Quote Originally Posted by Quickening
Now this is interesting. Does this not imply that if a human were to do the exact same thing, issue the same orders in the same conditions, that the outcome would also be different there? Does it not imply some bizarre randomisation of unknown factors? Strange.

Note that I'm not 100% sure on the assertions I made, it's just my understanding based on things I've heard and more important (to me, but more anecdotal to everyone else) what I've seen in my own experiances.

I couldn't testify to any of this, other than really close outcomes can change. And to be sure, I haven't had a heroic victory turn into a crushing loss or anything. If the outcome changes it's changed by a tiny amount, just enough to effect the end result. Maybe a unit that barely didn't rout in the game, routs in the replay, or maybe the arrows do a few less casualties and the extra 10 dismounted knights are just enough to turn the tide. Small things like that.

And I really think it's down to animations. Now, I use fairly missle-heavy armies too, so that may add extra-randomness to mine that someone who focuses more on melee/cav wouldn't have.

A quick test if you want to see if it happens to you, do a battle with 1/2 stack retinue longbows and 1/2 DFK, vs whatever. Note your actual battle results as far as men killed by the bowmen. Less important the Then watch the reply a few times. You'll (hopefully) note a difference in casualties. Or at least I did, last time I bothered to try a replay, but that's been a long while. Maybe it's been fixed in the 1.1 patch. Once I saw the uselessness of it, I didn't bother with replays anymore. Also of note, I found the same results in RTW and even MTW2. Didn't think to look for it in Shogun but I believe that if you went back it probably would hold true there.

My guess is that a "perfect" video type replay where the EXACT same thing happened down to the individual man on the field, the replay files would have a very large footprint, so they pare down the info to a "do-over" of the battle where both forces are controlled by the AI, rather than a replay in the conventional sense.