Neoteny wrote:

That's all well and good for the /random 3 rolls - which are flawed, and that's the goal to fix it.

As it stands, with increasing to a /random 6 roll, a ship with a stat of 0 going against a ship with a stat of 3 would still have a 1/12 chance of success, with a 1/6 chance to succeed or tie. (i.e. this is the equivalent of a ship with a stat of 1 [since we have relatively low 0's] going against a ship with a stat of 4, which, outside of hull, does not exist yet). Under the normal system, the stat 0 would have 0% chance to hit or tie.

A ship with a stat of 0 going against a ship with a stat of 2 has a 1/6 chance of success and a 10/36 chance of success or tie (i.e. shp with stat 1 vs ship with stat 3). Under the current system, the stat 0 would have 0% chance to hit and 1/9 chance to tie.

A ship with a stat of 0 going against a ship with a stat of 1 (stat 1 vs stat 2) has an 11/36 chance to succeed and a 16/36 chance to tie. Under the current system, the stat 0 would have 1/9 (for comparison, that's 4/36 - the /random 6 improves odds 4 times over here) chance to hit and 2 chances to tie.

These rolls are a significant improvement and, I believe, will be what we will use, at least in one test battle, though I do not foresee any difficulties.

Yes Neoteny, my point is that a situation where a random 6 will be useless doesn't exists yet, but it migth eventually occur. With my Skill roll proposal, I'm aiming to fix the problem under the current base 3 system and keeping it from break, eliminating the modifiers when appliable, only for that single attack phase.

Of course, the scenario when a lower rank player might have a better stat than a higher rank player needs more revision, specially with odd hovercraft configurations. Maybe a formula where the whole stat points are counted might give more balance than a straight stat debuff. Will think about it.

In all honesty, things aren't meant to be equal - that's the point of the stat increases. Beside that, enough of this game is already left up to chance that I don't know if I feel comfortable leaving "leveling the playing field" up to the addition of another roll.

As I stated before, it makes things overly complex, and even then, there's a pretty high and/or equal chance that a ranked player will retain their stats and nothing will change. Otherwise, they will be punished for being ranked, which is something I do not want. Additionally, the random upgrade of lower-ranked ships' stats doesn't seem to fit into the scheme of the battle and doesn't make logical sense to me.

/random 6 covers all the way to a stat bonus of 4 versus a stat bonus of 0 (i.e. stat bonus of 5 versus stat bonus of 1) giving at least a chance to combatants in that position. Indeed, there is a 0% chance of hitting at level 6, but if you analyze the distribution of stat points, you'd have to be an idiot to go for 6 stat points in just one area, and would have to be either incredibly stupid in your distribution or incredibly high ranked to do so (while still leaving most of your other stats defenseless).

For example, for a rank 5 (maximum rank) captain to have 6 stat poins in a particular aspect of his/her ship, they would have only 5 points to spread around to the other stats. Let's say they leave energy at 1, they would then have four. At an even distribution, that's 2 hull and 2 in either ballistics or shields. In this example let's say it's shields. They would then have a craft at 2 6 1 2. What does this mean? The ship would have relatively high ability to remain unhit, but would be incredibly susceptible to ram and only slightly more accurate than normal with ballistics, while having average move speed. At its best, it could possibly have 3 6 1 1 or 4 6 1 0. But at this point, you must also consider how often this craft, in its building (levelling), would be susceptable to attack and would likely be destroyed. It's not a feasible design.

The same goes for throwing it all into ballistics or hull. Certainly a ship could end up with 11 hull, if they never put any point into anything else. It would also take them forever, since they would perpetually have 0 shields and 0 ballistics and would not be able to hit anything and would constantly be able to be hit.

At current, the only ranked captains of achieving a 6 or higher in a stat other than hull are Publius, ShiXinFeng (neither of which play anymore), TekMon, Tranque, and Void. The only one I can see it happening with would be Void, and even then, he would retain a 0 in sheilds and be dead in 2 hits.

I just don't see a stat of 6 happening. And if it does, I see that the vulnerabilities it creates will more than level the playing field.

I agree with you Neoteny. I'm not trying to punish veteran players. I was just rationalizing that the skill roll as a way to say "bad days happen". Guns jam, shield generators fail, the pilot is drunk :: laughs ::, etc.

The question not should be if the current environment is friendly to new players, but how we can work to attract new players at all.  If after Rank 5 won't be additional stats increments, then a random 6 will be enough fora lower ranked player, without crippling the efforts of a higher rank captain. Let's test how the random 6 works.

Sorry for the lack of updates, but I've been bogged down with papers and finals. At current, I'm procrastinating from writing another eight pages for a fifteen page paper after having just finished severely editing a rather poor paper written by a classmate in another class.

The next battle held will invoke the /random 6 rule and, provided it is successful in its purpose, the /random 6 rule will be enacted as the new standard for hovercraft battles.

This is getting very confusing! 

Lyr

Illyria22 wrote:

This is getting very confusing! 

 

 

Lyr

But is solving the issue with the veteran ships vs new ships a bit. Which makes the confusion okay to me.

Illyria22 wrote:

This is getting very confusing! 

Don't worry about all the stuff TekMon said about skill rolls, we won't be using those.  We're just going to do /random 6 for ballistics and shields rolls (and perhaps ramming) instead of the usual /random 3.  It shouldn't be too confusing.

/random 6 will replace /random 3 in all areas except initiative energy rolls. That's all.

Ok.  So when's the next one? 

Lyr

How many people still participate in this? I may play with a project of sorts of this summer...

Bayamos wrote:

How many people still participate in this? I may play with a project of sorts of this summer...

Quite a few.  Zion always seems to pull out a strong showing; EPN, Gerik and Lt0brien play.  Machine-side, there's Illyria and b1t.  Tekmon seems to be holding up the Merv side.  And we still have no Cypherites.  It'd be pretty darn nice to have some more Machines, Bayamos!

Fen wrote:

Bayamos wrote:

How many people still participate in this? I may play with a project of sorts of this summer...

Quite a few.  Zion always seems to pull out a strong showing; EPN, Gerik and Lt0brien play.  Machine-side, there's Illyria and b1t.  Tekmon seems to be holding up the Merv side.  And we still have no Cypherites.  It'd be pretty darn nice to have some more Machines, Bayamos!

I've been spotty on attending, mostly because real life has been more haywire than usual, due to my kitchen being remodelled (plus I've been limiting my time on DN1, but I won't get into the reasons why). Once that's done, I'll make it up to you folks.

Just wanted to update everyone on the situation of the battles.

I had intended to do some in the few days I had after finals, but, well, I'm in Japan right now and it obviously didn't happen before I left.

I get back June 2nd, so we may resume sometime that week or after.