This is just way too big, and completely devalues the tank,zerker, and everything. The light infantry will now rule all games!

the problem is what?

Problem is multi-side attack. Problem is him encountering a game where multi-side INF attacks destroyed his fine armored force. Trauma ensued. Closure only possible by posting here. But then, in RL, INF doth kill tanks.

I seriously appreciate that a large enough number of H-Inf can kill a zerk. If you dont protect it, its your own fault

yes. LOCK THREAD!

the multi-side attack has been part of the game for quite awhile. It is just must people did not know about it until they saw the little tibit of info in the attack dialog window.

what??? info in the attack dialog window?

If you want to avoid multi-sided attacks you need to avoid having a single unit off on its own somewhere - that'll get it engulfed and eliminated, if you had 2 or 3 tanks in a line then you could use them and their ZOC to block infantry from getting behind you. If it still happens, they must have a large amount of infantry fodder and deserve to win

actually I destroyed the other guy using this. I'm serious, you can just send a 1 hp trooper to commit suicide, and you have the bonus. It's complete ludicrousy.

And why should haveing large amounts of infantry fodder make you deserve to win?
 

I think it's questionable whether it should accumulate.

yes. yes it is.

why? if attacked from three sides within the same turn (which is essentially simultaneously), would not each attack arrive with a greater surprise advantage? would that single unit not be in able to respond as effectively to subsequent attacks?

I'm not so sure what the problem is. 1 health LINF attacks initiating a string of flank attacks is iffy, but it's also a guaranteed lost unit. Initiating the string with and losing the unit might be worth it to some, not to others. Leaving strategic forks like that in a game are what make it more interesting.

 

If it is simultaneous, then sure, it should accumulate.  But that was not made clear.  It would be made more clear if we could pre-select more than one attacking unit, then finally select a target for attack, and then see all the damage and bonuses described in one engagement window.

Good point Ho. If you get the +1 at a $75 cost, it's a trade that may be worth it or not.

Goes back to income rarity or not. If we have 20 cities at $100 income, $75 is nothing. If we have 7 cities at $25, it's un 'pensez-y bien' (carefully think about it).

π, it's simultaneous in that the action that happens during your turn cannot be interrupted (artillery, cough cough) by the other players. It's not real-time. The simultaneity of each individual player's cumulative actions is always sort of understood in turn-based games. It's multi-piece chess, essentially. Well, maybe not.. Hard to think at work with clarity. Who picks this music?

TallyHo: Okay, I understand.

I'm fairly sure it's not cumulative - each attack's bonus is based only on the attack immediately before it.

(and the guy with a mass of infantry should win over a lone tank because the infantry mass probably cost more, and I'd like to see any tank stand up to the assault when its near-surrounded by enemies and has no support)

it is cumulative; I got like +12 at one point. yes, making it not cumulatve would be better...And really tallyho, think about it how did that infantry get to one hp? fighting stuff! so it's just sacrificing of an already used up unit.

point 1: why is a +12 advantage against a surrounded unit not indicative of the disadvantage faced by a surrounded unit? should not that unit be penalized for being alamo'd? I still don't understand what the problem is there.

point 2: again, i don't understand what you're saying. would you never bother withdrawing a 1hp unit? i know others don't feel that way, and neither do i. it's contextual.

i don't know if i am addressing your points, because I don't really understand your points. clarify, and ill have another crack at it.

Desent:  How do you know you received a +12 attack advantage?  Is there an attack advantage display of which I am unaware?

Well even if it's only a level 1 INF it does create confusion for the defender. There's nothing worst then being attacked from several directions, re. my paintball experience. 2 guys shooting on you is very very distracting. Even if it's a 1-armed pea-shoother dude shooting on you it creates confusion - your mind has to deal with that incoming fire.

