There have been talks at GDC and elsewhere about this...my memory is that humans don’t like being surprised by a smart AI that silently builds up resources and suddenly and mercilessly betrays and annihilates them, which is the obvious winning strategy. Humans don’t even like the random battle results to be truly random but expect them to hew very closely to the outcome of the odds as presented. The AI is grindy and unsophisticated on purpose.
I believe you're thinking of Sid Meier's GDC 2010 keynote "Everything You Know Is Wrong" [1]. The entire talk is interesting, but section on player perception of probability is about 20 minutes in.
One takeaway is to be careful about how strength numbers translate into odds. If your strength is 100 and mine is 1, does that mean I have a 1% chance to out-and-out beat you? Your armored tank shouldn't have an even 1% chance of being completely annihilated by my club-wielding warrior (that's somehow still around by then).
The later Civ games have taken odds out of the equation, and I think it's for the better. Instead, the amount of damage each unit takes per combat depends on the difference in their strength deterministically. From my own perspective, this is overall more fun than 'randomly' having really strong units lose against weak units occasionally.
> Humans don’t even like the random battle results to be truly random but expect them to hew very closely to the outcome of the odds as presented.
Because of this Civ2 added health and firepower stats to units, random battles sometimes meant an ancient trireme could destroy a battleship, which is fun to imagine...
The classic example is a militia (the weakest unit in the game, relying on no technology at all) defeating a battleship bombarding it from the sea, causing the battleship to sink. :D
Warriors should never be able to defeat a battleship in Civ2 because of the new combat system. The AI cheats (of course); I have had armor go down to knights on deity level
This is not correct; the weakest unit in Civilization is the militia, and the unit you get from gunpowder is the musketeer. There is no unit called "warrior".
How do I know we're talking about Civilization?
> Because of this Civ2 added health and firepower stats to units
I think it's unlikely Civ II added stats in response to feedback from Civ III.
