Reply To: Combat feedback (angry and annoyed)

[Meeky]

Firstly, you seem to have missed the parts – the lots of parts – where I said, and I’ll quote…

Meeky wrote:

RNG is actually GOOD in a strategy game

…and how the majority of my post was in DEFENSE of RNG being in a strategy game.

However, I think there are things which can reduce RNG if people want that reduced, and there is precedence for these things. Let’s talk about some of the points you brought up one by one, Sky.

Sky wrote:

You say give miss dmg, how the hell is that fair? So my heavy tanks in full armor will now be killed by ghouls? How is that fair in your mind? Nimble fighter ruling the field? Who are you fighting against, zombies and robbers? There is no way you can rambo in endlessly with one nimble guy.

Because you’ll have miss damage too, and miss damage will be TINY compared to hit damage. Think of it this way: ghouls don’t do much damage anyway, right? Imagine what 5% of that damage might be. If you’re actually wearing really heavy armor – such as the 300 armor scale and a solid helmet to boot – do you really think even a miss from a ghoul is going to significantly harm you? Five misses (25% of a ghoul’s attack)? Ten (50% of a ghoul’s attack)? And if you could recover miss damage by resting, wouldn’t that help a lot as well?

One nimble fighter doesn’t break the game. However, I have an easy time winning when I have, say, 3 or maybe even 4 nimble fighters to act as meatshields while my polearm fighters and archers do their dirty work. When you’ve got 100+ defense on multiple guys, or at least 80+, tell me that we don’t have a problem with Nimble fighters. They’re awesome, and I love the build, but they’re still a very easy way to win and I expect them to be changed somewhat when the devs put out the sweeping changes for perks I’m sure they’re gonna do eventually.

Just to reiterate: I am NOT talking about using one guy to win the game. I’m talking about using nimble fighters in conjunction with other characters. Nimble fighters hit hard, are incredibly hard to kill, and can wear heavy armor like everyone else. They’re tough cookies.

Sky wrote:

The bell curve. So I suppose you have recorded several of your matches having a statistic for every men in every match. Where you can see that the more RNG hits he does the less RNG it becomes?

Actually, this doesn’t require bookkeeping or a spreadsheet or anything of the sort to explain. What I’m about to explain is basic statistics – namely, probability.

Let’s say I’ve got a die that can roll any result from a 1 to a 20, or a d20. If I roll on that die, my range is 0-20, and my average is 10.5, and I’m just as likely to get any one result on the die as the other. There is no bell curve here.

Let’s change things up. Say that I have two ten sided dice, or 2d10s. Instead of rolling one of them, I’ll roll both of the d10s and add them up. So, if I get a 5 and a 6, I can actually get a result of 5.5. Etc. If you plot out ALL POSSIBLE OUTCOMES, you get the same range, only a slightly different average, but you get a bell curve instead of a straight line. You get more results around the middle because there are lots of ways to get an 11 total (5+6, 4+7, 3+8, 2+9, 1+10) than to get a 20 or a 2 total (10+10 for 20 or 1+1 for 2).

Let’s apply this to RNG in a video game. Let’s say that I’ve got a character who can hit for 10 damage but only gets one attack, and I’ve got a character who only hits for 5 damage but gets two attacks per turn. Both of them are attacking each other, and both have a 50% chance to hit with each attack. The first guy’s attacks are going to be much “swingier” than the second guy’s attacks. I.E.: there’s a lot more left up to chance, and he only has a 50% chance to hit in a given round. The guy who only deals 5 damage actually has a 75% chance to hit at least ONCE in the round. There’s a calculation of probability you can use to check this out. He’s less likely to get 10 damage, but he’s more likely to actually get results.

Let’s talk Battle Brothers now. Let’s pretend we could make all the attacks in Battle Brothers cost 1/2 the action points they do right now with a snap of our fingers, BUT each attack only deals 1/2 the damage. Suddenly, we’re seeing more of the “average” outcome happening – less RNG involved – but we still have meaningful amounts of RNG.

I’m not saying this is what we SHOULD do, note. I’m saying that if this WAS done, it’d be a totally acceptable way to reduce RNG while still keeping a healthy dose of it. As I said in the post before this one, RNG is good for strategy. RNG makes provides obstacles. Overcoming obstacles is what strategy is all about.

Sky wrote:

The shield thing. If you do that then you will make the big shield heavy armor dudes the OP ones who can go in with secoundary shields and be just terminators. But again, if they are alone that will not help, if they are in party then it does not matter, it yould only make the early game harder and bearing a shield a must have at least at the very beginning of the start, discouraging the trying other things and making it frustratingly hard to fight enemies early on.

We haven’t even discussed how many damage reduction I was talking about.

I don’t know exactly how much damage reduction I’d apply, but right now sword-and-board is the MUCH weaker of the two defensive styles. It really is, and NOTHING stops a Nimble Fighter from putting on a kite shield to fight off archers. A small bit of damage reduction wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Sky wrote:

*hint* There are at least two well known pure logic no rng games, chess and GO.

This sincerely makes me think you didn’t really read my post in its entirety. I expressed several times that RNG was GOOD, RNG is what strategy NEEDS, RNG simulates real world situations, etc. You seem to think I want a game devoid of strategy.

Let me quote myself next:

Meeky wrote:

Now, with all that said, I do think there are a few things that could be done that could reduce RNG without removing it. And I think they’d be fair.

What I’m saying there is that if you WANTED to reduce the RNG, there are ways to do so without actually taking it out of the game. And you shouldn’t take RNG out of the game. RNG is, again, GOOD FOR STRATEGY. But if someone wanted to know what you could do to make the game less swingy, the above examples are ways you can do so.

Also, I hate chess.