Reducing Luck in Ship Combat
And Improving Defense Too
from 
GalCiv2 Forums
GalCiv2 Forums
I feel that too much luck in any game but gambling makes for a worse experience. It takes away the skill that is necessary to win in a game and instead, replaces it with simple chance. You won this or loss that because you got a good or bad roll, not because of anything that you could control and as a result, it dumbs down the game. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be any randomness at all, but there should be enough that you can get a good idea of what will happen without ridiculous values occuring often.
Well, enough of my theorycraft. The point i'm trying to make is that ship combat is too random. As i understand it now, both offense and defense roll numbers from 0 to whatever their value is with all numbers having the same probability of getting chosen. Although this seems like a pretty good system, in practice, it doesn't always work well. Highly expensive ships, with 200+ defense and ~80 life can easily get totaled by a slightly larger number of smaller, high attack ships.
How does this happen? Lets say there are 4, 100 attack ships with no defense and little life. From before, the 200 defense, 50 attack and 80 life ship. Although the 200 defense sounds like it could easily handle puny 100 attacks, it really doesn't. Remember again that you roll from 0 to X? That means that you could just as easily roll a 0 defense as you could a 100 or 200. But you say that those 100 attack ships could just as easily roll a 0 as well, so it balances out. Yes that is true, but remember, there are 4 of them. That is key, because that means they get 4 rolls instead of 1.
Because of this, there is a much higher chance that at least one of these ships will get a high attack roll in a round, doing a lot of damage. All the big ship has to do is get a low defense roll during one round, very likely and it will probably die or take huge damage. Since it can only kill one small ship a round, the remaining ones will continue to pound on it until it dies. Even with double the amount of defense, the larger ship will still probably lose to the smaller ones. If you don't believe me, use the fleet simulator.
Now my suggestion, to improve defense in general and to remove random chance in ship combat, all you have to do is roll offense or defense a # of times, add the values you get and then divide by that # again. So with the previous example, each of the attacking ships would roll from 0-100 lets say, 3 times. Those rolls would be added and then divided by 3. The remaining number would be rounded up or down and become the final roll and then the rest of the fleet would do the same. The defending ship would also do the same, (the sum of 0-200 X 3)/3 rounded up or down.
Using this method, you would get a much stronger chance of hitting numbers in the center, rather then those on the edge. The graph of the distribution would be closer to normal and you could expect much more consistent results instead of them being all over the place as they are now. Increasing the # of rolls would cause even more central deviation and reduce "luck" further while decreasing it will do the opposite.
If we use this model on the first example, the squadron of fighters would probably lose instead of winning. They would almost always score hits of 40-60 while the cruiser would get rolls of 80-120 on its defense, negatating the damage as doubling the defense obviously should. You can still hit the minimum or maximum damage/defense and the edges of the distributions but there would be less chance, depending on the # of rolls determined earlier (more rolls, less deviation from center). This way, you can rely on defense to actually defend your ship and not be a waste against a number of smaller ships.
The bottom line to this method is that it would reduce the frequency of ridiculous rolls like 0, when you have over 200+ defense on a ship, and get bad beats simply because of bad luck.
I believe there was also another post very similar to this one a small while back. Anyway, thanks for reading my thread. Feel free to make your own suggestions.
Well, enough of my theorycraft. The point i'm trying to make is that ship combat is too random. As i understand it now, both offense and defense roll numbers from 0 to whatever their value is with all numbers having the same probability of getting chosen. Although this seems like a pretty good system, in practice, it doesn't always work well. Highly expensive ships, with 200+ defense and ~80 life can easily get totaled by a slightly larger number of smaller, high attack ships.
How does this happen? Lets say there are 4, 100 attack ships with no defense and little life. From before, the 200 defense, 50 attack and 80 life ship. Although the 200 defense sounds like it could easily handle puny 100 attacks, it really doesn't. Remember again that you roll from 0 to X? That means that you could just as easily roll a 0 defense as you could a 100 or 200. But you say that those 100 attack ships could just as easily roll a 0 as well, so it balances out. Yes that is true, but remember, there are 4 of them. That is key, because that means they get 4 rolls instead of 1.
Because of this, there is a much higher chance that at least one of these ships will get a high attack roll in a round, doing a lot of damage. All the big ship has to do is get a low defense roll during one round, very likely and it will probably die or take huge damage. Since it can only kill one small ship a round, the remaining ones will continue to pound on it until it dies. Even with double the amount of defense, the larger ship will still probably lose to the smaller ones. If you don't believe me, use the fleet simulator.
Now my suggestion, to improve defense in general and to remove random chance in ship combat, all you have to do is roll offense or defense a # of times, add the values you get and then divide by that # again. So with the previous example, each of the attacking ships would roll from 0-100 lets say, 3 times. Those rolls would be added and then divided by 3. The remaining number would be rounded up or down and become the final roll and then the rest of the fleet would do the same. The defending ship would also do the same, (the sum of 0-200 X 3)/3 rounded up or down.
Using this method, you would get a much stronger chance of hitting numbers in the center, rather then those on the edge. The graph of the distribution would be closer to normal and you could expect much more consistent results instead of them being all over the place as they are now. Increasing the # of rolls would cause even more central deviation and reduce "luck" further while decreasing it will do the opposite.
If we use this model on the first example, the squadron of fighters would probably lose instead of winning. They would almost always score hits of 40-60 while the cruiser would get rolls of 80-120 on its defense, negatating the damage as doubling the defense obviously should. You can still hit the minimum or maximum damage/defense and the edges of the distributions but there would be less chance, depending on the # of rolls determined earlier (more rolls, less deviation from center). This way, you can rely on defense to actually defend your ship and not be a waste against a number of smaller ships.
The bottom line to this method is that it would reduce the frequency of ridiculous rolls like 0, when you have over 200+ defense on a ship, and get bad beats simply because of bad luck.
I believe there was also another post very similar to this one a small while back. Anyway, thanks for reading my thread. Feel free to make your own suggestions.
Actually I remember reading up on it a while ago. Wasn't the Hood spending all of its time on tour around the world ("Hey look at our spiffy battleship!") and as a result, its armor never got upgraded (to the point where it was using wood on the part of the deck that got hit)?
