Posts made by frood

Okay, I’ve launched the new version. It includes both kinds of result highlighting and Heavy Bombers now work properly in LHTR rules. The double rolling is not displayed (only the lower of the two dice is showed), but you’ll find that if 99 H. Bombers attack, they will score about 85-90 hits.

Thanks for the help. Let me know if you spot any more bugs. By now there are so many configurations in which to test this program that I can’t really test for them all, so my only way of hearing about bugs is when others let me know.

Okay, I get it now. I can highlight both and keep everyone happy!

Switch, that glitch is intentional. I’m highlighting the average result, not the most common result. Two reasons: the most common result can be quickly identified visually because it has the longest bar graph bar. Second, the average is a better indication of what result to expect on the whole. Because the overall percentages given in the first chart describe the average outcome, and Jennifer was asking what those 24.3 units meant, ie. how can you have .3 of a tank, highlighting that line makes it a good reference point for understanding the overall results shown at the top.

I’ve updated the beta at http://www.frood.net/aaa/ with some more enhancements to the output. It now lists the units lost by each side as well as the IPC value of those units, which makes it easy to see the relative losses and costs to be expected by either side.

I’m now leaning away from doing combined results, eg:
2.4% Attacker with X units and Defender with Y units
1.8% Attacker with X and Defender with Z
3.3% Attacker with W and Defender with Y
0.7% Attacker with W and Defender with Z  etc.

Ultimately I think that’s harder to understand, and in any case, if you are doing battle to the death, you can assume that the 16% of the time that you survive with X units the Defender has lost all their units.

I’m going to do a bit more testing with the different kinds of combat to make sure I haven’t broken anything, and then I’ll launch this on the main site later tonight.

paintbrush - sounds like I took you a little too seriously. never mind.

Okay, I’ve posted a beta to test at http://frood.net/aaa/ - this has highlighting on the results that are closest to the calculated average, and added to each line is a list of the units that have been lost.

I made some changes to the overall code that I think increases the speed of the script by about 20%. Not much, but what the heck. Because of this though there may be glitches. I’d appreciate some beta testing so I don’t launch the update on the main site and then find out that suddenly subs are hitting aircraft or whatever.

@Jennifer:

Actually, I was thinking since you give the amount of money lost, it might be possible to just say:  If you attack with 9 Infantry you’ll probably kill 2 infantry and loose 1 infantry to return fire.

(LL would say 1.5 kills, rounded up to 2 hits; 0.67 kills, rounded up to 1 hits.)

Also, I noticed that if you hit a 1 round only 5000 attempt simulation (you attack for 1 round, but it computes 5000 attempts at the same round) it doesn’t give you even an average monetary loss.  Maybe I’m just blind.  /shrug.

Heard a complaint that it’s not emailing results anymore.  Tested a couple of tries to my own inbox, havn’t gotten results yet.  Maybe just a slow server?

Must have been a slow server - I didn’t fix anything.

Did you do the 5000x simulation with “No Luck” mode? Because it should show the averages just as normal.

Switch and Jennifer, are you suggesting just stating in one line what the most likely result for the attacker is, the most likely result for the defender, and the amount they survive with and lose in that case?

@newpaintbrush:

@frood:

There’s a considerable difficulty in displaying most likely COMBINED results as you are suggesting, especially in a large battle such as you describe. Each side has about 50 units, and it is reasonable that each side might survive with as many as 25 units … wait - I was going to say that you then have a possibility of 25*25 total possible outcomes,

Haha!  I wrote an analytic calculator once that DID break down the values.  But it always crashed my browser whenever I used it for more than fifteen units because it had to do so many calculations!  Although I think I know a way to fix that nowadays.

It isn’t 25*25 total possible outcomes with a 50 on 50 battle.  Depending on attack or retreat, it’s clearly 2^100, even if the odds for either extreme are astronomically low.  25 * 25 is only 625 outcomes.  2^100 is 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376 outcomes.

I have to wonder just what sort of “logic” your dice roller program uses . . . maybe you should stick the code on here and let us have a look-see.

Whadjoo use to make that webpage anyways?  Quark or somethin?  All that funny formatting in the HTML . . .

