[pxc]

> I think this is exactly it. And then Sid Meyer calls his players stupid and irrational

I think this is overstating what Sid Meier says in the talk. His original goal was to make his simple combat stat system clear to users by describing its odds as odds conventionally are described.

> For assuming a celebrated game designer would put even a modicum of thought into making a combat system that was balanced, made sense, and felt good.

That's exactly what he did, through player testing! Through practice and player feedback seems to me like a perfectly reasonable way to uncover an intuitive notion of unit strength. It's not like he said 'they're odds, stupid! learn how to understand odds.'. He recognized that player intuition and fun was the real goal, and his team gradually made the combat system more sophisticated.

[Dylan16807]

> His original goal was to make his simple combat stat system clear to users by describing its odds as odds conventionally are described.

Except that odds values don't add on to each other. It sounds like the numbers only worked like odds in a single way, and not in other ways. The system was inherently contradictory, and confusion is not irrational in that situation.

And it's easy to clarify something as odds by making it two opposing percentages out of 100.

[pxc]

1:3 (one to three) odds aren't the same as 1/3 odds (1 in 3 odds).

1:3 means the second outcome (that on the right-hand side of the ':' symbol) is 3 times as likely as the former outcome, which is true when the likelihood of the first outcome is 25% and the likelihood of the second outcome is 75%.

1/3 describes the chances only of one of the outcomes, and fixes it at 33⅓%. If there's only one other outcome, its likelihood is 66⅔%.

Is the 'addition' you're talking about just one of the readings of the first syntax, or did I miss something else in the video that made the initial presentation of those odds figures surprising?

Sorry if my terminology is off; it's been a long time since I did any stats