Is Luck too big a factor?

@squirecam:

A person might make an attack like ukraine, with only a 55% chance of success, but when it goes bad, complain they got diced.  Sure, averages say they “should” win, but nothing ever always goes as planned. I would rather argue that in this situation, the decision to attack was more responsible for the loss than the bad dice was.

I agree completely.

A player’s individual prospect of winning is determined by three factors:
a - their skill/experience
b - inherent game balance (eg. whether the Allies have an advantage or not based on the setup of the game)
c - luck

P (prospect of victory) = a * b * c (or a + b + c)

Now suppose we rate each of these factors on a scale of 10, and we have players 1 and 2.

Player 1 has scores a1, b1 and c1. Player 2 a2 etc.

And let’s even say that skill, when you have it, is more important than luck, because a skilled player minimizes the role of luck, so we will square the effect of skill

So P = a^2 * b * c

Players 1 and 2 are about equal in skill, one is a 7 and one is a 7.5. We will assume that the second factor, game balance, has been neutralized by the bid - we’ll give both players 5 on that. But Player 1 is lucky today - she gets some good dice early on and as a good player is able to hold that advantage. So player 1 gets an 8 for luck today, while player 2 gets a 4 - just a little worse than average.

P1 = 7^2 * 5 * 8 = 1,960
P2 = 7.5^2 * 5 * 4 = 1,125

Without the luck factor, P1 is 245 and P2 is 281 - much closer. Now you see what a big difference luck makes between closely matched opponents.

But now let’s say that Player 1 is less skilled, only a 3 on the Frood scale  :-D
P1 = 3^2 * 5 * 8 = 360

You can see that with skill being given twice the weight of any other factor, luck diminishes in its significance as skill differential increases. The fact that P1 has amazing luck does not save him from the fact that he wouldn’t know the front end of an artillery piece from the back.

Alternatively, if skill is still close and luck is closer:
P1 = 7^2 * 5 * 6 = 1470
P2 = 7.5^2 * 5 * 5.5 = 1547

In that case P2, with slightly worse luck, still comes out ahead because of slightly better skill.

I think you got me wrong - I am not saying the dice are at fault. Skill is more important, and is more constant than luck. But when there is no real skill difference, each player making the same amount of mistakes and exploiting the other’s mistakes with equal skill, luck becomes more of a consideration than between opponents where there is no real contest.

It’s like the expression “Good Luck” - “Thanks, I’ll need it”. I think I would need some amount of luck to beat Switch, assuming we’re in the same league. I would not need luck to beat my 4 year old niece - thus, luck is less important. And if Switch is out of my league, then again luck won’t help me, because he’ll kill me no matter what.

@froodster:

@squirecam:

A person might make an attack like ukraine, with only a 55% chance of success, but when it goes bad, complain they got diced.  Sure, averages say they “should” win, but nothing ever always goes as planned. I would rather argue that in this situation, the decision to attack was more responsible for the loss than the bad dice was.

I agree completely.

I think you got me wrong - I am not saying the dice are at fault. Skill is more important, and is more constant than luck. But when there is no real skill difference, each player making the same amount of mistakes and exploiting the other’s mistakes with equal skill, luck becomes more of a consideration than between opponents where there is no real contest.

If everything were exactly equal, then luck makes “the” difference. I just think that really doesnt happen much.

@ShadowHAwk:

Really in the end luck can be the deciding factor if you win or lose.
There will always be key battles that can go horribly wrong and are hard to recover from, and against a equaly skilled player can cost you the game, even against a weaker player can cost you the game.

Doing Pearl and doing 0 damage and taking 3 hits, you can even lost that battle without doing any damage at all.
If germany or russia get incredible luck ( happened 2 me more then once ) that can almost deside the game.
Russia attacks both fail to hit anything and germany hitting 90% of the shots, will put you in serious risk with russia.
Same with germany failing to down a single UK ship first turn is also verry verry unhealty.
Or the altime favorite attacking a country with AA guy and the gun killing 5 out of 6 planes.

Those things can deside the game pretty soon if the opponent can capitalize on those things. Especialy with big stacks luck can become a big factor losing your russia or EEU stack without doing significant damage to the other side will lose you the game without you having anything to do with it.

You’ve described some very extreme outcomes… these do not happen very often (but they can!)  I agree with earlier posts that although there are major set-backs, these battle outcomes CAN (and have been) overcome and one can still win regardless of those battles.

Generally, most of the battles in the game (and think about it from a total number of battles in an entire game perspective) come out within reasonable expectations.

With smaller numbers, you will have the potential for results to be many standard deviations from the norm.  However, I do not think this variability (or luck or whatever you want to call it) amounts to estimates as high as 90% of the game.

