I guess from Malachi’s perspective, I’m talking about a coder. (I’m not talking about what I learned in computer science back in 1993-1997 where we did very little programming.)
That said, I don’t think there are that many people who are only doing grunt work in software development - I think most people are taking on the bigger picture (though I might be biased since I’ve worked alone almost all the time). But I think it’s the grunt work, the attention to detail, that has the benefit.
Did anyone ever fix the bugs that I pointed out?
My hypothesis is that computer programmers (and other occupations which require exactness) make better strategic board game players - at least in that you are less likely to make silly mistakes. Strategy is probably another skill set.
This excludes my present game where I’m regularly messing up =)
I know as a programmer I’m always suspecting that decisions I’ve made are incorrect due to the vast numbers of bugs that I’ve written (and the thousands of hours spent finding and fixing them).
Do you agree? What other jobs are good for this?
I noticed that I made a change that stopped my modified version of AACalc from working a couple months ago.
This is back to working (with several exceptions previously listed still applying - ex. heavy bombers and battleships):
http://www.campusactivism.org/aacalc/
Gives great results for land battles.
I’m looking for a game - 1941 - no tech - NOs, bid for allies.
Well whether you call it hard-coding or not, you’d still be doing something special only for subs (and another rule only used by destroyers, and another rule only used by battleships (2 hits), a rule that only applies to inf+art, and perhaps others). And as AA comes up with new rules you have to add them. So you’ve still got a lot of complexity. It isn’t that hard to write a simulator, and I’d be very likely to get it done if I wasn’t programming for my day job - or if I get super committed to playing this game (or if there was more interest expressed in this thread).
I probably ought to write one form scratch, as figuring out someone else’s code is tough.
This is mostly a hatchet job - see if I could make Frood’s simulator useful, and it works well for landbattles (and there are some fixes that give good approximations for sea battles).
I removed those parts.
I didn’t get much feedback/interest, so anyone should note that it makes a bunch of mistakes (ex. battleships).
I’m looking for a 41 game. Bid for allies. No tech.
When you have an AA gun, and thus the possibility for multiple outcomes with the same number of attacker units lost. Frood does a better job displaying this - as it tells you what units are lost, whereas you only say the number and the IPC value. Can you list the units that are lost?
Here are some initial comments…
140 inf vs 100 inf
Attacker victory - 100.033%
defender victory - 0.451%
It’s above 100%!
And this is weird since the battle should be 50/50. (14 inf vs 10 inf gives the defender 53/47%)
100 armor vs 100 armor - give a 100% chance of a draw.
I’m impressed that this calculates real odds, instead of simulating them. Ahh the power of the CPU. I once wrote a risk odds calculator that used an iterative function, is that what you’re doing? Risk is a lot easier - as there is only one unit.
You might need to start simulating battles at a certain cutoff point, to avoid freezing the program. Or let the user know what the maximum number of units is.
You might think 100 vs 100 unit battles is an extreme, but they do happen in online play.
…
Can you calculate an average IPC loss for the attacker and defender? Frood’s calculator does this and it is an excellent indicator of whether a battle is profitable.
Could you host it on a regular website? I had trouble downloading it from that place (it was always busy when I checked). Only now have I been able to download it. Maybe you could get axisandallies.org to host it.
(I could host it too on one of my websites - though they aren’t related to axis and allies.)
You could open source it and host it on sourceforge.net.
I strongly feel that the Axis can jeopardize their chances by trying tor rush to Moscow too quickly.
I’ve won two out of two games taking CAU early (round 2). Of course that wasn’t rushing for Moscow, that was rushing for CAU.
My conclusion from this thread is that the SZ 12 battle is the most critical one for the Axis on round 1. Other battles can be important, but much less so. I think the only thing that can make the Axis have an equivalent loss would be if they did something that wasn’t strategic.
Any other examples of really unlikely outcomes that can mess up the Axis?
What are the attacks that are critical for the Axis to win on round 1? Attacks where you might have 90% odds or more in your favor, but if it goes bad - then it goes very very bad.
