going to try a new game because this is just frustrating.

[newageofpower]

Depends. Early game, my light tanks with 40mm howitzer and 25mm armor regularly squish infantry at 1:4 odds (in enemy's favor) with minimal-to-zero losses. I have high recon and manually check to make sure they don't have AT guns or RPG troops before I go in, of course.

"Yes sir! We're going in!"

EDIT: As Yutowap said, try not to attack entrenched forces in difficult terrain; cut them off supplies and starve them for a few turns before attacking. If that's not possible, call artillery on them first; it will lower their readiness and perhaps morale (especially if your artillery is effective).

Of course, Ranged Attack efficiency scales with recon, so if your scouting is bad throw away a Militia regiment in a suicidal echelon assault before opening up with artillery, then conduct your main assault to push through the position.

[yutowap33]

@Poliorcetes, what difficulty level?

In previous game, on easiest, the only time I had problems was fighting in forest against armored infantry with no retreat posture.
In current game, on hardest, I am see the exact same thing as you do, huge loss even on overwhelming odds in my favor :/

Add to that lack of resources, no room for expansion (surrounded by two majors and sea) damn non aligned snakes that are stronger than walkers, and I am certainly feeling the pain. It's going to be a slow attrition war here until I can turn the tied.

[BlueTemplar]

Hmm, maybe some things (Unit Feats ?) aren't being counted in the odds ?

[newageofpower]

-delete-

[stryc]

I've been playing the latest Betas on Hard and I frequently see 3:1 losses on odds greater than 10:1. I knew from earlier games that the odds cannot be relied upon but now they seem to be very misleading.

[redrum68]

Posting a few example battles would probably help.

I'm fairly certain unit feats are NOT included in the odds so that is one factor you have to consider outside the odds.

[AgentFransis]

Yeah, post some screenshots of battles so we can analyze. Including the detailed combat reports.

[Poliorcetes]

ok, so this was on Hard setting. This was the first turn the tanks arrived to the units, and I changed from Ambush to Blitz strategy.

Uh, so I have screenshots saved. How do I post them? Using win 10, saved in png from the Paint program.

[KarisFraMauro]

I'm not playing the beta but am on my first game on maximum difficulty, and ouch. Time to start investing in artillery I think (although can I afford the resource cost...).

[BlueTemplar]

Save the screenshots as jpeg, using custom compression settings - under 200Ko each, one per post. (If you're on Windows, I recommend Paint.Net for that.)

----

I would be *very* careful about trusting the odds too much. It looks like that they don't calculate the *actual* combat odds, just a simplified version using the modifiers you see on the pre-combat screen. And even those can give misleading results, I'm reminded of an Alpha Centauri bug in odds display :
the shown odds just multiply attackers attack by attackers health points and compare to defenders defense multiplied by defenders health points. However the *real* odds are different, because the actual combat math doesn't work like this !

And SE's combat is probably even *more* complicated - take for instance the effects of recon. If I'm not mistaken, the pre-battle screen assumes perfect recon? (As long as you at least knew the units were there in the first place ?) But the actual combat is going to be modified by the recon you actually have (I understand that artillery is especially affected by this?).

Also, the pre-battle screen might lump different kinds of units (especially frontline vs backline - artillery) into the same number, while they are likely to have a *very* different effect on the actual battle ?

P.S.: Oh, also even if these odd ratios were perfectly correct, they *still* wouldn't tell you your expected losses - only your expected chance to win the combat !

[KarisFraMauro]

At least in the past the odds have been unduly negative as well as positive. Units that have been surrounded in particular (sometimes) turn out to be a piece of cake when the odds suggest otherwise. All part of the fun!

[BlueTemplar]

Well, of course it's still random. And we also don't get any information about what the distribution looks like, or even just what the variance is...

[zgrssd]

ORIGINAL: Poliorcetes

I haven't played with the air force yet so started a new game. But I am getting whipped in combat now. Against equally equipped troops, with better leadership, appropriate tactics, fully rested, etc. I am routinely fighting 8:1 to 27:1 odds battles and losing with 3:1 troop loss ratios. Frankly it's only my ability to recruit 1,000 or more troops a turn and good strategic positioning that is keeping the war going. Now this is against a Major house, combat against marauders seems to be acting normal.
Given that I just got light tanks in the mix and it still barely made any difference (ie. still losing despite all numbers saying otherwise) I am going to try a new game because this is just frustrating.

What is your recon on those hexes?
Lack of recon can drastically under or overestimate enemy chances. A enemy that was not yet found might as well be impossible to hit in combat. And especially foiliage can massive impact scouting, entrenchment and low altidute airforce.
The only good thing for your soldiers is, that combat actually gives you 40 Recon/Combat turn.

Without seeing a screenshot with the target hex selected, it is hard to say what is going wrong.

[Poliorcetes]

I have converted it all to jpeg.
But I don't see an upload button.
I can't copy/paste it to this message.
I see an Image button but it just does which doesn't seem intuitively useful.

As a side note, I have to laugh when a message board layout makes a 50-year-old ER doctor who grew up using Tandy computers, learned Basic, wrote papers on Framework in college, etc, feel computer illiterate. I have Grammerly overwatching my typing in real-time, which is darn near magical.
But the smileys are nice.

[redrum68]

@Poliorcetes - Are you using the Fast Reply at the bottom? Instead use the "Post reply" button and there is an upload option below the text box.

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah, it's a bit quirky : you actually have to click on "post reply" to get to the full-blown reply dialog...

The image tags are there so that you can paste an image link inside. In that case you'll have to host the image somewhere else of course, which can be annoying later on, because external website links tend to die/break faster than forums. Unlike the upload dialog, these image tags support png, but still not svg.

[Uemon]

This could be as simple as you using a bad unit composition and for example having wrong recon, which gives you inaccurate combat odds, which makes you take fights you shouldnt take.

Other than that, if the enemy has a lot of tanks, and you do not, fighting tanks with infantry is a terribad idea, and game will frequently lie to you telling you that you have a shot, whereas you dont.