Frood AACalc Dicey / Sim / Odds Calculator: Updates and Opinions

[DarthMaximus]

For DAAK, FoE, and some of the other clubs I was more talking about the “rating points” aspect.

There if you play a rated game and you win a game you get X points, and the loser loses Y points and they keep track of the players total pts.  However, there are ways to play unrated games if you wish.

I see you’re roller as a great way for players to play unrated games without playing in a specific club.

For example, if I just wanted to play friendly PBEM games and not worry about rankings your dice roller will work great.

Up until being aware of your roller, I’m not sure if there was another roller to use without joining a Club.  It’s free to join, but you still have to join.

Your roller has a little more universal appeal in that aspect, in that you don’t have to “Join Frood” to play.

In terms of differences, I’m not sure if there really are many.  They do provide game #'s.  However in DAAK I’m not really sure what the purpose is other then to distigiush one game from another.  I think the purpose was to automatically enter the emails for games started and to be able to go back at anytime and check a log of your rolls, although I’m not sure if that works at DAAK.  For FoE, they DO keep a log and DO NOT email the results.  So, I play a game there, log in, pick the apporpriate game # and do my turn including combat and Non Combat and submit it and FoE stores the information in the game log.  I like FoE at times b/c it means you aren’t getting bombarded by emails if you are playing multiple games.  You just go to each game log and read up on the turns.

I’m not sure if that is a path you’d want to go down.
I mean assigning game #'s, such that If I were to play Jen or Switch I just type in my game number and your roller automatically populates an email line with the appropriate players and game conditions.  Obviously one of the players would have to set that up at the start of the game and then get a random game #.  But again, I wouldn’t want to suggest you do that, as it seems like an awful lot of work and perhaps storage space and could possibly cause a whole series of other issues.

For the most part I think yours might be a bit superior in that you can roll a battle X1000 (5000) times and see about where you should come out then go a head and roll for real.  The others simply roll the battles and don’t provide any of the helpful ancillary information.

[Jennifer]

BTW, did you ever fix that glitch where a battleship doing shore-bombardments would do them every round if you didn’t take the ship out of the attacker pile and if you performed a 1 round at a time result chart?

Also, any way you could have it go through a scenario but stop when it becomes 80% likely you’ll loose aircraft on your attack?  If not, that’s ok.  If it already does but I don’t see it, then let me know!

So much easier sometimes to just have it run to the end instead of doing 3-30 individual rounds just to avoid the risk of loosing a plane!!!

[frood]

Darth: Okay, I see. DAAK and FoE actually track a whole game. Yeah, I probably can’t start doing that…

Jennifer: Yes, I think that bug has been fixed, if this is the scenario you are talking about.

As for the other feature, I was going to say no, but I have some ideas now. This would replace the “end attack once air-only” option. Basically, I’d add up the defenders likely hits based on punch and see if that exceeds the attacker’s number of land units. Good idea Jennifer!

[Jennifer]

Well, feel free to say ‘no’ to any of my ideas, Dan.  I get much worse on this board then just a “not feasible” or “too much work” heh

[frood]

Your idea has inspired me though, and it is very feasible. It’s actually a better idea than the abort threshold of a punch ratio, although that still protects from general bad luck. I like the suggestions as long as they are reasonable.

What I’m thinking now is this option:

[  ] A. units must survive

This would allow you to preserve aircraft, or anything else that comes later on in your OOL.

Eg. Suppose you have 2 Inf, 2 Art, 2 Fig. If you want to save the two fighters, you would enter 2 in the option box.

With each round of combat, the sim would see how many units the attacker has left. Suppose the Attacker had lost three units, so there would be 1 Art 2 Fig left.

Next, the sim would determine how many hit the defender can be expected to score.

If this number of hits would reduce the attacker to fewer than the specified number of units to be saved, the attack will abort.

Setting the option up this way allows the more cautious attacker to specify one or two more units in case the defender gets very lucky with the dice.

[frood]

Done!

Also cleaned up the e-mail output to look like the web-based output.

Finally, I have to fess up that I found a slightly nasty bug - if a Destroyer was present, the submarine hits were not only delayed, but never taken! My apologies. This bug has been fixed.

[Jennifer]

Is that unit left counter basically analyzing by Low Luck or you using a different equation?

Also, I find it extremely annoying that I have to re-enter an email address EVERYTIME I roll another set of numbers.  Please, pretty please, with a cherry and sprinkles on top, return it so that the e-mail field (and the territory field) do not reset anymore!! (bats eyelashes and unleashes the bambi eyes!)

[frood]

Uh oh, my wife is getting jealous.

The units left counter uses this formula: if X is entered value:

if Units left minus rounded((Defenders punch + 3) / 6) is less than X, end the attack.

In the experiments I ran with trying to save 2 fighters, this threshold saved the 2 fighters 95% of the time, and 5% of the time one fighter was lost.

The e-mail / comments thing: That’s inadvertent. I’ll fix that.

[Jennifer]

I also notice that battleships when damaged don’t seem to be moving themselves into the damaged catagory.  I’ve been doing it manually the past couple of times, but it could be very easy for someone to forget to check it.

