Before the new big step forward

[RusBear]

Just before you start working on the next stage of the game, I think the following information useful. Last month I regularly watched the stream of the game and talked a lot with Russian-speaking players. As you know most of them are very happy with the game and all praise game’s style and the quality is very high for early access games. There is one thing that is not like the vast majority of players. It’s absolutely crazy random hits. 3 hits in a row with a chance of 5% or 3 misses the chance of over 70 % or even 90% -it’s not what players expect from competent tactical game. Or % does not display correctly either randomizer configured not correctly. Sometimes one gets the impression that your mercenary specially hits the enemy in head( with chance 20%) with a helmet who is without any armor on the body and 2 HP of health. I understand that much will be revised and changed, but I beg you to pay attention at this moment. Too much weird and bad reviews about it.

[mrbunnyban]

Hrm. Guess these folks don’t enjoy X-com or DnD if they abhor random hit rolls? I hve the feeling that the randomness is an intended feature to represent the crap that life throws at you. Folks playing Darkest Dungeon have the same complaint.

I find Pillars of Eternity’s solution interesting: Total roll of 0-15 is a miss, 15-50 is a graze for half damage, 50-100 is a regular hit, 100+ is a crit. Battle brothers would be 50-75 is a hit and 75-100+ is a head shot/crit I suppose. Would totally mess up the current balance of the game, but it is a solution.

How does that sound to you, RusBear?

[Gabbek]

Pillar of Eternity suffers because of it, in fact. You have to min/max a lot because otherwise your character ends up doing nothing in combat (mainly because of flat damage reduction instead of %)

[Rap]

Well, this is how a game with random hit chances across the whole spectrum plays out. There is nothing wrong with the random number generation in the game on a technical level, the human brain just isn’t particularly strong at working with chance and probability. Try playing poker for money if you want to get real mad at chances ;)

As mrbunnyban suggested, a possible alternative on a design level would be like Pillars of Eternity handles it; adding more outcomes inbetween the binary choices of ‘hit’ and ‘no hit’ would even out the damage sooner, i.e. require a smaller sample size on average for the actual damage to approach expected damage numbers and reduce the element of luck. However, it would also diminish the impact that a single hit has, both in damage numbers and emotionally, since you’re kind of always hitting for small amounts of damage. This would change the feel of combat (and ultimately the game) quite a bit, away from the generally fast and deadly style we want it to have, more towards applying constant damage over time. It’s not perfect either way, but we’ll probably stick with the system we have.

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[Anonymous]

I have thought about this aspect of Battle Brothers a bit when I first played the early development builds. Another way to do it would be a pseudorandomisation, as i.e. Dota2 handles it regarding skills like Axe’s “Counter Helix”: If the skill has a 33% chance to proc on a hit and the rolls do not meet the expected outcome of 1/3 of the hits, the chance goes up or down until the outcomes over the course of a game are as close to 33% as possible. So here we find the number actually controlling the propability for each hit in constant flux so we have a result of 33% over time.
That said, I am totally fine with how the probabilities in Battle Brothers work and I am sure we can trust Rap that the lines of code under the hood are more than solid. He is totally right with his assessment that often there is a huge dissonance of people’s perception of a random system and the actual probabilities, because players a) experience small sample sizes (i.e. a single battle where they get angry and then later in a playing session another battle) and b) the negative experiences tend to be stronger and stick in our memory (the so-called “Negativity Bias”). Regarding the above mentioned “lucky” rolls of hits despite a very low hit chance we could easily extend this line of thought towards the notion that our brains register short spikes much stronger than the long periods of time where the system meets our expectations. We remember the few rolls that are on the fringes of a “Gaussian”/”normal curve” of distribution much easier than the big chunk of rolls that make up its center.
Plus from a gameplay standpoint I came to the conclusion that the Dota2 system makes sense in a real-time environment. Turn based combat would lend itself much too easily to the “gaming” of a pseudorandom system.

[RusBear]

I do not argue with the fact there there are many sadomasochists who enjoy a miss with 99% chance to hit in the x-com.
Why should we then this % and level up and skills of mercenaries – let all the time will be a random number generator. Just before the battle, throw the dice and he chooses who died who won. And not even going to argue about it. I just announced the aspect that causes negative emotions and misunderstanding of the majority of players in the Battle Brothers. it’s all. As it understood by developers and that they will do with it – it is their decision. This section of the forum is called feedback – first post was feedback…

[mrbunnyban]

Gabbek wrote:

Pillar of Eternity suffers because of it, in fact. You have to min/max a lot because otherwise your character ends up doing nothing in combat (mainly because of flat damage reduction instead of %)

That’s the fault of the high flat damage reduction rather than less binary outcomes, surely… but I think you point that out later in your post yourself.

Rusbear: I certainly appreciate you telling us Rusbear, and I’m not even the game developer haha. I think folks who like very heavily tactical games don’t appreciate the luck aspects so much. I find swingy randomness easier to forgive in Darkest Dungeon becos I’m controlling a small squad of 4 in simplifeid positions. DD’s main draw to me is the flavour; the game is oozing that dark and despair flavour like crazy. Even then, folks complain about the randomness thre as well (and unlike BB you can’t load a previous save hahaha)

Battle brothers, you control up to 12 pcs on a full tactical hexagonal grid. Yeah, I can see how the folks who enjoy playing with that setting may want luck to play less of a role.

[Gabbek]

The best comparsion which comes to my mind would be Battle for Wesnoth – you usually own 12 (often much more) units at the same time and rely heavily on RNG. The biggest different, in my opinion is that you’re able to defend your precious units with your meat units – so if RNG is not in your favor, you can always throw some more “shields” to protect your important units. Here – you eventually want to have all of your guys on level 11. Early-mid game you can develop team of X veterans (8 or so? Even more if you’re reloading/playing very carefully) and have few battle brothers who are merely there to protect your important guys. It often helps to mitigate RNG in that way, by having some characters who aren’t all that important to you who can save your more experienced guys lives, if it’s necessary. Forgive me for my english.

In the end it all comes down to two major ways: embrace it, or hate it. If you embrance RNG and learn how to play around when you’re feeling insanely unlucky – the game will become very fun to play (xcom, for example). If you really dislike it… then probably RNG-driven games aren’t all that good for you.

[Holy.Death]

I find swingy randomness easier to forgive in Darkest Dungeon becos I’m controlling a small squad of 4 in simplifeid positions. DD’s main draw to me is the flavour; the game is oozing that dark and despair flavour like crazy. Even then, folks complain about the randomness thre as well (and unlike BB you can’t load a previous save hahaha)

I am of the opposite mind: the number of units you control in Darkest Dungeon is smaller, you also can’t really do anything without using an action. So if you HAVE to move forward in order to do anything you sacrifice your turn for that. If you decide to attack and miss you wasted a turn basically and have much less options on the table, which can be even worse if you NEEDED that action to hit. With battle brothers you can control your positioning before you clash and there are more variables that make randomness less of a factor in Battle Brothers.

Battle brothers, you control up to 12 pcs on a full tactical hexagonal grid. Yeah, I can see how the folks who enjoy playing with that setting may want luck to play less of a role.

Honestly, people will complain about anything. There were people who complained that X-COM: Enemy Unknown was too luck based and completely ignored the fact that you can shape the odds in various ways. In fact X-COM: Enemy Unknown gave more options than the original X-COM, despite being simplified in some aspects.

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