Why 1/3 = game lost?

It's a hangover from the earlier larger games of DBx, where individual commands were demoralised on 1/3 (rounded up) lost.
With HoTT, it's 1/2.

I'd rather 5 or 6 elements lost for a win in DBA, or 'first Ps lost counts as 0', etc. if staying at 4.

Yes, but I bet they weren't Ps so much.

Having previously played a lot of DBM, one of the things I like about DBA is the number of games you can fit in in a day, particularly if you're into tournament play.

Having 4 elements as the result is just about right to give a reasonable chance of a result in about an hour. This means you can fit in 5/6 games in a day's play compared to 2 games a day (or 3 with an evening as well) with DBM. I think this makes day long tournaments viable and worthwhile travelling some distance for.

So if you get a bad run of dice or your army is mismatched in one round, there's usually another round coming along soon!

I don't think that by 4 elements you know who's going to win though. Not always. I played two games the other night and was 2-0 down in one but won 4-2. In the other it was 3-3 and I have a chance for the final kill but my General blew it and I lost 4-3. If we'd gone on I had a couple of good chances for kills so could have made it 5-4 in the next round.

However you have to draw the line somewhere.

Of course the game can go on at 4-4. Had a great game earlier this year which I think ended 7-6!

Some tournaments incorporate element kills into your score, so a 4-3 loss is better than 4-0.

Interesting that the 1/3rd is based on historical casualties though! However I wonder if that was battlefield casualties that decided the outcome or did they include losses during the rout and subsequent pursuit? I always thought that generally the major casualties were inflicted once the battle was essentially over? If so the key casualties may well be lower than you'd expect?

It seems to depend on period. For medieval battles 1/3 is too low to break an army. Often the climatic part of many battles when victory or defeat hung in the balance occurred after an army had lost 1/3 of its force. In several battles one of the three opposing battles broke only to have the other two reverse the result. Mass graves and some of the better estimates from chroniclers indicate higher than 1/3 loses (and loses should also include wounded and those who ran away but survived).

I'm always suspicious of numbers derived from ancient battles as Hans Delbruck amongst many others have pointed out how exaggerated the numbers used by ancient historians for the size of armies seem to be. Very hard to tell where exactly the casualty figures come from - who counted them and did they account for wounded and those who ran away? Of course dead found on the battlefield would only be a fraction of the real total casualties that caused an army to break.

For historical battles (and causal play too now a days) we use the rule that you must have more Elements on the table then in the dead pile (so about half). HOTT uses 1/2 points as a break point but I find counting Elements works better and is a nice balancing factor between large armies and small elite armies (we do use points or historical OBs for the initial armies so they games are almost never 12 on 12). And yes Ps count only 1/2 Element.

We normally finish in less than an hour unless playing multi-player big battle (players are pretty familiar with the rules).

TomT

A destroyed element represents not only casualties inflicted in combat but also troops that have fled the conflict.
If enough troops bolt that would certainly send a clear message to the rear ranks of units currently engaged and suddenly worried about their belongings left in camp.