I have to say I don’t much care for your tone. It sounds like you’re slagging my math, my logic, and my HTML code. But because I’m the patient sort, I’ll respond politely, even if my flame finger is feeling itchy. I want this thread to be for improving the sim, not for flame wars.

In terms of “logic” that my dice roller uses: it rolls the results of a battle thousands of times and tracks how often each side survives with a different number of units. It is not an analytic calculator. It gets used about 10,000 times a month and only very occasionally do I get an e-mail from someone saying the results don’t seem right. That hasn’t happened in a while. So no, you don’t get to see my source code, at least not if you can’t ask nicely.

I think you might be stretching it with 2^100, and saying that this is “clearly” so just sounds pretentious. It sounds like anyone who can’t see that must be a cretin.

At least without retreats, there is a range of results of maximum 100 possible outcomes, where one or both players by definition will have 0 units surviving. Allowing for retreats probably increases this by a few orders of magnitude, but not to 2^100. The possible results are limited by the order of loss and other aspects of the game mechanics. In any case, since the sim works by actually rolling the results randomly many times over, I only care about the results that happen at least once every 10,000 battles, and I can limit the display to only show results that have a significant probability. No one needs to know about a possible outcome that only happens once in 2^100 or whatever, or even only 1 in 10,000.

As for the HTML source, I am not some quarkhead or frontpage newbie. It’s all hand-coded, and the “funny formatting” you refer to is called inline styles. Usually I control all the style with a separate stylesheet, but because the results also get e-mailed, I have to stick them in-line. Since the source is generated by a PHP script, inline styles are less of a disadvantage, because there is still a single point of control in the PHP script. Or if you mean the way the HTML itself is formatted, that’s because it is generated by a PHP script and indentation etc. is not an issue for me in the final page that is built, since I do my debugging at the PHP level.

If you weren’t being rude, sorry if I misunderstood. You have to be careful online :)

@Jennifer:

Also your list of results is great, Dan.  However, could you also offer an option of numbers of units lost?

For isntance, if you attack with 2 infantry vs 1 infantry you could say:

Most likely outcome 1 Attacking Unit Lost, 1 Defending Unit Lost.

Etc.

That would be especially helpful in very large battles when you want to compare damage dealt in units to damage received. (For instance if Russia attacks iwth 30 infantry, 10 artillery, 5 armor and 2 fighters vs 40 infantry, 10 armor, 3 fighters and an AA gun, you might want to know how many units you destroyed in X number of rounds to determine if you can weaken Germany enough for England to finish her off.)

There’s a considerable difficulty in displaying most likely COMBINED results as you are suggesting, especially in a large battle such as you describe. Each side has about 50 units, and it is reasonable that each side might survive with as many as 25 units … wait - I was going to say that you then have a possibility of 25*25 total possible outcomes, but that’s not the case if you  fight to the death, because each of the set of 25 results has the other side with 0 units, not with any number from 0-25. So really that means only about 50 different possible results, and of course even many of those will be highly unlikely. With 50 results, the average likelihood of each would be 2%, but obviously a few would be much more likely and many would be below 1%.

However, the number of results is still compounded by the presence of the AA gun (or any battle with subs) because you could have the same number of units surviving with different amounts of air units left.

Sorry, I’m just thinking out loud, as it were. This has been a major shift in my thoughts about how the outcome can break down. I can see that this would be much more intuitive, to see the combined results, not just separate for each side, and now also that it might be doable.

@ncscswitch:

The only difference I can think of in LHTR over the OM rules relate to Heavy Bombers.

In LHTR, it is the better of 2 dice rolled instead of 2 dice added.

All of the other units stay the same.

Hmm… that could take some work. No other units hit in that manner, so the logic of my dice rolling routine might have to be slightly disassembled. I have some ideas though. Also, how would this work for Low Luck? I wonder if simply having Heavy Bombers attack on a 5 would approximate the odds of scoring a hit on the better of two dice hitting on 4 or less?
@ncscswitch:

Also, you may want to consider a “Consolidated Bombardment” check box option that will allow DST’s to fire a support shot of 3 in addition to Battleships during an amphib assault (like BB’s the casualties are taken before the defenders can return fire, they only fire once, and they cannot be taken as losses).

