Now I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm not commenting on the math, its just that return of the fallen may only apply to your normal ships and not the copies you acquired through reanimation.
Methinks I must be articulating myself poorly. That is precisely what I thought you meant. In all honesty I hadn't even considered that possibility before you mentioned it. I thought it was possible ships revived by return of the fallen could revive again, but I'd actually never considered that clones from reanimation might be able to resurrect on death via return of the fallen(after all they are already clones & clones of clones sound rather silly to me).
In my OP my comment about running the calculation on the combined fleet size of your opponent and yourself was merely mentioning the fact that you have a 10% chance of creating clones from enemy ships that AND you have a 10% chance of resurrecting your own ships when they die, meaning you have a 10% of ressurecting/cloning each of the ships in both player's fleet at the start of the fight(provided they die).
As I said any sort of multiple Resurrections of a single unit(regardless of which tech grants the revive) scenario is really an unnecessary consideration for the point I was trying to make(small relative difference). Anyway, regardless of where the misunderstanding is methinks we're starting to derail the thread, so I'm going to get back on topic.
Quoting bilun, reply 9
Sorry if this turned into a bit of a rant, I'm studying to be a Math major and the misunderstandings about probability which abound are a bit of a pet peeve of mine
I don't see my misunderstanding and agree with everything said in this thread.
My point was:
It is very likely you with get no ships back.
In hindsight I should have elaborated:
It is likely you will get less then 1/10 back.
It is possible you will get 1/10 back.
It is unlikely you will get more then 1/10 back.
It is very unlikely, but possible you will get all of your ships back.
Did you even look at my numbers? This is nowhere near true. With 50 ships:
"very likely you will get no shops back"- the chance of getting no ships back in a 50 ship fleet is only .5%- that's 1 in 200 such battles. Even in a mere 10 ship fleet the chance of getting no revives is only 34%(so the chance of getting at least one revive is about twice as high). That said, there's no point in dividing a fleet up into 10 ship segments- the simple fact of the matter is the larger a fleet gets, the more reliable this tech will become. And by the stage of the game you're learning it 10 ship battles are less then common.
but I digress back to the the 50 ship fleet example:
"It is likely you will get less then 1/10 back"- 36% of the time you will get less then 1 in 10 back. I suppose 36.1% is still fairly likely, but you're almost twice as like of getting more then 1 in 10 ships back
"It is possible you will get 1/10 back"- 18.5% of the time(just short of 2/3) you will get back AT LEAST 1 in 10 ships. That's more then "possible", that's probably
"It is unlikely you will get more then 1/10 back"- 46% of the time you will get more then 1 in 10 back that's not "unlikely", that's nealy a 50%-50 chance. You're calling the 36% chance of getting less then 1/10 revives "likely" and the 46% chance of getting more "unlikely"
All put together you have about a 64% chance of reviving 1/10 or more. The point is you are incorrect in your assumption that you will generally get less then 1 in 10 ships back. it's exactly the opposite, odds are you will get at least 1 in 10 back. It is still partially random to be sure, but nowhere near as undependable as you make it sounds.