[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
What you are trying to do is rationalize the absurdities in the combat system. It doesn't work. These are not men with low grade rifles, they are men with arquebuses. One small round bullet, which you have to pack in with the gun powder to the gun. Such guns can not penetrate a tank's armor, period. Sure, it is theoretically possible, but highly unlikely.

And if you understood the combat system at all, you would realize just how unlikely it is. Without any modifiers, a modern armour will defeat a musketeman 98.64% of the time.

The tanks get defeated on open terrain too. These musketmen don't have mines and such.

Ahhh. So what you are saying is that these musketmen are actually 400-1000 years old by the time they fought your tank. Why don't they have mines and such? To say that they don't is to be irrational.

Ok, so unless you spend all your trade on taxes and then buy everything, you fall behind. Sounds like fun to me.

I am complaining that the AI cheats too much. Not a simple bonus to remain competitive, but cheating.

There is no difference between a bonus to production and trading research. Both are cheating.

I stopped playing the game long ago because it was no fun. So, of course the rampant cheating is insurmountable with my skill at civ 3. Had the game been fun, I could probably have played enough to learn how to cope with the cheating. But, it wasn't fun, so I stopped playing.

So basically, you couldn't beat the game at as high a difficulty level as you could play the other games, so its obviously the games fault that you don't understand the game.

It is unrealistic for large numbers of high tech units to be required to defeat low tech units. The problems happen with things like Pikemen too. Tell me how men armed with Pikes (and nothing else) can defeat tanks?

This is an artificially constructed dilemna that you have built for no reason other than to convince yourself that the combat system is severely flawed. Pikemen can defeat tanks in several ways that I have already explained. If not, then apparently the Russian civilians in Leningrad didn't actually manage to defeat a single German tank. You cannot explain away the fact that a single attack from a tank represents an entire four month campaign.

They simply can't, unless you artificially create a lot of bizarre circumstances in their favor. In 99.99% of situations, the pikemen would be slaughtered without any danger at all to the tank. But in civ 3, they can defeat the tanks.

BZZZT. In Civ 3 they are defeated 99.5% of the time.

What you see as a "severely flawed" combat mechanism, I see as standard, and expected, statistical variation.