Quote Originally Posted by Agent Smith
So, each attack value is a dice roll? It still seems out of balance to me. With things like Sacred Band spearmen, who have a total defensive value in the front of 23, I think, there isn't anything out there with an attack value that comes even matches that.

But, if I see it correct, if each roll is say, a d6, and someone with an attack value of 7 rolls all 5's for a total of 35, and a guy with defense of 23 rolls all 1's for a total of 23, a hit is scored?
No, it´s not a "normal" dice, each toss can be either sucessfull (1) or not (0), what matters are the (unknown to us) chances for sucess. The 1´s are added up and are the figure with which the soldier attacks. Then the defense throws their dice, their 1´s get summed up and compared to the attacker´s value. If the defense value is higher, the defender survives, if the attacker´s value is higher he gets a kill. This mechanism, doesn´t go on between the units involved in a fight but between the individual men, basically a lot, simultanous one-on-one duels. I hope that makes it a bit more transparent, I don´t have any unit stats at hand so I could set up a more detailed example.

And keep in mind, this is but a theory on the very basic dynamics. Everything else, morale, valor, armour upgrades, exhaustion, flanking... is handled by an internal modifying model to increase or decrease the number of "dices" used in the fights.