G40 League House Rule project

[Karl7]

Sounds good.  Too bad, you don’t get paid!  :lol:

[gamerman01]

@Karl7:

Sounds good.  Too bad, you don’t get paid!   :lol:

:-) Thanks
That would be nice, but I’m just doing what I enjoy, and enhancing my own A&A experience…

[allweneedislove]

@Gamerman01:

I need to talk to Jennifer about minimum game lengths for forfeits.

be careful about your recommendations and how you implement them. if there is minimum then players can purposefully take advantage.

you can do a very risky G1 attack, get bad dice and then abandon the game, and not be penalized.

[gamerman01]

Right.
Well, it’s cheap to claim a win when you haven’t done anything and the other guy just goes AWOL when you’re not even done with half of round 1.  I guess we’re on the honors system for that.

[Jeff28]

I call it disrespectful instead of “cheap” to start a game and never respond again after PM and offers to call it off. But I guess we have our own definitions.

I suppose any time I have a bad G1 I’ll just ignore that game and it won’t count.

–Jeff

[boldfresh]

@Jeff28:

I call it disrespectful instead of “cheap” to start a game and never respond again after PM and offers to call it off. But I guess we have our own definitions.

I suppose any time I have a bad G1 I’ll just ignore that game and it won’t count.

–Jeff

it’s a tough call - perhaps it should count as a loss for the player who goes awol but not a win for the opposing player.

[gamerman01]

@Jeff28:

I call it disrespectful instead of “cheap” to start a game and never respond again after PM and offers to call it off. But I guess we have our own definitions.

I suppose any time I have a bad G1 I’ll just ignore that game and it won’t count.

–Jeff

These personal opinions were not pointed just at you, believe it or not.  I’ve seen it multiple times with the G40 league.  It’s a big game - takes a long time to play especially for people who are inexperienced.  People start a game, lose interest, life happens, whatever.

Do you know why the person never responded again?  If not, you can’t call it disrespectful because you don’t know that.  Did they show up anywhere else on the boards?  If not, they probably just bit off more than they could chew and lost interest.  Whether or not your opponent was “disrespectful” or what, I fail to see how that has anything to do with your decision to claim a win.

Look, all I’m saying is I wouldn’t claim a win as Axis after J1 just because the other guy was a no show.  Unless you had a blistering G1 and J1 and you really think he bailed because he didn’t think he could win.

None of this matters - there’s no reason to argue with me other than you feel defensive because I called it cheap to claim a win after your opponent did nothing but an R1 where they couldn’t even cross the border.  Your “big win” is going to count in league play and help you get into the playoffs.  I’m not going to count it here, but that doesn’t matter because my records have no influence on actual league or post-season play.

[gamerman01]

@Jeff28:

I suppose any time I have a bad G1 I’ll just ignore that game and it won’t count.

–Jeff

I backed off of saying that there should be a minimum length of game before they count.

I took another quick look at your “win” over Noll, and I see that you had an average or worse G1.  You had an uneventful J1, only attacking China and losing a couple infantry.  He didn’t even download the J1 map!  All he did was give you a scramble decision for Z110, buy some stuff and move it around in Russia, and quit playing.

How is that a win?  :-)

[gamerman01]

Updated

AA League standings.xls

[gamerman01]

Updated

AA League standings.xls

[gamerman01]

Oops - this one’s better

AA League standings.xls

[gamerman01]

And Eggman gives us a second result tonight

[gamerman01]

Updated

AA League standings.xls

[gamerman01]

Updated

Assigned rankings of 2 or 3 to some of the players I had left with ? marks
This caused a slight tremor through the rankings…

If you defeat a previously unknown player and that’s the only game they’ve played in the 2013 league, I am assigning said unknown player a ranking of 3…

AA League standings.xls

[gamerman01]

Slight adjustment -
I like this one better

AA League standings.xls

[Karl7]

Question:

I often ask myself how many wins/losses could you attribute statistically to pure luck.  I assume the more games you play the more likely you will reach the statistical averages of rolls over time.  But as you do that you will obviously encounter the outlier luck instances.  So it seems per X games you play you could safely predict N/X games would be the outlier games where you either get killed or win by luck.  Of course strategy would mitigate against luck (but how much?). I assume (I once had a basic understanding of statistics) that the given the relative combat values per number of units generally on the board, the most common roll is about 2.5 chance out of 6?  So if the average number of average rolls per game is Z, spread over X games, you would could predict the likely number of outliers that would skew the game?

I was wondering if anyone has run any of the numbers on this.

Am I making any sense here?

[boldfresh]

@Karl7:

Question:

I often ask myself how many wins/losses could you attribute statistically to pure luck.  I assume the more games you play the more likely you will reach the statistical averages of rolls over time.  But as you do that you will obviously encounter the outlier luck instances.  So it seems per X games you play you could safely predict N/X games would be the outlier games where you either get killed or win by luck.  Of course strategy would mitigate against luck (but how much?). I assume (I once had a basic understanding of statistics) that the given the relative combat values per number of units generally on the board, the most common roll is about 2.5 chance out of 6?  So if the average number of average rolls per game is Z, spread over X games, you would could predict the likely number of outliers that would skew the game?