Hmm, I guess it comes down to your interperatation of the game. I feel that every unit has s 10 subunits(like a unit of tanks would be ten individual tanks) and every battle it more of a skirmish. And isn't the punishment for being Alamo'd BEING Alamo'd in the first place? How do 10 lightly armed people destroy like 3 heavy tanks who have 7 more backing them up? I mean, Even if your being attacked on a bunch of different sides, this makes no sense! And it is a ridiculous game mechanic that is just to powerful at the moment. I propose that it should not stack with each other, as that would make no sense, and this would make the 1 health infantry suicide less usefull

And by the time a 75 credit unit is a t one health, with 1 repair per turn, then at that point, using it to kill a tank is much more appealing to me.
 

I have to admit, I'm a bit divided on this issue.   I like how offense is being rewarded here, but I also suspect something like +12 is a bit much.

slugthog: At the bottom of every engagement results window, it talks about what bonus that attack got.  Very useful data. 
 

um, let me try and reduce this to a more workable scenario.

Tally Ho and 9 of his bestest friends are in a room with six sides — and they are armed. A man walks through the front door firing at them. Tally Ho and his 9 friends return fire, killing intruder while allowing him to fire only once; the intruder misses the only shot he fires. Unbeknownest to them, a larger group of intruders has arrived through the rear door, guns blazing. Tally Ho and his 9 friends turn to retaliate, but in they surprise, 3 of Tally Ho's friends are wounded and unable to return fire.

This is one of the few facets of the game that is reasonable, intuitive, and logical. I can't think of a real army reasoning, with their forward lines engaging the enemy, that they should not try and get in behind them. Why have generals? why maneuver? why does the bigger gun not always win? I don't understand why anyone would want to play a game which does not reward good play and good tactics.
 

also, plus 12...how? screenshot?

TallyHo: Your anecdote is somewhat convincing.  I see your point.

Also Desent, if you talk about INF destroying Tanks - this IS accurate. Infantry DOES destroy tanks. Not by shoothing their guns on the hull, no - but with anti-tank weapons! It's an historical development: bigger tanks makes for bigger anti-tank weapons. Like said in another thread, in WW2 you had Panzerfaust, Piat and Bazookas. This is for real. Look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzerfaust

For all of you freaking on the fact that Weear INF destroys tanks: '' (...) the shaped charge could penetrate up to 200 mm of steel, enough to defeat any contemporary armoured fighting vehicle.'' Armor was NOT made to roam, unsupported, and trample Infantry. It was made for tactical breakthrough. Which goes back to movement points... Regular INF should only have 2 movement points IMO. It IS grotesque that INF and Tanks each move 3. INF should move 2; then Tanks would have a real mini edge on INF.

Also +12? Holy cow - is it even possible? Any units would be dead way before reaching +12.

i am glad you enjoyed it.

Like many here I assume, my fightin' knowledge comes from books and movies (hence my score). the battlefield is much more fluid and much less predictable than (i think) desent believes.
 

^^ and it weighted 3 kg or so. Those who cannot lift 3 kg, raise your hand!

Argh no!  Don't REDUCE movement... increase the other units movement.   Inf 3, Tanks 4, Raiders 6, etc.

it was versus a heavy tank. And maybe it was +10, not sure, but it was a big number. Anyways, It's the Heavy troopers armed with anti tank weapons. I'm just saying, it's bad for game play if it stacks. you guys have convinced me it's good, but I still say nerf it some.

 

Is artillery giving only a +1, or say are 2 art firing on a unit getting a +2? Cause yes, art can stack in some locked fronts. It'd make Art stop at +1, no more.

I dont really care at all for historical accuracy or realism, screw that!
But I do think that its good for game play if the attackbonus stacks. gives you strategic choices instead of just having to send units of the same strength against each other. consider that you are wasting many different attacks to kill one tank like this. theese units now cannot attack several different targets.

I like the storry of TallyHo and his 9 friends getting owned. It also makes sense to me.

