Posts made by frood

Hey, I’m in Winnipeg too! And my friends who play A&A are a) too busy and b) not very good (don’t tell them I said that)

I’ve never used DAAK and I don’t know how it works, but I can say mine works by generating random numbers from 1 to 6. If it’s a 1, the AA gun hits. More specifically, the PHP expression used is mt_rand. mt_rand is supposedy better than the rand function, more random somehow. I wonder how DAAK does it, but I haven’t heard of random number generators with a bias toward lower or higher numbers - that’s not really random!

Maybe DAAK (or the programmers) thinks its more exciting when there is more hits, so they give AA guns a +1 bonus or something crazy like that. But to do that they’d have to be honest about it.

That sounds kind of weird.

Not to be nitpicky myself, but I just noticed that on the links page of this site (not in the forums) it still says that my sim does not have e-mail notification. Also, it is referred to as FROOD. frood.net is my domain name (and I don’t like to use all CAPS) - my name for it has been AACalc. Call it frood.net/aacalc/, or just AACalc.

So if whoever has the power could fix that I’d appreciate it. Thanks.

Thanks.

As far as I can see, I’m missing two rules for AA Europe in my sim:

1. Air units can’t hit subs unless a destroyer is present
2. Marines.

Both of these rules could be a real pain in the @$$. Not sure I’ll implement them. Maybe I’ll do some tracking to see howefter the AA Europe ruleset actually gets used anyway.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

@DarthMaximus:

I’ve gotta say, Great Job Frood!

I can see this becoming more and more of a possible “go to” roller.
Certainly for people that may not want to register at the various Clubs (DAAK, FoE) to use their rollers.

I know Switch has a link for this in a few places but I’m also going to add a link to your roller in the PBEM Hints, Tips thread in the Play by Forum area.

I’ve never really used DAAK or FoE, can you tell me what features they have that I don’t?

Oops - left one of my debugging outputs on. Fixed.

More changes at http://frood.net/aacalc/ :

• Option to swap the Defender’s and Attacker’s units. This way you can see what might happen if you decide not to attack and your opponent then attacks you instead with the same forces.
• Option to just evaluate the value of your units. Displays Unit count, punch and IPC value. May be useful as a tool in purchasing units, and with an e-mail address entered you could use this to submit unit purchases.
• Cleaned up the form a bit.

Now it’s time I focused on some other things…

New feature that might be pretty cool:

I’ve added the ability to bookmark a scenario. Also, the link to the scenario is included in the e-mail, so when someone sends you a battle result, you can click on the link and toy with the scenario, see what their odds were etc.

Also, this will allow me to create a page of presets for certain first round attacks. I could use some help if people would set up the attacks and e-mail them to me using the dicey, then I’ll create a page with the links I get. Also, they could get posted to forums for discussion etc.: example : Link to 4 Arm v. 4 Arm

Don’t know why I didn’t do this way back, it was pretty easy to implement.

Example:

He he. I wrote “is showed” - that’s not right!

Okay, this post serves no purpose other than to inflate my post count - how much longer do I have to be a lowly infantry. Hey, can I give myself a special title in my profile? (goes to check…)

Do battleships sustain 2 hits?
And how do heavy bombers work?
What can transports carry?

Does anyone have a pdf of the AA Europe rules?

Use your bombers to kill other units. The cheapest unit you can kill is Inf at 3 IPCs, which is almost the same as the average 3.5 IPCs damage on SBR. And the added advantage is that you are killing active units instead of future ones - the effect on the enemy’s strength is immediate. Of course, you also have a lot more stuff shooting back at you, so your bombers need backup.

And for me any excitement about SBR’s really fizzles when that pesky AA gun blows 15 of my IPCs out of the sky.