Having Trouble Understanding the Combat System

you roll a die for your attack between 0 and your attack. Same for defense. If attack is superior to defense, then the unit get the difference in damage.

You roll 13, he rolls 7 ==> 13 - 7 = 6 points of damage. If you roll ower = no damage.

Thanks for the explanation. That seems a little more random than I like - I would have hoped that with a superior attack I would have had a better chance to hit him than seems to be the case. I literally went through 12 attacks without a single hit. It seems like you are completely at the mercy of the random number generator.

Yes, you are right now.

And when it comes to my sovereign and magic the invisible dices seem to be loaded in favour of the AI as well. 20+ intelligence and still hardly any damage at all.

Yes, that's my sovereign. Bright as a rocket scientist, but he cannot hit a barn door from 2 meters distance with a fireball. *sigh*

Rabenhoff

It does seem there should be a "too hit" and a "damage" You could hit a rock golem, but if you hit it with an arrow or something with low damage, then you shoulldn't be able to really do much to it.

That would work for me. I wouldn't mind if my arrows were hitting but doing little damage to a high armour target. The complete whiffs were a little disconcerting.

RNG pwn U!

Basically.

That's one of the current issues with the game - inconsistent damage.  It's really, really frustrating casting a spell with a name like 'Infernal' on a group of low-level spiders, fire crashes from the sky in an awesome display of magical might, the smoke slowly clears... and you've completely missed half of them.  I believe it's being worked on, however.

I don't usually visit game forums, but having recently seen Elemental on Impulse, I impulsively decided to try it and so bought a copy.  I find I'm having difficulty understanding the mechanics of combat also.  For example, an enemy unit made of of four soldiers, each with a defence and attack value of 12 (giving the unit a combined attack of 48 and combined defence of 48) attacked a city I own.  After a couple of turns there was one soldier left in each unit which I assumed would bring the attack and defence of the units down to 12.  I was wrong.  Having now closed with my units, the enemy units proceeded to kill each of my 5 full strength units with a single blow each, still attacking with an attack value of 48.  Is this how it is supposed to work, or is this a bug?  If this is how it is supposed to work, why?

Thanks in advance for any help in understanding the mechanics of this game.

As far as we can tell, it's a bug.

Ahh.  Thanks.  It surprised me as it almost completely negates the value of ranged attack if any damage taken by a unit is ignored and the unit still attacks with the strength of an undamaged unit.  I am enjoying the game despite the problems I seem to be finding so I guess I'll keep playing and keep an eye out for any patches.  Cheers. 

With patch 1.1, I believe they are planning on overhauling the combat, so fear not. There have been many good ideas on this forum for how to improve the mechanics, and I am confident that all of these good ideas are not falling on deaf ears. Stardock are good when it comes to improving a game where it needs improving. I'm confident they'll do right given enough time.

Thanks for the info.  As I said before, I usually don't frequent game forums as they seem to be mostly inhabited by rude, unhelpful ppl, but after spending a few minutes looking through these forums I'm surprised and impressed by the level of intelligent discussion going on, not to mention the level of dev interaction as well.  I may spend the next few weeks reading all the great posts here discussing the game mechanics and how they could be improved.  It's almost as interesting as actually playing the game.    I bought both Elemental and GalCiv2 only recently and am having great fun with both.  I look forward to seeing how they improve on this fun (despite being flawed) game.

Side note: I have noticed that casting Berserk on a unit causes the accuracy of said unit to go down considerably. I have also noticed that the damage doesn't seem to increase much, if at all when a hit actually landed. I'm unaware if this is intended or not.

Does it also seem like the damage values in AutoCalc are different from what you get in tactical combat? When I read the report from an AutoCalc battle my damage, especially spell damage, is WAY higher than the numbers I see in tactical.

I think it's been said somewhere that Auto-Resolve uses a different calculation for damage, which is why it's higher.

Well that would be a kick in the teeth, since I cast Beserk specifically to get the boost in attack power to try and get past the higher defence.