Re: Patrolling and Unrest
 

OK, so here is my test.
Dominium 10, Order 3 (less events), Grow 3. Events rare (even less ugly events XD), Independents 9 (so easy AI Caelum will stuck in his capitol and I have a lot of time). EA Ermor (because has nice all 10 points units).

Patrol: Pontifex (10 precision, 10 AP), 9 Hastatus or Accensus (10 precision, 10 AP). 1 star experience gives +1 precision, I know this, so I check every unit and replace them with fresh troops if needed.
So this is always 10 points patrol

My methodology:
1 - patrol with 200% tax, if no increase/decrease events - note how many kills
2 - patrol with 0% tax, just to drop down unrest to 0. I didn't note kills here, because 0% tax make unrest to 0 and it is zero kills anyway. Those all zeros below (and all kills) are from point 1.
3 - if unrest is 0 - back to step 1.

Results:
9, 4, 0, 8, 0, 9, 0, 1, 9, 3, 10 (wow, so 9 was not the maximum), 7, 0, 0, 10, 0
OK, stop, I'm bored XD
No events happened.

Bad formula, bugged RNG, bad test, my bugged hardware?

Re: Patrolling and Unrest
 

Yeah, that is quite convincing. Out of 16 tests there's 6 results of 0 and only 3 results between 1-6. I'm at a loss..

Its not clear where the data in Lch/Sunray FAQ came from, perhaps a guess based on an even smaller test.

Re: Patrolling and Unrest
 

Well, I did a test with LA Man. I've patrolled one province wih a magister (destealh should be 26) and another with two foresters (destealh two times 16.4, so make that 32) for about 40 turns. Both provinces taxed a 150%, so unrest generated was 10 points every turn. I've assumed unrest reducing destealh power by one point per 2 points of unrest, but that can't be exactly right, since the magister managed to reduce unrest a bit even when it was over 50 points. Generally unrest does seem to impact patrolling negatively, though.

Another problem of course is that while you can see the low rolls, when the patroller misses some unrest, but not how much better than the 10 points needed.

Anyway, I've expected the magister to succeed about 0.6 (16/26) of the time, and the two foresters 0.7 (22/32). What I got was 0.67 for the magister and 0.63 for the foresters. that's close enough to what's expected for me.

tl;dr:

the wiki is right

Re: Patrolling and Unrest
 

Edit: ninja'd again.

Anyway according to the wiki commanders get +20 to prec and move points before division by 20, so your pontife shuld have been wrh 3 points and your 9 dudes 1 each, for 12 vs. 10 points of unrest. Maybe the wiki is wrong about those commander bonuses?

Re: Patrolling and Unrest
 

I tax 200% to unrest 18-20, so even with 10 kills I had some unrest and I had to low tax to lower unrest to 0 (step 2). That is why I used only 9 dudes, to see real kills. I know that superfluity of kills are not displayed (1000 guys vs 1 unrest will kill only 1 bandit).

Edit:
Lots of 9 and few of 10, maybe this mean some "re-rolls" in this place?
Or maybe troops (9) and commander (1) are tested separately?

Re: Patrolling and Unrest
 

So it seems that there are two things going on -- first, the likelihood of finding the rebels, and second, the number that can be killed.

The "extreme" results then are probably caused by the interaction of these two. If you're patrolling with 50+ troops, you probably have enough troops to kill all the rebels they find each round. But you still have a significant risk of not finding any. This creates the tendency for the "all-or-nothing" results we tend to observe.

I guess the best strategy then is to have enough patrollers to take out *two* turns of unrest -- whatever they miss the first turn, they'll likely crush the next.

Re: Patrolling and Unrest
 

The wiki isn't wrong. Your reading comprehension is :). (I wrote that part of the wiki, and tested it using the debuggin tools from dom3, the log files then list the destealth values. Which baffled me for some time, until I figured out that commanders get double their skills).

Commanders get a double bonus. Not +20. So if their prec is 1 they count as having prec 2. Not prec 21.

The patrol bonusses count just as one point of patrol (which means they count as 20 before dividing by 20 ;) ).

Re: Patrolling and Unrest
 

Yeah, I had a raging headache when I was writing that, and it was an off-the-cuff reply based on what I remembered from reading the wiki a couple of hours earlier. So it got a bit muddled.