It is these slightly off exact results which make the game so challenging, IMHO.  React to them in the right manner and you’ll become a great A&A player…manage those risks!

I think for giggles, I will start some polls on other A&A MBs to see what percentage of ‘luck’ players think exists in A&A.

My prediction: 50-60%

Anyone care to help me word the poll question (perhaps we should start one here), with the answer from 0-100% in increments of 10%.

I’m also not saying luck doesn’t play a role, but I’m looking at the games played over the long term.
Anyone (and we all probably have had one of these) can have a complete screw job battle and lose a game based on it, no matter what your skill compared to your opponent.  However, over the long term the screw job battles fall into their statistical place and the more skilled will rise to the top, whether that is because they have seen it before, or rolls even out later, or whatever.

I think our League will be a good test and example.  I’m willing to guess that the the end of the year winner (hopefully me  :-)  )  will probably end up at like 10-2 or 10-3 (+/-), with a win % between 75-85%.
And I don’t think this person would have been lucky to get there.  Sure maybe 2-3 games, but all 12-13 games, no.

I’m also not saying this person is the hands down best, but I would be saying this person is more skilled then someone 4-8 or 6-6.  The skill gap can still be small, but it exists.

Now someone with 9 wins, alright, they probably have the same skills as the 10 or 11 win player.  But if they played a best of 7 ,9, 11, etc series I’d guess that the more skilled player would eventually not only win more, but start to win a lot more.

I also don’t think all 32 players had a shot at winning the tourney regardless of luck.  I think certainly by the top 4 any lucky players would have been weeded out.  Eventally bad tactics or overly relying on dice catch up with you.

This is all because, I think there are a couple different learning curves in the game, there is:
noob to bad
bad to avg
avg to good
good to great

I think it only takes about 2-4 games to go from noob all the way to average player (assuming you have some sort of A&A experience, ie you played Classic).

I think it takes another 8-10 games to approach the good level.  On both sides you get more comfortable with the KGF and you’ve probably seen some games that are KJF too.

The difficult one is going from a good player to a great player, and that one doesn’t get a number.  Maybe you get there maybe you don’t.

One of the cool things is I think we have a lot of very good players here, so we do a lot of beating each other up but I think through the growing tourneys and the League that a few players (starting out with maybe 4-5 players) with start to pull away a bit.  And it is up to each other player to continue to learn and play to try and join the “elite” group or pull a few of them down and pass them as you play more and more games.

I guess this post is the long way of just saying over time I think the more skilled will win more.  :-)

I agree with Darth
I see I missed the signing for the league play while I was away.

The Skilled player will win more.

There will always be the dice factor.

I have a lot of pride and I try to be the best and try to every game.
But I realized after loosing a few games because of the dice factor that it doesn’t mean I am less of a good player and the opponent understands that as well when the other side gets some bad dice or a bad break.

A lot of “bad” dice occurs all the time but probably on smaller scales so nobody says much as they probably won the territory they were attacking anyway just with 1-3 less infantry then expected.

@DarthMaximus:

I think it only takes about 2-4 games to go from noob all the way to average player (assuming you have some sort of A&A experience, ie you played Classic).

I think it takes another 8-10 games to approach the good level.  On both sides you get more comfortable with the KGF and you’ve probably seen some games that are KJF too.

The difficult one is going from a good player to a great player, and that one doesn’t get a number.  Maybe you get there maybe you don’t.

This is exactly what I’ve been saying all along, we just draw different conclusions. Someone falling into the “great player” category will win 90% of his games against the “noob” based on skill. In that respect it’s fair to say it’s 90% skill and 10% luck. I introduced the difficult term “equally skilled opponents”. That means between two “great players” luck will be the deciding factor by as much as 90%.

I also think that the leap from “noob” to “average” is a lot bigger than the step from “good” to “great”. Therefore a game between a good player and a great player will also be mainly decided by luck.

I don’t know what kind of players will enter your league, but I guess you will have players from all categories thus making a win percentage of 90% possible. But after just one season those “noobs” will be average players at minimum and unless you introduce new players next season no one will be able to get a 90% win percentage. Maybe 70% since some people never learn.  :-P

I’d also like to state for the record that I was exaggerating when I made my “10 skill, 90% luck” statement. Although I was aiming to kick some of you guys off your high horses I didn’t mean to get you that upset.

