We agree with you. It's going to be modified coming up.
But how? Any chance you'll explain the revised system before you start implementing it?
Since you'll have to do surgery on the mechanics and completely rebalance everything, I have a suggestion for you guys:
Make the "dice" two-sided so they can't roll anything other than 0 and 1.
Use the various unit stats as the number of dice the unit gets to roll.
Change the baseline value for all unit stats (except movement/action points) to 1.
Split up the current Attack stat into Melee, Missile and Magic Attack stats.
Remove the Defence stat entirely and resolve attacks by comparing attack rolls instead, but prevent units without the relevant weapon type from counter-attacking.
Introduce a pile of new Damage Resistance stats, one for each type of damage in the game (fire, blunt weapons, etc).
A combat round between baseline human A and baseline human B, would work out something like this:
Despite having 1 Attack across the board, neither participant have missile or magic capabilities, so they can only attack each other in melee.
Human A attacks and rolls 0. Human B makes his opposed roll and gets 1. Human A has missed and Human B has made 1 counter-attack.
Since Human B is armed with nothing but his thick skull, let's assume his 1 damage die is Blunt damage.
Human B rolls his 1 blunt damage die and scores 0. Human A doesn't bother to roll his 1 Blunt resistance die, since no damage was inflicted.
This system has several advantages over the current one:
It is easily understood by anyone over the age of 10 (6 probably) and the bare basics of it can be explained in half a page (so you won't have to write any of that documentation you evidently hate with the fury of a trillion exploding stars... or something).
Its results are random, but predictable with a very high degree of accuracy (so it's both more fun to use and much, much easier to balance).
It has a fair amount of room for unit specialisation/combat specialities (so the unit designer can have a practical purpose rather than the purely cosmetic one it has now)
It allows many different kinds of modifiers (so magic can be more and other things than direct damage).
I'm not demanding you use this exact system, I'm simply trying to show you the difference between the current system and one that actually works. Please feel free to ask questions, Brad & minions. Regardless of whether the system you settle on is remotely similar to the one I just outlined. Because... don't take this the wrong way, but right now my faith in your collective ability to design a combat system is... well... pretty much absent.
