Another guess about casualty loss mechanics…

[Marius123]

There seem to be a lot of complaints on this forum about casualty loss rates. I think most of you guys have it wrong in your thinking about the way the game mechanics work, hence your frustration. Here’s my guess:

Whenever you fight a battle, every unit you bring with you has a percentage chance of dying, mostly INDEPENDENT of level, whether you win or lose the fight, and the total atk/def strength.

For instance, if I have 2 allies I will bring 8 units to a fight. When I click on the “attack” button, each of those units will randomly roll to see whether or not they die. The chance of death comes from the casualty rating (i.e. a “high” rating might mean a 5% chance of death per attack, while a “low” rating might mean a 0.25% chance of death) and has nothing to do with how badly I win or lose. If, instead, I have 200 allies I will bring 800 units to a fight. Each of those units will randomly roll. Obviously, 800 rolls vs. 8 rolls means a much higher casualty rate. Also, it appears the percentages are tweaked depending on whether you are attacking, raiding, or defending. Raiding and defending have a much lower chance of death than attacking

What are the implications?

1. While ultimately, the casualty rate is random, the more units you bring to a fight the more casualties you will have.

2. The more units of a specific type you bring, the greater chance that unit type has a casualty.

3. It (probably) does not matter if my total atk strength is 1400, and his def is 40, I lose units based off of their chance of dying in a fight, not the result of that fight.

4. It is not necessarily good to have a bunch of allies. You will be able to bring more units to a fight (and, therefore, have a higher atk strength) but you will have a MUCH higher casualty rate. (I initially loaded up on allies, but was getting frustrated at the number of casualties. To test my theory, I dumped almost all of my allies, and guess what happened… my casualty rate plummeted.)

I would love to hear feedback on this post

[JMC]

You are right about some things but the strength of your opponent definitely matters. It determines how many units you will lose. The amount of units brought to battle doesnt effect that much unless youre making huge changes like from 8 units to 800.

Right now there is a bug in the figt mechanics and casualties. All deaths are random and you take a loss no matter what. Very low or high casualty currently doesnt matter. That is what everyone is complaining about right now.

[Marius123]

It’s certainly possible that atk/def do matter, and that I have just never noticed because most of my fights don’t have a huge disparity. I am only lvl 36, my atk is ~280, I generally attack others with def of 180 – 220, and I only have 6 allies.

That being said, I used to have 20 allies and would lose units all of the time, while now I only lose a unit every 10+ fights. Maybe I will try attacking someone with way more defense just to see if I lose more units.

[fortisanima]

So I am level 69 with atk and def 12k+ and thus have been around the game for a quite a while. What I noticed is that originally (say from game's inception to about a week ago on Friday) the casulty rate made sense. So let's say for example you attacked someone with roughly the equivalent stats as you. Most likely you would lose units (2 to 3) with a mix between high end and low end units. You could also lose no units or you could lose all high end units but that is what happens when you attack someone with a high defence. Now lets say you attacked someone much weaker than you. Depending on the amount they were weaker than you (say you had an attack of 8k and they had a defense of 2k) you would usually not lose any units. However, sometimes you would lose some units but they would usually be weak in nature (say a ranger or humvee). This was pretty consistent if you were attacking or raiding. So bottom line is that you could build up your army by attacking those weaker than you by a substantial amount and if you wanted to attack someone stronger or around the same level you could do so but with an increased casulty rate. Frankly this made sense.

So starting about one week ago the casulty rate was drastically changed so that the relative strengths of the two players no longer affected the casulty rate, only the number and type of units being brought into battle. So for example, I have 12k attack and about 280 allies and I attacked a person with 500 defense. I lost three expensive units totaling about 375 valor and 300k cash from this one attack. Normally this would have been a safe attack and I would have nearly guaranteed not to lose a single unit, though if I did get seriously unlucky all I would have lost is a humvee or ranger (some small cheap unit) in the past. The new economics make it really unwise for anybody with a high level base to do any attacking as there is no attack strategy that can make it economical since no matter who I attack I am nearly guaranteed to lose 2-4 units with some of them being valor or expensive units. My best guess is that starting on Friday the casulty algorithm was chagned so that relative strength of the attacker and defender no longer affects how much casulty loss occurs. So now all attacks are the equivalent of attacking someone the same defense as you when it comes to how many units one loses (though the win or loss of the attack/raid is determined by your how much stronger you are like in the past). So even though I win all my fights now they cost me so many units that I don't want to attack anymore.

What you are describing for a strategy is correct for the current algorithm as the best strategy is to just drop all your allies and thus you won't lose many units in an attack whether or not you win or lose. Try and get units with very low/ or low loss rates and thus you won't lose many units when attacking since you are only bringing a few to battle. This is frankly against the purpose of the game in my view since normally the goal is to get a stronger and stronger base. However there is almost no point in this anymore since it does not make sense in getting allies as all it will do is increase one's own casulty rate regardless of who you attack. I am hopeful that Funzio will fix this problem (and thus allow us to get a big army and pick on the weaker armies :)) but until they do that this game will continue to lose players as the current setup forces us to not attack others without seriously weakening ourselves in the process.

[Flipmode]

Does need rebalancing, but hope they don't go back to zero casualties for beating up small players.

Imagine they were trying to remove this but ended up raising the level in a way they didn't expect.

[Tanner]

Does need rebalancing, but hope they don't go back to zero casualties for beating up small players.

Imagine they were trying to remove this but ended up raising the level in a way they didn't expect.

AGREED!
Although, a little rebalancing will be alright w/ me ;)

[Ramshutu]

Speaking as a programmer, I suspect defense difference was taken into account before. I suspect that they changed it to be a basic dice roll for each unit low to high value with a maximum cap on losses. This would make sense, as I tend to bulk up any extra capacity in alliance vs units with scouts. After I lost loads of them (without replacing) I began loosing higher ones.

It's probably working exactly as it was intended, but it's easy to miss the poor balance when testing if your expecting things to be worse by design anyway.

[ShawnBB]

Hey Marius, check here
http://www.funzio.com/forum/showthread.php?17633-My-new-assumption-of-the-Casualty-mechanism-%26%23128562%3B
http://www.funzio.com/forum/showthread.php?16777-For-those-who-complaining-about-low-casualty-unit-lost-against-weak-players.
My original thinking is absolutely the same as yours . Set your main troop as light gunners so that your major core units like Harrier jet, Stryker, cruiser will be much safer than ever before. As all the gunners have a fairly high priority to go as the meat shield.

I tested recently also, just to see how are the other units going if I don't purchase an over sized light gunners to cost the must happen death.
AND, it turns out that our theory is right. My other medium units start dying like high casualty units. Because a jeep has to die if there's nothing else weaker than it.