No checkbox needed. At present you should be able to add Destroyers to a land battle just like Battleships and they take a shot in opening fire of the first round.

Hey folks.

I’m adding different rulesets to my odds calculator / dicey at http://frood.net/aacalc/

I need to know what units/combat rules are different between AA Europe and AA Revised. I know that Armor defends on a 2, is there anything else? Is it the same as AA Classic?

Alright, now you can select which ruleset you want AACalc to use - Classic or Revised.

I don’t really know anything about LHTR, does it have different unit values?

@Jennifer:

I put this in another thread, but I’ll repeat it here:

It would be nice if you could edit your dicey to handle classic as well.  Should be easy enough since you’re just deleting lines really.  Tanks go from defending at a 3 to a 2.  Infantry do not get boosted by artillery.  Artillery and Destroyers don’t exist.

If you don’t want too that’s fine too, since Classic seems to be dieing off.

I’ve actually been thinking about adding a dropdown for differen variant rulesets, I just don’t know the differences, If someone who knows could explain them all to me it shouldn’t take me too long.

I could do Europe, Pacific, Classic - are there others? I REALLY don’t want to mess with subs.

@Jennifer:

Back to Revised:  I recommend putting text on the site (like you do for explaining why Battleships are first in OOL) explaining the 2nd AA Gun option.

There’s an explanation on the readme page, but honestly I think I should just drop that option. Who ever flies over 2 AA Guns? With ALL of their aircraft for a battle?

@Jennifer:

Also, is there anyway you could put in a calculator to average the success of multiple attacks?Â

For instance, if Germany attacks W. Europe, S. Europe, Balkans and E. Europe and has the following chances of success:

77%, 48%, 65% and 90%

They then take those numbers, after determining them, and put them into another form and hit compute to learn they have:

22% Chance of Winning all of them
45% Chance of Winning 3 of them
69% Chance of Winning 2 of them
90% Chance of Winning 1 of them

(Best chances that is.)

That’s a different app altogether, but it would be a simple one. I could make one on a subpage.

However, I think you’d have a higher than 90% chance of winning one. That’s the chance you have of just winning the one 90% odds battle, but if that fails there’s still some chance that you’ll win one of the other three.

@cyan:

cool idea. so if you went in 75% then you would keep fighting untill you had less than a 25% of succedding? if you do this i think you should have a 60%, because i ussally retreat when i have less than a 40% chance of winning. this sorta reminds me of gambling  :-)

No, the percentage is a percentage of either unit count of your opponent, or punch of the opponent, so eg. if you put in 75% and then you drop to having only 3 Arm while the defender has 4 Arm. Since you have 75% of the unit count of the defender, the battle gets aborted. The percentage is not a chance of winning, it it a ratio of the strengths of each side.

Hello all. I’m starting this new thread as a central place to post updates on my dicey / AAR sim AACalc, aka Frood, found at http://frood.net/aacalc/

First order of business: I’ve added a new feature called “Att. abort threshold”. If you leave this alone, Frood will run as it always has, fighting a battle to the death. However, if you enter a percentage here, the attack will be aborted if the attackers unit count or punch drop below this percentage of the corresponding value for the defender.

Example: If you enter 100%, you’ll keep fighting as long as your force is stronger than the defenders. Suppose 10 Arm attack 8 Arm. The first round goes really badly, with the attacker scoring only one hit and the defender scoring 5. The attacker’s odds of winning have dropped from 88% to just 6%, with the defender likely to survive with 3 Arm or more. Faced with those odds, any sane player would cut their losses and end the attack rather than throw their Armor away. However, until now, Frood would happily keep throwing your precious tanks into the fire.

If you had entered 100%, the battle would end as soon as the odds shifted away from your favour.

When using Frood as an odds calculator, this will eliminate those results that would never occur because the attacker would call off the attack - you get to set your own threshold. Consider this: 20 Arm. v. 19 Arm

If fighting blindly to the death, the attacker has a 66% chance of coming out alive, with an average 3.5 tanks surviving overall - that one extra tank makes a surprising difference to the probability. The defender has a 32% chance of surviving, average 1.5 tanks left.

