Originally Posted by Quickening
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.
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