I know from experience the “snowball effect” sucks.

when you go in with a large superior force against an opponent’s large but smaller force and on Round 1 (you get bad luck and don’t get as many hits as expected vs good luck for him and more then expected hits on his side) this round of battle most likely just changed the fate of that battle depending on how many troops and hits involved.

that’s where skill comes in, like the poker analogy (and the song says)

you got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em

in other words, pull back and regroup don’t suicide your remaining forces in jsut to get slaughtered.

if you attack ukraine for that tasty fig and get 0-2 and he nails you guess what?  it is probably a good idea to retreat baack to caucasus and possibly even change your placement and next rounds buy/strategy

@NoMercy:

I agree with Darth
I see I missed the signing for the league play while I was away.

You can still sign up!   :-)
There is no deadline.

You just need 9 games finished by the end of the year to qualify to “win the pts total”.

I can put you in if you’d like.

@Sankt:

@DarthMaximus:

I think it only takes about 2-4 games to go from noob all the way to average player (assuming you have some sort of A&A experience, ie you played Classic).

I think it takes another 8-10 games to approach the good level.  On both sides you get more comfortable with the KGF and you’ve probably seen some games that are KJF too.

The difficult one is going from a good player to a great player, and that one doesn’t get a number.  Maybe you get there maybe you don’t.

This is exactly what I’ve been saying all along, we just draw different conclusions. Someone falling into the “great player” category will win 90% of his games against the “noob” based on skill. In that respect it’s fair to say it’s 90% skill and 10% luck. I introduced the difficult term “equally skilled opponents”. That means between two “great players” luck will be the deciding factor by as much as 90%.

I also think that the leap from “noob” to “average” is a lot bigger than the step from “good” to “great”. Therefore a game between a good player and a great player will also be mainly decided by luck.

I don’t know what kind of players will enter your league, but I guess you will have players from all categories thus making a win percentage of 90% possible. But after just one season those “noobs” will be average players at minimum and unless you introduce new players next season no one will be able to get a 90% win percentage. Maybe 70% since some people never learn.  :-P

Ah, okay.
Yeah we will have verying quality, and we will always accept new players that wish to join.  But that was one of the things Djensen wanted to do with the league, give palyers a chance to play a variety of people and learn as much as you can.

Note:  I also didn’t have a problem with any of your posts it was just that one little word thrown in there.   :wink:

Certainly there are degrees of luck and degrees of skill.  But the split is 10% luck and 90% skill.  The same guys don’t keep winning at tournaments just because they’re lucky.

This game has a lot of risk management in it.  Most folks have no idea what that really means; that doesn’t mean the game is about luck.

Against evenly matched players that 10% luck factor may decide an individual game, but, like in poker, that doesn’t mean skill isn’t the most important factor by far.

Peace

@CrazyStraw:

Certainly there are degrees of luck and degrees of skill.  But the split is 10% luck and 90% skill.  The same guys don’t keep winning at tournaments just because they’re lucky.

They were distracted by your tasty pecan pie…

Squirecam

Crazy Straw I think hit on a key term… Risk Management.  And Darth used a great anaology with the “know when to fold”

Sure, a set of very bad dice can really play havoc with a strat (part of why I like ADS over LL is the potential, actually the likelyhood, that this will happen at least ONCE in a game).

The key to being a good player (and the point of every argument i have ever had regarding Low Luck) is that the truly good players can HANDLE those setbacks and changes in strat that result from bad dice, or good dice.

With new or even average players, dice may indeed decide the game.  But against a skilled or better player, unless the bad dice repeat over and over and over, then skill will be the ultimate determining factor.

There’s a Cossack saying, “Do not salute yourself in victory, or blame your horse in defeat.”

–

My horse’s name is Lucky, and I am not a Cossack.

@ncscswitch:

Crazy Straw I think hit on a key term… Risk Management.Â

yep… his brilliant one post insight was not lost on you, for sure…

@axis_roll:

@ncscswitch:

Crazy Straw I think hit on a key term… Risk Management.Â

yep… his brilliant one post insight was not lost on you, for sure…

What is wrong with a theory of risk management???

Posted on: January 26, 2007, 04:58:02 PMPosted by: ncscswitch

And Darth used a great anaology with the “know when to fold”

Posted on: January 26, 2007, 08:10:58 AMPosted by: critmonster

that’s where skill comes in, like the poker analogy (and the song says)

you got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em

my names not darth  :wink:

@squirecam:

@axis_roll:

@ncscswitch:

Crazy Straw I think hit on a key term… Risk Management.Â

yep… his brilliant one post insight was not lost on you, for sure…

What is wrong with a theory of risk management???

Nothing, not a damn thing.

I had said the same thing several posts before Crazy Straw….

except i said I manage my risks…

I use a much clearer font.

@CrazyStraw:

I use a much clearer font.

Thanks for the chuckle