If this bonus would not stack, I would sometimes not know how to kill a huge tank in the first place.

about the +12, might be possible. If you got 6 troupers of 1 healh each, each one will attack and die as soon as the tank looks their way, and its probbably only the 6th that will actually kill something. This is a waste of manpower of course, as you could repair them all up to 2 and kill the tank much faster, but hey, sometimes you just have too many inf

btw: I was unaware that you got any info about any bonuses. I never inspected the combat dialoge.

 

Art is only +1. To tell the truth, I actually use this alot, and Now I feel it makes the game interesting. Change of heart!

PLease lock this.
 

We'll lock YOU in, aye!  

i am victorious.

@hugobrain, @Desent Re: "How do 10 lightly armed people destroy like 3 heavy tanks who have 7 more backing them up?"

During the Winter War in Finland, basic light infantry destroyed Russian tanks by rendering the lead tank and last tank on a road immobile by jamming its treads with small birch logs filled with explosives. Then they opened the tank doors and threw more explosives in. Quite effective...
 

Aye, 1940 Finland war is a classic on how a much smaller army destroy a larger one. Woot!

Read the other day that Field Kitchens were the Finns prime target... to demoralize the troops!

Right.  And this shows how things are not so "sure thing" in war when you have more money, bigger army, more powerful equipment.  And, as I've said in the Piffle thread, that is an element missing from Weewar: Not enough variance.  You can play the game with very high confidence that certain units will do a certain amount of damage to other units.  I know I've said in the past that I wanted less variance -- I phrased myself badly.  What I was primarily complaining about was that I didn't know what the heck to expect because the specs were so top secret.  I was bemoaning the lack of public specs rather than the variance.  What we need is a combat system that has enough variance, but is also public.

Maybe your berserker _won't_ take out 6-8 troopers in one blast.  Maybe some of your artillery fire will miss.  Maybe your infantry rifle will lock up.  Maybe one of your bombs is a dud.  Or maybe your trooper got a lucky kill and shot the driver of the raider right between the eyes.  ...etc. etc.
 

Well these things can sort of happen within the actual statistically based combat results.

Once I had a HA inflicting 5 damage on a HT in one shot. It happened once and only once. I had a few 4 damage points (same: HA vs HT). Usually it's 1-2-3. Sucks when your HA wounds HT only by 1 pt. This is the extent of variable combat result.

Other times I get lucky/unlucky hits from different units... Sometimes that 1 damage is all on you need on that zerk, and I'm sending 3-4 INF to die on it. etc. Actually the 'multi-side' attack can really improve the odds of weak units inflicting damage on stronger ones.

I'd vote -1 on KIA stuff though - INF killing HT in one shot... Hell, DFA usually cannot even kill an INF in one shot! IMO such KIA direct hit stuff would only benefit cheaper units, and remove the potency of larger ones.

Also ''maybe your trooper will get a lucky kill and shoot the driver between the eyes', yes, sure, but how often this actually happened in history? Like, 'ok dudes, here's your rifles, run on these HT and aim for the lucky hit, good luck boys'. I wouldn't volunteer for this mission.

We don't need any "kill in one hit" setups, but I could go for a better and broader statistical distribution of damage all around.  Right now, it generally seems like a spike, rather than a smooth bell curve.

As for my "driver between the eyes" I didn't mean to imply that 1 inf should have any significant chance of destroying a 10 hp vehicle.  I only brought those up as a means to justify greater variance.  Ultimately, your stories or mine are irrelevant, only the statistical distributions matter, and I think the current ones need tweaking.
 

You have to decide, what you want from this game Weewar.

a) having fun, throwing some units against each other and have the luck decide the outcome. or

b) have a challenge where the tactical use of your troops decides the outcome.

I myself prefer b). Therefore even the probability distribution could be much more narrow for my taste. I hate it, when games get decided by luck, even though my move was smarter than my enemie's move. There were quite some examples, where I lost a crucial unit to a lucky hit or could not kill a crucial unit of my enemy because it seemed dug in and made of stone.

