in aow 1, i've seen heroes with 10 def always suffering maximum damage from lesser units when hit. as much as i know units with attack 6 or less all have 10% chance of hitting def 10 - they need to roll 10 on a ten sized dice and that also means a critical hit, that is because they always inflict maximum damage.
i didn't like this, especially when i didn't know how hit and damage was calculated, so i got my 10 hp leader killed by a single ballista, when i thought the chance much less than the actual 1% (i thought if even it hits twice, there's only a 1/25 chance for both inflicting maximum damage) - quite annoying when trying to play "ironman" (no reload)... :P
the problem is not only that critical hit. if you have attack 5, increasing it to attack 6 doesn't affect your chance to hit def 10 at all. but when it is increased to 7, your chance is doubled! increasing it to 8 multiplies the chance only by 3/2, etc. and that of course applies to def 2 (most first level units have that) and attack 6: you have 90% to hit, doesn't matter if you increase it to 10, it's still 90%. but as soon as you have only attack 5, the chance of failure is doubled. this latter case is much more frequent, but as heroes practically always had high def, the other one was quite important too.
it's a pity that i expect this will change only a little bit in aow 2: stats will range from 1 to 20, so perhaps the min. chance will be 5% instead of 10%, and the max.. ok, you got it. (and actually i prefered the 1-10 stuff aesthetically...)
i've already managed (in gameman1a's last interwiev on planet of wonders) to ask lennart why they don't use gaussian distribution, so i don't want to push the devs again, just thought to ask you guys what u think about this.
(using the normal (gaussian) distribution for the rolls would be quite similar to the current system, only it would be more "smooth", without this "1->6 no effect, 6->7: doubled chance" thingie and the others i'm bitching about...)
if you could give some links to the previous topics about this, i'd appreciate it