Posts made by Avin

That’s really a very interesting point about the RNGs in dicey, AgentSmith, that I hadn’t even been thinking about. I don’t think I’ve ever actually used an ADS dicey, my criticisms were all based off LL dicey versus real dice from my experience in FTF games. But I think I can see that even in the LL dicey: taking a sample of around my last 10 games, I would say that at least 3 out of 4 times when I’ve attacked a lone transport with planes, I’ve lost a plane in the battle because the transport rolled a 1 either before or at the same time that my plane got a hit. See my game with Maddogg for an example where in all three of the battles where I did this, this happened (and for that matter I think Maddogg attacked one of my transports once and lost too). So it stands to reason that in playing with ADS this effect is amplified by the much larger amount of dice rolls - which means I really don’t want to be playing ADS.

So you should not assume a 24 PE bid would have won you the Axis.

I actually find that I am more likely to bid PE in ADS and more likely to bid PAfr in LL.

From ncscswitch, the LL criticisms I have seen fall into three categories:

(ncscswitch, please correct me if I am wrong, I am trying my best to accurately understand your position, which is sometimes a hard task because often in your remarks about LL you make over-general and highly exaggerated remarks, and I hope to try to address your real concerns.)

1. You don’t need a human, just a simulator.

In response to this, I ask why bother playing games like Chess, Checkers, Go, etc, where there is no randomness? More people play Chess than Axis and Allies, and surely they would object to the same criticism. Even if we had a computer powerful enough to calculate the optimal strategy in each situation to defeat any opponent guaranteed in one of these games (which is theoretically possible for all these games, unlike A&A, we just don’t have computers powerful enough to do so), that would not stop people from playing any of these games because players would recognize that when two humans play against each other, you will have a different game every time and it’s what each player does that’s important. No person is going to be able to compute the optimal move in any situation.

Now, I’m not totally opposed to randomness in games, but see the point below for that.

2. Once you determine starting setup, the outcome can be calculated.

In response to this, I would suggest considering the following hypothetical situation: two equally skilled players play against each other multiple times with the same bid and same player playing each side both times. As long as the bid is reasonably balanced, I guarantee you that one player will not win every time. However, if one player is inherently a better player than the other, then I guarantee you that that player will win the vast majority of the time, proportional to the difference in skill. This is as it should be, in my opinion.

3. When you reduce the randomness, you reduce the fun.

This is his only point that I feel is valid, primarily because it is subjective. As I mentioned, this is not the case for me: I obviously find LL to be much more fun, and no one can argue with that because fun is subjective. My only objection to this argument is that it is based on a completely lack of experience: I would be willing to accept it better if you played a few games in LL before making such a harsh policy against it, rather than rejecting it without ever giving it a chance. Haven’t you ever tried something you didn’t think you would like, and found that you liked it after all?

I enjoy LL.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with ADS, I just don’t enjoy it as much because of getting sick of it after years of play, and after switching to LL I found that I enjoyed it a whole lot more because it was more strategic.

For those that enjoy ADS, I have no problem with that, and I welcome criticisms of LowLuck, but I would appreciate if those cricitisms were based on experience and reason please and not just strawman arguments. For instance, Maddogg raised good points with his dislike of the way SBRs work in LL. I agree with some of his sentiments even though I think I still prefer the LL interpretation of SBR to the standard.

Positive whole numbers generally exclude zero, as is the case here, as can be deduced even if it was uncertain on the basis that no answer is possible if zero is permissible (see my response to Maddogg). So no one has a zero, and furthermore everyone knows at the start that they cannot have a zero. This is critical to the problem.

Maddogg, regarding your first post, sorry, that was a typo. It should read the sum of the other two numbers. As for second post about Alex seeming to change his mind, that is the essence of the puzzle. At the beginning he did not know what number was on his hat, but after Bob and Chuck had spoken, he was able to determine his number. Therefore, even if zero was allowed, Yanny your answer would be incorrect because if he saw 0 and 50, Alex would have immediately known what number was his, but he didn’t.

