Should we sharpen our swords, wax our bow strings and prepare to do battle against the wind and snow

Looking for some opinions on Doomdark’s Revenge battles.

In Lords of Midnight a Lord cannot be killed until they have no army. This is obviously a one way thing as there are no enemy lords.

In Doomdark’s Revenge the overall night processing cycles through all lords from 1 to 128 giving them each chance to fight at their location if they have not been involved in a battle yet.

It then cycles through the lords at that location given them the chance to become the attacker.

FOR ALL LORDS IN LOCATION – (attacker)
choose defender = random lord at location
1. attacker vs defender lord attack
2. attacker army vs defender army
3. defender army vs attacker army
NEXT
choose defender = random lord at location
4. stronghold vs defender
5. stronghold vs lord defender

If there are only two lords in a location then they will both have a pop at each other. If there is a stronghold then it will take a pop at just one of them ( if both are enemies of the stronghold ), or just the one enemy.

If there are multiple lords in a location, then random selection means that some of the lords might get hit multiple times, and some not at all.

During the battle, If an army is reduced to 0 then there is a chance that he relevant lord will flee or die.

However in lord vs lord the the attackers success is calculated from a formula that includes carrying a battle object, energy, despondency, and recklessness. Gives a number between 0 and 255

The defending lords’s chance is a random number between 0 and 255

if attacker’s chance is greater than defender’s chance then the attacker wins.

When defender loses, then chance of dying is
1 – 50:50 survive
2 – is recklessness less than a random number between 0 and 255
3 – If carrying a battle object then 30% chance

The upshot of all that is – it’s pretty easy for a lord to die in a battle against another lord regardless of size of their individual armies. And it has nothing to do really with strength or even attacker initiative.

I’m trying to add a game play rule option for better battle AI and wonder of ways to make the lord vs lord a little fairer!

I’m thinking of adding runes of protection in at step 3
I’m also thinking of doing some maths on the lords army – ie: rather than just if army greater than zero they can’t die, maybe have a low army threshold eg. Less than 100 soldiers, or a percentage compared to the attacker’s…

Anyway, thoughts…???