My theory is that the larger the possible loss, the greater should be your odds of success. For instance, when planning a defense of the German capital against an Allied assault - even if I’m hard up for troops - I like to reduce their chance of victory to 2-3% (so if they are willing to take a 40% chance of losing a lot of planes, and thus giving me a serious advantage, in exchange for a 2-3% chance of winning the game - that is a fair trade.)
Germany 1
Z12
If you attack Z12 with 2 fig and a sub, you should kill at least the destroyer. However there is a 3% chance that you kill nobody and lose a sub and fighter. This just happened to me. Then UK gets decent odds on an attack on the Italian fleet (55%), and if it doesn’t kill it outright, it can get it next round by purchasing three bombers. My opponent did this and all of the Italian and german fleet was removed from the Mediterranean on round 1 for the price of a single bomber (and the des and cru which normally would have died in G1). This is a net loss of 58 IPCs and makes it very hard to win.
Prevention: don’t attack Z2. Focus more on Z12.
I’m not sure if any other battles are so significant. Egypt might be the most important land battle if you try it on G1, but so long as you have your fleet still alive you can retry it on G2 or the Italians can do it. Typically land battles are small and not so influential.
Japan 1
PHI
If PHI holds then the US can attack Z50 with a bomber from WUS and a fighter from HAW. This can destroy the Japanese fleet (if you have a typical bat or bat/des and 2 tra) - knocking out two transports.
Prevention: attack PHI with at least 3 inf, 1 art. However that will still cause this to happen 7% of the time which might be too often.
Z53
If you don’t attack the Battleship it can cause trouble. Especially if your attack on PHI fails and then Z50 can get attacked by fig, bom, and battleship. You can try blocking the battleship with a carrier in Z51 - but that will just get killed and if you built two transports then you need at least one carrier with fighters in Z62.
This happened to me too!
I’m confused. Do the changes to the FAQ apply to existing league games? To new games? Or not at all?
I’m in a game where my opponent got heavy bombers.
Now having played these two games for several more rounds there do appear to be some disadvantages.
Sacrificing german planes to take CAU, or Italian troops on a first-round assault to help the Germans take it, combined with placing fewer troops in Africa - can make it so that the Axis has less of a fighting force, and might also be making less money than otherwise possible.
Italy is likely to lose its NO(s) in Africa faster. Germany gets the CAU NO, but if it is possible to get this by trading KAR, then that might be a lot easier.
Germany loses a lot of flexibility by being tied into sending armor to CAU (either to reinforce it, or to take MOS). Also fighters can get tied up too, making atlantic Allied convoys easier and facilitating the US going for Japan.
Plusses: if you can get Italy to fight your Russian territory border skirmishes and to build infantry to defend ITA, FRA, and GER against the Allies amphibious assaults - then Germany can build up much faster than Russia and ultimately take Moscow with a stack of armor (possibly reinforced by a buy of all bombers, the turn before the assault - as they can fly from GER to MOS is one turn).
Having Italy use its infantry for cannon fodder is much better than having Italy attack MOS to soften up the defenses before the German attack, as Italy will typically lose all its units on the first round of fighting (thus it costs 10 IPC to kill a single defending Russian infantry - by buying 2 arm, or 10.5 with inf/art). Italy can also intentionally escalate in border countries (stack an empty country with 2 inf, instead of 1) to bleed off more Russian units.
The economic advantage partially depends on if and how you count China. Should their countries count as 1 IPC value (because normally the Chinese army isn’t that worthwhile), or 1.5 IPC value (1/2 of an inf) or some other number.
For instance, if Japan is normally getting China down to 3 countries - then China produces 1 inf - value of 1 ipc/country. When I play Japan, I try to get China to round down.
You can have a hard time getting as much of Africa as you’d normally get. But otherwise, what is a UK player going to do? Invade france once - which they can normally do anyway. They can invade NWE and Poland all the time, but that seems to happen regardless as it is hard to defend FRA, GER and another country.
For battle calculators use
www.frood.net/aacalc/ (for battles involving battleships)
Or my updated version of Frood for Anniversary - unfortunately battleships don’t work.
www.campusactivism.org/aacalc/