Now, if an abort threshold of 100% is added, the attacker survives 100% of the time, average 7.3 tanks left. Defender also more likely to survive, but the increase in probability is not as large: 46% survival, with 4.4 tanks left.

At 50 % threshold, the attacker keeps attacking with some disadvantage, with surprising results:
Attacker: 89%, 4.4 tanks
Defender: 33.1%, 1.8 tanks
The attackers results improve significantly from the no threshold result (66% to 89%, and 3.5 to 4.4 tanks left, while the defender’s survival rate does not improve.

At 75%:
Attacker: 96.7%, 5.2 tanks
Defender: 35.3%, 2.5 tanks
Interesting to note that defenders survival rate is almost unchanged, but surviving tanks increases noticeably. Attacker’s survival rate approaches 100%.

Again, at 100%, results were:
Attacker: 100%, 7.3 tanks
Defender: 46%, 4.4 tanks

And at 0% (default)
Attacker: 66%, 3.5 tanks
Defender: 32%, 1.5 tanks

I think this adds a new level of accuracy to AACalc as an odds calculator, because it takes into account that realistically, certain battles would get aborted, and you can specify your own “pain threshold” - how much are you willing to bleed before you decide to live to fight another day?

Also, it could accelerate the use of AACalc as a dicey - you can send the whole battle once, having decided ahead of time that it will be cut short if it gets to a certain point.

Well, I’ve added it, and found some interesting results. I’m going to start a new thread for discussing my Dicey, so I can put updates and requests for suggestions there instead of in different threads all over the place. Heading on over to make a new topic…

Kinda slick with some of the interface ideas you have there.

FYI, I just found another neat “real-time” calculator app today: http://www.twmacinta.com/myjava/allies/

Not comprehensive, but good for a lot of simple and accurate calculations. I really wish I could streamline mine to run 100,000x, but I’m not a coding expert. It may be with the complexity I have put in with the kind of info it tracks, it’s just not possible.

Anyhow, this new one is kinda cool. Good job.

The trouble is that Germany then knows specifically it will be facing tanks from Norway, and can respond to the Allied threat more efficiently with that knowledge.

It could be a good idea in the right circumstances. But I think those circumstances are generally once the Allies have a healthy advantage, such as pumping out extra tanks faster for the final push.

That’s a great suggestion Jennifer. Hadn’t thought about that. I think I can work that in fairly easily.

EDIT: Done. I also exclude them from casualties, so that it does not look like you are losing an extra 24 IPCs.

Also, don’t tell anyone, but I also changed the 10,000x mode to secretly run the battle only 5,000x. I noticed my error log had grown to 2MB, all as a result of the page exceeding the 30 second time limit for the PHP interpreter. I ran it a few times and the odds seem to stay consistent within a 1% range, at least for a battle with about 15-20 units per side.

Re the “abort at” feature, this obviously would be only for calculating odds, not for the Dicey function. The question is, would it be beneficial for that function?

If I did this, I think I’d replace the field for # of rounds with a check box for “1 round at a time” - as I recall, my reason for allowing greater flexibility there was another proxy for what I’m talking about now - the ability to discontinue the battle if things go badly. And actually, there would not be a lot of coding involved. But as the form gets more complex, I might add a button for “Advanced features” to hide a lot of this stuff.

As I think about this, perhaps it is not necessary. The function of the sim is to show the raw probabilities, and the player’s role is to decide if they like those odds. Once the sim starts having to account for what the player might do in certain circumstances, it gets a little confusing what odds you’re really looking at.

I’m a little hesitant to commit to an online game, I’m not sure if I can commit to coming up with a move every 24 hours. I guess its only for one country though each time. I’d be up for a team game maybe, does that happen here? 4 or 5 player?

That said, throw me into the queue, and when my turn comes up I’ll see how things look, if that’s okay.

I’ll just add my ignorant two cents’ worth…

This question goes to what I think is the heart of the game - logistics. The Allies start the game with an economic advantage (greater production) while the axis have the logistical advantage: they build their troops right close to the action. This means that the Allies economic advantage is a bit of an illusion - they cannot actually build more, at least in terms of fighting units. To get 8 IPCs of fight to Russia’s doorstep, Germany only spends 8 IPCs. The US and UK have to spend 16 IPCs to deliver the same fight - the armor, the infantry, and a transport to carry them.

