Mutual attacks - where do they fight?

[Chazar]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
This works fine if you're attacking from a province that is not being attacked in turn. If you launch from several provinces, including one that is being attacked, the enemy will attack first.

I have these situations over and over again, and I conducted my own testing. Sometimes things work out, sometimes things don't. As Jasper pointed out, the program cannot distinguish between attacker and defender in such situations, especially in a case of plenty mutual attacks occur along a long borderline.

In addition, the program evaluates all movement orders sequentially, and although I am aware that "random" has a different meaning in the world of computers, even the pseudo-random numbers used tell us that we cannot influence these things by other means and have a hard time predicting what whill happen (Can you predict the outcome of every battle? There are only pseudo-random numbers used for the dice-rolls as well).

I am also happy with the situation, and although I despise heavy infantery, I would not like to see this done in a deterministic way based on strategic movement (sure there is no such thing as non-determinism in computers widly available right now, but this is a different topic and I am sure you know what I mean).

Difficult terrain, bad Weather, a commander with puny bladder,etc. may all delay a marching army a little bit, so I am truly happy with the random element in this bit. It means that I've got to prepare my Army Setup for different situation - and I need to anticipate my enemy's strategies much more...

Oh, by the way: I am only playing against human opponents, so it might be that movement against the computer might be handled entirely different to compensate for the AI's lack of strategic thinking, which may explain our different perception...