BTW, thank’s for turning the AA Guns off after round 1 now too.

Really, I’m not trying to be nit-picky, honest!  I love the program!  It’s easy and convenient!

[frood]

That’s not nitpicky, that’s helpful. With all the changes it’s inevitable that something will break. The sim is getting so many options that it is becoming difficult for me to test everything for bugs, so when someone catches something, I’d rather they let me know than walk away and use something else because mine is broken. I’ll look into that tonight, it’s probably a one-line fix.

[Jennifer]

Hope so.  There’s a reason I don’t program these things….I cannot STAND looking at code all day…that’s also why I stopped pure code webpage design after HTML 4.2, come to think of it…

[General_D.Fox]

Hey, it seems that the boxes for inputting numbers are reeeeally thin, which only allows for a person to see a single digit rather than double digits if attacking with double digits.  Is that intentional?  Or did you jsut run out of room on the page?  :-P  BTW, I think it’s a great calc.  Used it a few times myself.

[Guest]

I have room for 2 digits, but I ahve a large monitor and high res…

[frood]

Fixed the issue with battleships not getting damaged, and also the skinny input boxes.

OT: I posted a link to this page over at the harrisgamedesign.com forums earlier today, and a guy named “Larry” replied with " Cool :) " I think that’s probably the main man Larry Harris. I feel so honoured! :) I suppose that a guy like him, much like ourselves, has nothing better to do with his time than troll the forums. Hey, if I invented a multi-million dollar game, I probably would do the same.

[Guest]

Larry is indeed Larry Harris, the designer of the game.

If Black Watch (the keeper of LHTR) also gives you a thumbs up, consider that a gold plated enforsement!

[frood]

Cool.

Fixed two more issues re: rulesets:

1 - in AA Europe, Destroyers support fire on amphibious assault hits on a two, not a three, which they still use in other combat (however, I noticed that they are not working properly in their effect on sub sneak attacks in AA Europe for some reason, I’ll look into that. Also, reading the AA Europe rules, it seems that you need to have a destroyer present for Air units to be able to hit submarines. That sucks, might be hard to make work. All these special rules will be the death of me… (not to mention marines!)

2 - for AA Classic, the sim will automatically shift Bats to the end of the OOL if they have been left at the beginning, because in AA Classic they only get one hit and it becomes unwise to use them to absorb the first hit. So now in AA Classic you can just enter Bats in your battle instead of using the dBat field as a workaround.

[frood]

I think I fixed the Sub / Destroyer issues for AA Europe, except for the air units being able to hit subs only if Destroyer is present.

[frood]

Hey Jennifer, thanks for the donations. That’s nice. Now I’m getting closer to being able to buy another variant. But no rush, I still haven’t broken in the AA Revised that I bought with the first few funds. I almost feel bad inviting them because I enjoy playing with my sim so much (unlike you, I can easily spend a day or a week staring at code, too bad it’s not my job). Anywho, it’s not for the money. If I divided the hours I’ve put into this by the cash, I’ve maybe earned a nickel for every hour… It’s just fun to make something that others actually find useful.

And you and Switch (who is also a gold-level donor ;) ) sure put in your contributions at this site, and to the sim as well with the rules clarifications and feature suggestions. Heck, if Switch hadn’t pointed out that my page was borked, I wouldn’t have embarked on this latest frenzy of modifying it. And Jennifer’s idea of being able to preserve certain units is a really sweet finishing touch. I think this makes the sim way more useful and realistic in that it reflects decisions a human player would make.

Okay, enough of the love fest. One more question I had is whether I should modify some of the default values, specifically:

• should LHTR be the default initial ruleset?
• should 1000x or 5000x be the default sim mode, rather than “Once”?
• should the abort ratio start with a default value of say 50% to at least minimize catastrophic results for the attacker?
• any other suggestions for defaults?

Also, now that there’s the ability to bookmark scenarios, I could create a set of quick links for preferred settings, or unit combinations. Can you suggest, or even create links for, some of your most common defaults? I know that for R1 anyway there are a lot of battles that could be preset, to be experimented with slight variations for opening strategy.

[rjclayton]

@frood:

• should LHTR be the default initial ruleset?
• should 1000x or 5000x be the default sim mode, rather than “Once”?
• should the abort ratio start with a default value of say 50% to at least minimize catastrophic results for the attacker?
• any other suggestions for defaults?

My opinion is that you want first time users to have success using your tool for the first time.  I think that would mean:

• leave the abort ratio as is.  If they realize that the results include aborts, they may interpret the results differently than intended.  Besides, for amphibious assaults there is no abort option, and often I want to see what will happen if I keep pressing the attack regardless, so it’s not a terrible default to have even for experienced users
• some users may not know what LHTR is, so I would not use that as default.
• 5000x would be my recommendation as default

Personally, when I go in there, I always run 10 rounds at 5000x (to the death!), then after seeing the results, make changes as needed.  Very nice sim!

[Guest]

I would agree about new users needing an easy to use resource that when you “just run it” gives correct results.

As such, I would leave the “abort if” function defaulted to OFF
Revised ruleset as standard
Run ONCE as default

Those with more experience will “play” with it and experiment with the new features :-)