Logic puzzles, huh?

How about something a bit more interesting?

Three perfect logicians, Alex, Bob, and Chuck, are sitting facing each other, and a fourth person puts a hat on each of their heads. On each hat, they are told, is some positive whole number, and one of those three numbers is the sum of the other two numbers. They can each see each other’s numbers but cannot see their own.

Alex says: I do not know what number is on my hat.
Bob then says: I do not know what number is on my hat.
Chuck then says: I do not know what number is on my hat.
Alex then says: The number 50 is on my hat.

He was correct! The question is: What were the other two numbers that Alex saw? Like DM, I will not accept random guesses of numbers: there is only one correct answer and you have to explain why that answer is correct and no other pair of numbers work.

(By the way, Maddogg’s puzzle was simple Algebra, I’m surprised it took so long! Three equations, three unknowns: S = 2(M-x), S-x = M, S = 24, solve for M)

[Note: edited to correct typo; see Maddogg’s post immediately below this]

By the way, for those mentioning club play, I started playing at DAAK close to a year ago as part of my first forays into playing A&A online, and I regularly bid 22 IPCs. I find that I very frequently will either get Axis at that bid amount, or my opponent will have bid the same amount thus making us tie and it will randomly choose. The only times I get underbid is when I am playing someone who is obviously a newbie to online play. So at least at DAAK a 22+ bid seems to be the norm. (Note: I also only play LowLuck there, so that obviously affects it somewhat).

I must have missed noticing that the Political forum was created a little while ago (a week or so ago?) but THANK YOU VERY MUCH for creating that forum! I HATED reading the General Discussion forum here (although I would do so once in a while when I was bored, but would always regret it) because political debate so permeated everything, even threads that at first glance seemed to be completely unrelated to politics. Now maybe I will actually take interest in the General Discussions!

So AgentSmith = SexualHarrasmentPanda! I never realized although in hindsight looking at their personas and strategies it seems obvious. Well, AgentPanda, I’m glad you weren’t banned for good, but I do hope you’re able to refrain from as many personal attacks since I definitely appreciate your strategic insights.

This strat is roughly what I tried against DM recently in our PE-test game, except I was using my PE bid to start in UKR and immediately lurch to CAU, putting pressure on both LEN and MOS. Consistent with DM’s previous post, he took out my armor, costing the German offensive, and the other source of my downfall was his aggressive actions against Japan which cost me the initiative on the east as well.

As mentioned by others, this can work, and probably will if Germany is already doing well in the midgame, and Japan can provide fighter support. This is a good way to push for the pressure on Russia, particularly with the fighter cover. However, my tactic tried it too soon (maybe it could work similarly with a different bid and different choices on my part), and the way you posted it is also open to a strafe by Russia.

Not true, TripleA comes with A&A classic, A&A revised, and a few other variants as well I believe. TripleA is a “strategy engine framework” and not explicitly tied to any one game, but designed to be capable of implementing many different strategy-war games - and obviously A&A was what was started on first because it was the primary motivation for making it in the first place.

I’ve used it to play A&A classic far more than I’ve used it to play revised, probably because I enjoy A&A classic much more anyway.

I believe TripleA predates the Revised release in general, so it’s kind of silly to equate it with revised.

Forget about Karelia, both US and UK can have bombers in MOS by the end of round one that can serve the same purpose against JAP ICs. However with the first IC (provided it is not in India), the JAP player can simply transport an AA from Japan to the mainland the same turn the IC is bought at the cost of being able to ship two infantry that turn.

Hey, Russia with bombers is at least better than Russia with Battleships.

Maddog, I have to say that although you’re cocky, you’re at least hilarious about it!

Or he could give GG Allies with an advantage and see the slaughter. That might be pretty fun to watch.

Oh, by the way, I was able to come up with another completely different algorithm that is more space-intensive involving utilizing one K dimensional array of probabilities per battle round (where K is the number of different types of units) but this approach does not improve over the previous one in terms of time, provided you do utilize caching as I just mentioned.