In Weewar we only have a few units and a relatively small battlefield. Therefore single units are important and of high value. If you bring more chance into the game, it would be a game of pure chance, since there are not enough tests of chance to even it out in the big picture.

Take balanced RTS-games as examples, Starcraft for instance. There is a reason why they have damage ranges like 25-29. There is a very distinct range, what a unit can do and a fixed value of what it can take. No other chance is ruled into that equation. The high peak in the weewar damage variance makes it similar to the damage rating in those RTS games. Those games have been balanced for years and are very much accepted.

A zerg infestation is quite large. You may attack with 40 Units at one battle. In weewar, we have about 10, which interact with each other. Which makes Weewar units more important. In most maps u will lose, if a HT (which many times represents more than half of you resources on the battlefield) gets destroyed by a lucky shot.

So if you like to gamble, play something else, weewar is a mix of strategy and chance. Where the chance is added to make it more fun for casual players. Thats what it is, a funny strategy game.

Have fun!!

Basti


 

Basti: Welcome to the Weewar forums.

I completely agree that nothing should be decided too much by luck.  Leave that to Monopoly and Crazy Eights.

BUT, you can still have variance AND tactics, by way of understanding and knowing the probability distributions involved, your chances of success for each action.  Know what I mean?

So, I agree with you on the one hand, but your complete dislike of chance is too extreme, IMO.  You can have chance and tactics; Wesnoth is a perfect example.  Plenty of breathing room on the statistical distribution graphs, but you will get owned if you do not understand the rules, specs and unit interactions.

Imagine all the big wars in history.  Imagine the generals saying to themselves "Okay, we're ready to attack Pearl Harbour now.  We have PRECISELY the exact number of bombers needed to ensure victory, because the universe operates on fixed laws of determinism."  I don't buy that.   Nobody can truly be sure of outcomes, large or small, without some significant margin for error or variance.
 

And please, don't join the ranks of people that misunderstand my point on this: I have never, ever said that more variance should mean "critical hits" a-la dungeons and dragons.  All I want is moderately broader stat distributions.  Maybe 20-40% different than what they are now.  At the moment, my experience has been that the outcomes are largely a single value, with slight chances for +/- 1.  That is too little variance, IMO.

Agreed Pistos. I could also use some more statistical distribution. Like right now say HA usually can wipe 6-7-8 INF dudes in the clear. Would be nice to have (even just a 1% !!) a chance to wipe 1-2-3-4-5 and 9-10. So as to have once in a while extraordinary results, instead of the ordinary and expected ones. +1

Those extraordinary results were removed from happening to make the game balanced awhile back. I really hated it when my berserker/HA/DFA attacks would deal 0! Results that you can expect and rely on is better than extreme randomness especially in a turn based strategy game such as weewar.

@Pistos: Isn't Weewar as you describe? After a while playing you get a feel for the probability of an attacks success. Just because there are no distinct percentage values published, does not mean they are there. You just have to get to know the game to "feel" them.

About the war analogy: This is Weewar and not a War-Simulation. If you want the feel of "real wars" feeling, you can play Medievil or sth. in that direction. The question to be asked is: Do you want a game of chance or of strategy. The variance distribution is just like a slider between these two. So this whole discussion is just a discussion about personal preferences and therefore useless.

Let's hope, that the makers of Weewar make the right decision and keep it as a strategy game with a bit of chance.

@hugobrain: The last time I talked to the developer, there just was a very small chance of exactly that. So just do your 1000 attacks and you should see a few of those miracles happen.

*cough*

http://www.tangler.com/group/weewar/topic/26793

it's all there, guys.

PS: AAAAAAAARGH, wrong paste. This is the right one, but it is discussed below now anyway.

Okay, I am clearly not getting across to some folks.  I will take one final stab at this, and I probably will otherwise not expend kilojoules typing any further on the matter.

I have been talking about probability distributions.  In our case, because the damage caused by any engagement is a finite set of non-negative integers, we are concerned with discrete probability distributions.



