dismal,

You've pretty comprehensively demonstrated the strength ratio/battleOdds connection, that a Heroic victory requires more that just killing all the enemy without any losses of your own, and the Son of Chinglu stuff.

The last item provides a nice illustration of how of the event triggers work.

Anyway, you've put paid to the discussion we've been having about these topics, so I went back to the first real post in this thread:

I wonder if someone could research the factors that determine the strategy map battle odds? I imagine things like number and quality of men, upgrades, commander, and so on.

This seems to be important for getting traits, whether the AI will fight, etc.
I'm planning to look at the effect of a commander's battle stars on battleOdds. Anyone's welcome to scoop me.