Two things:

First, this approach is understandably going to be extremely large for non-LowLuck because the algorithmic complexity is O(n!) as you said. However, Low-Luck is only O(4^n) which is still exponential, but much better.

Second, caching will make a HUGE difference, as it is the difference between polynomial complexity and exponential, both for LowLuck and for ADS. In fact, the benefits of caching will be even more obvious in ADS.

Your query for the programming is what I suggested originally. I had previously mentioned pre-calculated results of battles, but it’s pretty simple from there to throw in some good dynamic programming that would make it even faster. I’ll describe an algorithm below.

First, the rules for LowLuck are that all units are grouped together regardless of type. So in the example you gave (7 infantry and 3 armor attacking 15 infantry) the attacker has a strength of (7+33=) 16 and the defender a strength of (152=)30, so the attacker has (16 / 6 =)2  guaranteed hits and rolls one die to determine if he gets an additional hit if the result is (16 mod 6=)4 or less . The defender has (30/6=)5 guaranteed hits and does not need to roll any dice.

You’re right in that subs are treated special; the attacker has a choice in how he wants to use his subs in a naval battle: he can choose to either use their first strike ability or forgo it for each sub on each round. So for instance, in the example you give (3 ftrs 2 subs vs 1 BB 5 subs) the 2 attacking subs can choose to take their first strike at a strength of 4, so they would roll one die, and then the fighters would attack as normal at a strength of 9 so they get one guaranteed hit and roll one die at a strength of 3. Or they could choose to use one sub for its first strike ability at a strength of 2, and use the other sub like normal with the fighters at a strength of 11, so that way having one guaranteed hit and roll one die at a strength of 5 for another. Or they could forgo the first strike completely (for this round) and then their total strength would be 13; they would get two guaranteed hits and roll one die to hit on a 1.

Now, I found this rather interesting: I tried out some sample battles on DAAK’s LowLuck server and got some very interesting results!

Battle 1: 5 fighters vs 20 subs - Attacker has 2 guaranteed hits and rolls 1 die at 3 for another hit. The defender does not roll because his subs cannot hit back.

Battle 2: 5 fighters, 1 sub vs 20 subs (Attacker does not use first strike) - Attacker has 2 guaranteed hits, and rolls 1 die at 5 for another hit. The defender has 6 guaranteed hits and rolls 1 die at 4 for another, BUT is only able to sink the sub, so the remaining “hits” are wasted.

Battle 3: 5 fighters vs 20 subs, 1 trn - Attacker has 2 guaranteed hits and rolls 1 die at 3 for another; the subs cannot fire but the transport can, so the defender rolls 1 die at 1 (no guaranteed hits).

Battle 4: 5 fighters, 1 sub vs 20 subs, 1 trn (Attacker does not use first strike) - Now this is the intesting one! All the ones above seemed to make sense, but this one defies reason. Attacker has 2 guaranteed hits and rolls 1 die at 5 for another hit - so far so good. The defender has 6 guaranteed hits and rolls 1 die at 5 for another, AND THE HITS ARE NOT WASTED! The defender wins the battle, killing all five fighters even though it is obvious that the fighters could not have all been hit by the single transport.

Maybe this is a bug in DAAK’s LL roller : I will submit it to them and see what they say. I’m sure this situation doesn’t come up that often of course, since it’s not very likely for anyone to amass subs like that.

Anyway, let me propose to you a recursive algorithm for computing land battles without AA guns and you can generalize pretty easily I’d think. For AA guns, simply add a single round of combat in which no units fire but the AA gun does, and for naval combats, perhaps you could include a couple option boxes reflecting the strategy for how subs are to be used: “Always use first strike” “Never use first strike” “Use first strike only if there are enough subs for a guaranteed hit, and use remaining subs in regular combat” “Save enough subs for regular combat to bring the combat strength up to either a 5 or 6, and use remaining subs for first strike”.