I was wondering if anyone has run any of the numbers on this.

Am I making any sense here?

no karl, you are not making any sense at all.  :-P

[Karl7]

ah, man!    :-(

[gamerman01]

2.5 chance out of 6?  What?

You can’t mathematically determine exactly how many games you win or lose because of luck, no matter how much you know about statistics.  This is because it’s impossible to quantify the exact degree of luck vs. skill in any particular game.

Luck in certain battles is much more important than in others.  It is possible to have overall better average luck than your opponent in a game, but yet still be the “unluckier one”.  Maybe your opponent got a lucky roll when it really mattered.

Sometimes a lucky hit takes out an enemy battleship.  Sometimes, just an extra infantry or two that will get slaughtered on a counter-attack anyway.

The comparative skill levels of the players has a lot to do with how many games are actually won and lost by luck.  If you are very close to the same skill level, then luck is much bigger factor in who will win.  If you are a lot better than your opponents, you’ll usually beat them whether you’re lucky or not.

JWW keeps saying he’s so surprised that some players can consistently win 80-90% of their games, even though there are so many dice throws.
But some players are just a lot better than most other players, so if a player is in the top 5-10% of players in skill level, we are seeing that those players also only lose about 5-10% of their games.  Once in awhile maybe it’s because they screwed up or just actually got out-played.  Some of those games, of course, they lost because their luck was so much worse than the other player’s.  But we have players who only lose 10-20% of their games, consistently, year after year.  This tells me that skill is a much bigger factor than luck in A&A.

Now that said, if two players are of the same exact skill level, dice will decide many if not most of those outcomes.

Two players of the same skill level will each win about half of the games when playing a game with no luck - chess.  Why is this?

There are games with a lot of luck and not very much skill involved (Uno, for example?) that a more skilled player can still consistently win at.

I’ve played over a hundred games of chess in the past 2 years with lots of different kids ages 10-16.  I never lost a game.  Once I blundered and gave up my queen to one of the more skilled 16 year olds, but I recovered, took advantage of his over-confidence and came back to win.  You can still lose a game of chess to someone much less skilled than you, but it will very rarely happen if you’re not careless.

I’ve also played dozens of rounds of Uno with young kids - ages 12 and 14.  Of course, they win quite a few hands.  But I win significantly more than my share, because my experience and skill wins me several hands.

A&A is somewhere in between Uno and Chess on the luck/skill ratio.
I believe it is impossible to quantify how many games you win or lose purely because of luck, for many reasons.  One of the big ones is that the players probably have different levels of skill.

I have consistently won over 80% of the A&A games that I have played, for the past several years.  :-)
I would estimate that more than half of the games I lost, I got out-played.  So I think less than 10% of the games I’ve played, I lost because I had too much bad luck, or bad luck when it counted most.  I’ve had many games where I had bad luck at critical times, but was able to recover because I was more skilled/experienced than my opponent, or my opponent got careless.  Just like when I screwed up and lost my queen to the 16 year old.

Does that help with the question you often ask yourself, about how many wins/losses you attribute to pure luck?
I think that depends a lot on how skilled a player you are, and the skill of your competition.

[gamerman01]

While we’re talking about luck, I would also point out that experience tells me that the earlier you are in the game, the more weight the luck has.  Of course, because the effects are cumulative throughout the game.

Sometimes players will “grab their side” and moan and groan when they get diced late in a game, maybe because they’re trying to get back in it.  But luck in seemingly much smaller battles and with much smaller IPC losses in the first couple rounds can have as much or more influence on the outcome of a game.

I guess I’m just saying that it’s usually hard to say who was luckier in a typical game.  As you said, as you throw more and more dice (and there are a lot of dice rolls in an average A&A game), the luck will tend to even out and approach expected averages.  Also, situational luck is impossible to exactly quantify.

For example, was it luckier that you failed in your attack on Z106 on G1 (losing a sub and failing to sink a destroyer/transport), or that I failed on my attack on your Japanese destroyer and transport with my American sub on USA3?  (These are made up but realistic examples)

Answer: impossible to determine.

Now we all (probably) tend to compare IPC values and ignore which powers were involved, what round it was, etc etc.  If you got lucky and shot down my bomber with AA, and I got lucky and took out an extra infantry with my defense somewhere, we tend to compare the bomber that costs 12 and the infantry that costs 3 and think that losing the bomber was a much bigger loss.  But it’s not that simple.

Shoot, we’ve all seen where sometimes our bad luck turns out to be good because it causes the other player to do something different than they would have, and it back fires!  Or, it just plain distracts them!  Or makes them over-confident.

In summary, we can obsess over the role of chance in A&A, but ultimately that sucks the fun out of it for everybody.  The good players WILL win most of the time and the bad ones WILL usually lose.  Some games of course will be won by the player who didn’t play as well, because he got better luck.  Lots of games, if the players are the same skill level (because then luck is the factor that is different).