For a tank on plains attacking light infantry on plains, the current system might have a probability distribution like this:



What some you THINK I am suggesting, is this:



This is, of course, utter foolishness.  Foolish to put into practice, foolish to suggest it be put into practice, and foolish to suggest that I am suggesting it be put into practice.

What I *am* suggesting, is that we try out something more like this:



I assumed at the time of my earlier posting that some things would be obvious, but some of you have proved to me that it's never safe to assume.  Therefore, at risk of boring the remainder of you that understood me from the beginning, allow me to clarify and reiterate a few points:

(1) Notice the clear lack of any significant probability of doing 10 damage (though I would be open to having some tiny chance of this).
(2) Notice the stark absence of any significant probability of an utter miss or dud (0 damage) (though I would be open to having some tiny chance of this).
(3) Notice that the probability mass function (F) of the distribution is itself a fixed, static function.
(3a) Notice a corollary: that the expected value of F is fixed, static, and calculable.
(4) Notice that the distribution is not radically different in shape from the current one.
(5) Notice that the distribution's mean is not shifted left or right from that of the current one.

I've said it before, and I'll say just one last time:

The current system feels more like a spike (first graph), when I think it should be more like a bell curve (third graph).

If some of you still do not understand what I'm trying to say, then I'm not sure what else I can do.   I sincerely hopes this clears everything up.

One more thing: I dare say we would not be desecrating our beloved "tactics, not chance" doctrine by implementing (or at least testing) my suggestion.  Don't worry!

PIstos with the finger, my goodness.

+1, Incidentally.

Hey, some of us with cleaner minds didn't even think of that.  It is purely coincidental! 

I re-vote for Pistos as President. We'll let him drive a Berzerker around town, and throw plastic rose petals under his tracks.

+1 Bell Curve beta testing.

+1 on Bell Curve Fringe Action, be it 1/1000 chance of an INF hurting a Zerk in a frontal assault, or a Zerk wiping an INF in one shot (pre-multi-side attack bonus aye).

to Pistos et al.,
I must admit that I haven't been following this thread too thoroughly, but I would like to make an interjection.

In contrast to Pistos' graphs, the current system is actually already much like what he proposes (graph #3).  According to my battle simulator, which uses the same math used in the game, the outcome of a tank attacking a light inf is much more varied than what is presented in graph #2 (see below).  Perhaps it seems like a spike-type graph because the human mind tends to focus on the most probable events and ignore the least probable events.  Just a thought.

Pluto: Thanks for your input, and the graphs.  I would like to see more variance than just 3 values, though.

No, you wouldn't like to see more variance!

We had it in the early Weewar. It was frustrating. The outcome of battles was so unpredictable and sometimes only remotely depending on tactics. It just sucks to see your whole assault on the enemy artillery (which did not shoot back at range at that time) stall, because two new tanks could not take out that freakin' 4 loser infantry blocking the way. (I am not even talking about that two lucky shots following, leaving only scrap metal, where the tanks stood.) That stuff decided games.

Even though we don't see a bar with "only 4 tanks left", there is a chance, you can get it. And when you do, it freakin' rips your heart out. Ok, this would be realistic, but wars are not fought with 20 units, but with 200.000 units, so these "freak incidents" are evened out by the masses.


 

Actually, that one patch awhile ago changed combat outcome where it varies slightly towards the higher end. Low ends were removed from ever happening and high end results would occur frequently.

Did I mention I really hated when my artillery would do 0? HATED that so much lol.

Although I don't have as low a player ID as you guys, I was also around at the time when we had more variance.  As I've said, the problem was that the variance was mysterious.  I don't see a problem with once in a while your tanks fail to take out some infantry, if, also once in a while, your infantry would lay ruins to some tanks.  It all evens out in the end.

I still stand by what I've said.
 

It has to favor the strong units as much as the weak. Perhaps more so the strong ones, given their cost.

MoJoe: Your ARt may have done 0, but the +1 bonus on further attack still holds water.