Questions Regarding Firing and Assault Resolution

[jckerr4]

Thanks for all the advice.
It will certainly help.
It can't hurt, cause I loose just about every game I play
I still think I need to understand assault, attack, and defense values just a little better
Do attack values correlate directly to defense values?
In other words if there are 2 equal units on equal terrain with no modifiers, and the attacking unit has a attack value of 10 and the defending unit has a defense value of 10. Do I have 50% of scoring casualties?

Or are they just relative to my own troops.
Where I should be thinking "this unit has a defense of 20, and that unit has a defense of 10, If i need to secure a position I should use the 20"

I understand the comments regarding over analysis, and have no problem "going with my gut", but why then did they bother to put the Combat results section in the manual?
Am I the only dope who read it 5 times, thinking maybe, I need to understand this to get better?

Maybe there should be a disclaimer

Warning! This section should only be read by Game designers, Astro Physicists and Non terrestrial beings. Read at your own risk. May cause foaming at the mouth, sporadic head scratching and spontaneous incontrollable outbursts of inappropriate language. If you read this and have an erection lasting 4 or more hours, you probably should seek a career in the computer sciences field

Here is the section:
A common combat results calculation is used for both fire and assault results. The combat results calculation is based on four parameters: a combat value, a modifier, a Low Combat Value (LCV) and a High Combat Value (HCV). For fire combat, the combat value is the adjusted fire value of the firing units. For assault combat, the combat value is the adjusted strength of the opposing side. The given modifiers are applied to the given combat value to arrive at the effective combat value. The Low Combat Value and High Combat Value are the extreme possible casualties resulting from a base-line combat value of 1000. The effective combat value is used to scale these accordingly resulting in low and high possible casualties. Finally a random value is selected between the low and high casualty values to arrive at the final combat result.

For example, given a combat value of 40, a modifier of 25%, a Low Combat Value of 50 and a High Combat Value of 250, the effective combat value would be 50 (= 40 + 25%). This would be 5% of the base-line combat value of 1000. Thus the low casualty value would be 2.5 (= 50 * 5%) and the high casualty value would be 12.5 (= 250 * 5%). The resulting casualty value would be randomly generated between 2.5 and 12.5 for this combat. Finally, based on the fractional part of the casualty value, it is randomly rounded up or down. For example, if the casualty value was calculated to be 3.7, then 30% of the time this is rounded down to 3 and 70% of the time is rounded up to 4.