1. Test whether the current battle is an “end case”: that is, whether the total strength of both attacker and defender is less than 6. If so, assign a precalculated probability to all outcomes that you can load from a file, and return these values.
2. Test whether this battle has already been calculated previously while running this algorithm. If so, load the results and return these values.
2. Analyze the possible outcomes of the current round of battle and assign each of the (up to 4) different outcomes a probability, so that the sum of the probabilities is 100%
3. Recursively call this algorithm on each of these outcomes, and multiply their return values for the final outcomes they predict by the probability for that individual outcome you computed in step 2.
4. Return the result, adding probabilities for any identical final outcomes.

Note: Steps 1 and 2 are distinct; step 1 refers to the 25 different “infinite” battles I referred to above, whereas step 2 is a dynamic programming method of caching already determined results that will significantly prune the tree you are searching.

Take as an example this battle: 3 inf 3 arm vs 6 inf

Note that my algorithm above corresponds more closely to a DFS approach, but I will be taking a BFS delineation of it to simplify for the reader.

The possible results after the first round are:
1 inf 3 arm vs 4 inf (100%)

There is only one result, so we recursively look at it. The possible results for the second round are:
3 arm vs 3 inf (2/9 chance)
3 arm vs 2 inf (4/9 chance)
2 arm vs 3 inf (1/9 chance)
2 arm vs 2 inf (2/9 chance)

So we recusrively look at each of these.

The outcomes of the (2/9 chance) 3 arm vs 3 inf battle are:
3 arm vs 2 inf (1/4 chance)
3 arm vs 1 inf (1/4 chance)
2 arm vs 2 inf (1/4 chance)
2 arm vs 1 inf (1/4 chance)

The outcomes of the (4/9 chance) 3 arm vs 2 inf battle are:
3 arm vs 1 inf (1/3 chance)
3 arm vs 0 inf (1/3 chance) - battle over
2 arm vs 1 inf (1/6 chance)
2 arm vs 0 inf (1/6 chance) - battle over

The outcomes of the (1/9 chance) 2 arm vs 3 inf battle are:
2 arm vs 2 inf (1/2 chance)
1 arm vs 2 inf (1/2 chance) - end case

The outcomes of the (2/9 chance) 2 arm vs 2 inf battle are:
2 arm vs 1 inf (2/3 chance)
1 arm vs 1 inf (1/3 chance) - end case

At this point, to eliminate step (2) in my algorithm, let’s simply add up the common outcomes:
3 arm vs 2 inf (1/4 * 2/9)
3 arm vs 1 inf (1/4 * 2/9) + (1/3 * 4/9)
2 arm vs 2 inf (1/4 * 2/9) + (1/2 * 1/9)
2 arm vs 1 inf (1/4 * 2/9) + (1/6 * 4/9) + (2/3 * 2/9)
1 arm vs 2 inf (1/2 * 1/9) - end case
1 arm vs 1 inf (1/3 * 2/9) - end case
3 arm vs 0 inf (1/3 * 4/9) - battle over
2 arm vs 0 inf (1/6 * 4/9) - battle over

So, you can see how this will end up, right? The two end cases present would be calculated in advance, so there is no need to calculate a potentially infinite battle. This algorithm would work to calculate any battle in a relatively short amount of time, particularly since you could even store outcomes in a file and load them in step 2 between battles and then the more you use this, the easier it becomes for the program to calculate battles!

As hard as the standard problem would be to produce a completely deductive odds calculator, it would be a lot easier to produce one for lowluck! Unlike standard dice where all battles can potentially last infinitely long (if both sides only roll 6s), a large proportion of LowLuck battles are guaranteed to be finite, and those that are not (ones that can potentially see both sides with not enough forces to make one guaranteed hit) have exactly 25 different “possibly infinite” scenarios, which of course can just be worked out in advance by hand and loaded into the calculation on demand.

I like the idea of revaluing the German territories. Perhaps a slight increase combined with RR sounds like an ideal way to play, for the points Bashir mentioned on why RR. I’ve never much favored RR because I’ve always found the R1 attacks to be quite fun regardless of which side I’m playing, but if it makes for the most balanced bidding I think I’d be willing to change that opinion.