I'd like to point out a couple of things regarding my calculations:
* I am fully aware of (and I thought clear on) the possibility that this is not how it happens.
* I am fully aware that allowing the one trooper to take on each enemy one at a time is unrealistic; that is part of the point.
* I find that if such a lone-trooper friendly resolution is employed, a lone trooper should have about 3% victory chance against a force of 5 equally powerful troopers with no other modifiers, whereas another likely percentage is 16% (direct proportionality)
The visual presentation may be covering a completely different process, but if 1v5 (equal power to each unit) results in odds of 3% or better, they're being nice to the loner (seeing as that is the overall chance of victory under very unlikely and highly optimal conditions for the loner), with 16% being extremely loner-friendly. Now that I'm at a gaming computer I can actually try to establish a test case, although I'd need a human partner to reliably establish a battle that meets all criteria. (Of course, 3% and 16% are far enough apart that AI battles can give some indication still.)
And you should potentially fare a bit better in RTS than with the Imperial Army, since the dragon is not present in autoresolve and there are no generals. But individual skill applies to RTS, so that's not easy to work out. If autoresolve should correspond to RTS, it should correspond to RTS with all sides controlled by AI at the same skill level with no dragons. Shouldn't it?
UPDATE - TEST: Best test I got.
1 trooper (1 star) against 4 troopers (no stars) resulted in 20% chance of victory. By my reasoning a 1/16 chance (not accounting for the research advantage) would have been generous towards the lone unit. To give it a 20% chance of victory means you must force it to win against 50/50-odds four times in sequence (using the 1-on-1 assumption as a sanity check only). A 6% chance of victory would have been a fair starting point, not accounting for the obvious fact that the lone trooper could be attacked simultaneously by multiple enemies. (And not accounting for the RTS feature of constructing additional units to even out the battlefield if it goes past the opening move.)
Last edited by Sinister; 30/07/13 05:00 PM.