The human player has won the battle even though he has no units! This can happen in other ways as well, such as an opponent attacking your stronghold with 4 units.
Rule Clarification - Strength
Oh, I see I got quite the dispute started.
Taking a closer look at the rulebook, I have come to the following conclusion:
Player A wins the battle, Player B is forced to retreat.
The reasons leading to this conclusion are the following:
As stated on page 21/22, the fourth step of a battle sequnce "Rounds of Combat"(pg.21) includes substep 3 "Resolve Special Abilities"(pg.22),
which states "[...]Starting with the attacker, each player resolves his units’ special abilities (as printed on the faction sheets) a number of
times equal to the number of special ability icons on cards he drew."
Ergo, any "Special Ability" triggered is resolved before battle step 5 "Tally Strength"(pg.21). That very step is described:
"After each unit has attacked once, both
players
tally their strength
as follows:"
So the rules clearly state, that "Strength" is a property of a PLAYER, not a UNIT. > Player A: 4 Strength || Player B: 3 Strength
So in the "Resolution"(pg.21) step where "The player with the highest total strength wins the battle; in the case of a tie, the defender wins",
"The losing player must immediately retreat all of his participating units from the area and rout them". Full stop.
I could not find any paragraphs opposing this theory. I hope nobody else can :-)
Thanks to everybody for their contributions.
broken said:
The rules are ambiguous. It could implicitly mean that that Siege Tower gains +2 strength when determining the winner of the battle. That would be a much more elegant solution that just adding +2 per orb drawn for Siege Towers, even if you have no units left.
seems like a clumsy solution, because you would have to say which siege tower got the and which didn't, because if at the end of the battle you have 1 siege tower left standing, you must know if it was the one that you activated for +2 or not, too much bookkeeping. in the rules it never says that you assign one special ability activation to a specific unit, it only says you activate the number of times equal to the number of activations you drew.
Corey comes to save the day! I am happy that we have gotten an answer, even though I was totally wrong.