IIRC, in civ4 they tweaked the combat rules so that elite swordsman would rarley if ever beat tanks. Back in the earlier civs like 2 if you had a high level unit in the right spot it could kill anything that attacked it.

And, does anyone remember that one scene in baldurs gate 2 where you are in the underdark and run into a party of adventurers. When you encounter them control is taken away and you talk with them for a bit, eventaully giving them a quest to go kill a beholder tyrant and bring its eye back. It does time passing. The party comes back talking smack about how they crushed the beholders. They start talking to you, but in the conversation, they choose the "attack other party option. Keep in mind control is still taken from you, this is like an in-game cut-scene.

Anyway, they attack, and your character transforms into the Slayer, avatar of the god of murder. And you procede to rip their party apart with only your main character in 10 seconds flat. Right before the leader of the adventurer party dies, the game pauses. The menu screen comes up. The cursor moves over to 'load game'. Click. Rolls down to a save right before they attacked you. Loads the game.

Adventurer party talks to you, this time they give you beholder eye and adventurer leader says 'sir' at the end of every single sentence with pleases and thank yous.

So the computer did get a chance once to save-load to avoid a bad outcome.

EDIT: was not the underdark. was in a pocket plane during quest. You unpetrify adventurers, then send them on quest.

Yep, you are assuming tanks are just one massive hunk of steel that floats magically above the surface.  If battles took place on a completely flat, indestructable surface with no where to run and hide then, yes, a bowman would never be able to beat a tank.  But that's not the case.  We can assume that in Civ, whoever is piloting the tanks at least have to eat and, presumably, the tank must consume something as well.  With that vulnerability ALONE, we can come up with a thousand scenarios where a bowman could beat a tank.

I just can't fathom why certain people get so offended when a bowman unit, stacked with massive terrain advantages and upgrades, has a 1 percent chance to beat a tank.  Think of it this way.  There are 10,000 elite bowman sitting in the forested hillside across a river above 50 tanks.  The tanks are attempting to defeat them and move into their position.  If this battle took place 100 times, can you imagine the bowman winning at least once?  If you can't, you have a very bad imagination.

You don't get it, don't ya? Swordsman vs. tank in Civ4 -> Random results all the time. Just reload the game 20 times, and attack the tank with an elite swordsman. Civ4's horrible RNG based combat system is destroying the game for me. Tiny bit of randomness is cool to have, but that is all.

The thing people have to remember is Civ IV combat is not tactical, it is high level general combat between armies.  If you use the units in the way they are intended, you almost never lose.  If you have tanks you also have artillery that can soften up an entrenched position.  If you come across some elite medieval units that are entrenched in a fort on a hill across a river, just soften them up with a couple artillery attacks first, and you will roll right over them.  I think Civ IV is one of the best strategy games you can play, not to mention the free mods Rise of Mankind, or Fall From Heaven II are better than most games period. 

And SERIOUSLY, I find just having iron age swordsmen when the enemy has no copper or iron lets you demolish them, so I just don't understand people who complain about their tanks not being tough enough.  If you gave me tanks when the rest of the world was still using longbows, I would take over the planet so fast it wasn't funny.

TBH, this is all a moot point, since we will have tactical combat control we can prevent the random bowman from killing the tanks, or we could guide the bowman to victory. Yay for tactical control.

You sound like someone who has never actually played the game. There is an option not to reseed the game when you reload it so outcomes won't change.

In what world is a 1% extreme. Hell how often in a game do units even reach other one on one in a game if Civ that has advanced to modern tanks... almost never. So not only would you need a high advanced hunit of an old age unt meeting up with a tank in an advantage fortification being attacked by a tank you'd have to roll a 1 out of 100, so to speak. He also talked about reloading 20 times and causing different results which, if it really bothered you, can be fixed. I still think a number of you have not played Civ IV but are just rehashing the same bitching from the older titles. I've played Civ IV well over a 100 times, never seen it happen.

This is bull****. Macemen and longbowmen does not destroy any stack of tanks in CIV IV. If the units are undamaged we are talking about 99% chance of a win for the tank in every fight. So for 5 macemen to destroy 5 tanks you would need 10000000000 tries to make it happen or thereabouts.

You're not exactly a majority in that opinion. The Civ series has done very well for a very, very, very long time. It's not horrible and it's not broken, and I have yet to see you actually verify that yo have played Civ IV for an extensive amount of time or if you are just bitching about the older versions and applying it to the newer version with no first hand knowledge.