(Actually, that’s why I think Russia is a bit under-rated. Sure, the production sucks, but what production there is is right on the front, and can be immediately used where it is needed.)

So the heart of the game then as I see it is whether the Allies can efficiently overcome their logistical disadvantage in order to realize the benefit of their economic advantage. A Norway IC is one solution to that, but thinking about it, I don’t think I like it. It delivers units to the front more quickly than any other solution once it is built. But it takes time to capture Norway and also time to build the IC. It also lets Germany know where the attack will be coming from, and as Sun Tzu says, deception is the key to all warfare. That said, if Norway could produce more than 3 units, I might think about it more.

I’ve only played about five games, but I think this is why I won and why I have seen people lose as the Allies: quite simply, they fail to get their IPCs delivered to Germany’s doorstep. They build units that they won’t have the transports to move. Or they build enough transports, but fail to protect them from attack. Or they build extra transports that won’t have anything to carry the next round. Any of these result in wasted IPCs sitting around on Great Britain (or in the water) while German tanks roll happily across Africa and Russia.

So I think the key to the game is simply planning carefully how to get (or prevent) Allied IPCs flowing into Europe (or Japan) as efficiently as possible, and thereby realizing as much as possible the economic advantage. This means getting control of the sea while preparing an invasion fleet that wastes no IPCs. The Axis meanwhile have to leverage their logistical advantage to prevent the Allies from setting up an efficient delivery system.

Another thought I’ve had for getting Allied IPCs across is in the form of fighters. They can arrive to help defend Russia in one turn, and avoiding the sea means that Germany’s navy is all a complete waste. The problem though is that they can’t support Russian offensives, and are too expensive to use to attack on their own. But they might be a good interim idea while the shipping gets set up?

Glad people have still been using it despite this glitch. And yes, I received enough to buy my own copy - I received only two donations, but each was for $20. One was from nscswitch, thank you again! Alas, my game has been prepared for play, but sits unused…

I’ve been busy (I’m articling at a law office this year) so I haven’t been here in a while. I only noticed because someone (Lyle Wincentsen) e-mailed me a bug report - he said that having a super sub caused him to lose 100% of his battles - has anyone else seen that? Does anyone use super subs anyway? I think it was over at C-Sub that they basically trash all the scientific advances, including super subs.

While I have your attention, I could use some suggestions on a new feature request I’ve received. The request is to add a feature that would abort attacks when a certain criteria is met. This would simulate what happens in real games, when attackers decide to cut their losses. Right now AACalc fights to the death every time, which is not always realistic especially if the attacker has a few bad rounds. Having some abort-threshold I think would make the odds calculator more realistic because the attacker would have fewer occurrences of being totally annihilated.

At present there is one simple abort condition, which is that an attack can be called off once the attacker has only air units. But there are a lot of situations in which you might want to call off an attack.

Here are my thoughts on implementing this:

Add a row to the form called “Abort threshold” or “Attack ends if…”
This would contain four inputs:
Attacker punch is less than ____ % of defender punch
Attacher count is less than ____ % of defender count
Attacker has less than ____ surviving units
Defender has less than ____  surviving units

An attack would end when any of these conditions are met. The default value for each field would be 0, which would make the sim run as now - until one side is dead.
The first two fields would allow you to decide based on when it becomes unlikely for the attack to succeed. Eg. once you have 50% of the punch of your opponent, odds are pretty stacked against you.

The third option would allow the attacker to preserve certain units, in combination with the order of loss (OOL). Eg. attacking with 3 Arm 5 Inf, you might call off the attack when you only have 3 units left, in order to preserve your armor. Actually, this one might have to work together with the above two, because if you have 3 Arm left against one enemy Inf, any sane person would continue the attack to take the territory. You might also use this to ensure that you only take a territory if you will have enough left to defend it, if that is your objective.

The fourth option would let you set certain objectives such as only fighting until you have destroyed all their subs, or their bombers, for example.

Thoughts?