Dice or Low Luck??

@CWO:

I’ve never used the Low Luck system, so I don’t have any opinions on its merits relative to standard dice…but one element of this discussion caught my eye: the general issue of “result predictability” versus the potential for having a good strategy ruined by bad dice.  Although I never really developed the idea beyond just a rough concept, I’ve sometimes wondered whether a variable-risk dicing method might be interesting to use in an A&A context.

I got this idea from a subject area that has nothing to so with wargaming: possible ranges of investment returns (both positive and negative) based on the riskiness of investment types.  Financial institutions sometimes offer investors various types of pre-packaged investment portfolios which contain mixtures of stocks and bonds, in different proportions, and in varying ratios of domestic versus foreign holdings.  Here are three simple (and completely fictitious) examples of what I’m talking about.  At one end of the scale, you might have a very conservative portfolio that consists entirely of domestic guaranteed government bonds; its upside is that it’s very safe (you’re virtually certain never to lose any money), but its downside is that the rate of return is very low.  At the opposite end of the scale, you might have an aggressive portfolio consisting entirely of foreign stocks in high speculative and volatile sectors of the economy; its upside is that it has potential for generating spectacularly high returns, but its downside is that you could end up losing all your money.  In the middle of the scale, you might have a balanced portfolio which distributes your money among many different asset classes, and therefore which offers a mixture of safety and risk and a mixture of low and high returns.

How might this apply to A&A dicing?  As I said, I never really worked out any details, but the idea would be that a player who’s about to enter a round of combat would choose one of three dicing options: low-risk, medium-risk and high-risk.  These options would, I imagine, work either by using either different dice types (4-sided, 6-sided, 8-sided, etc.) or by using standard dice combined with some sort of interpretation table.  The low-risk option (represented, let’s say, by 4-sided dice), would offer a narrow and hence fairly predictable range of outcomes, which would translate into only modest gains or modest losses.  The high-risk option (represented by, let’s say, 8-sided or 12-sided dice) would offer a much wider and less predictable range of outcomes, with potential for either spectacular gains or spectacular losses.  The medium-risk option would fall somewhere between those two extremes.

The point of the system would be that each player would have to decide on a case-by-cases basis whether he wants to use a low-risk, medium-risk or high-risk dicing strategy in a particular round of combat, rather than being locked for the whole game in either a Low Luck mode or a standard dice mode.  In principle, this would have two advantages.  First, it would mean that each player would have to make a new type of “command decision” during the course the game, which adds to the thrill of being an armchair general or admiral (which is part of the whole attraction of wargaming). Second, a player who decides to use a high-risk dicing strategy and who ends up losing big won’t be able to put all the blame on the bad dice: he’ll have to take responsibility for having chosen the high-risk dicing strategy in the first place (which, again, is something that a real commander has to live with in a real war).  Conversely, the player who decides to use a high-risk dicing strategy and who ends up winning big will be able to congratulate himself for pulling off a gamble which succeeded spectacularly.  Yamamoto (who was an avid poker and shogi player) was definitely a commander of the “high-risk dicing strategy” type, and he’d probably have agreed with what James Graham, the 5th Earl of Montrose, said during the English Civil War :

“He either fears his fate too much,
Or his desserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch,
To win or lose it all.”

Lets get a system like this up and running! It sounds nearly perfect and you are very wise to try to make a compromise between both parties! I say that this system would nearly double the Great fun of playing as Military Commander and I fully support it. It might as well go into the next A&A edition if we can create a smooth version!

@CWO:

An amusing footnote to this discussion would be to consider some of the alternate methods of combat resolution that tabletop miniature gamers have experimented with over the decades.  They’ve even included, believe it or not, firing little spring-loaded cannons at the opponent’s men, or going into an adjacent room to take shots at circular targets with BB-pellet air pistols.  Fred Jane (of Jane’s Fighting Ships fame) advocated a method that involved hitting a ship diagram with a “striker”, a rod attached to a circular plate from which an off-centre nail projected – the offset position of the nail being used to introduce an element of randomness to the strike.  Fletcher Pratt’s naval wargame, which was designed to be played on big ballroom floors using little balsa-wood model ships, required players to estimate the range of the enemy ships at which they were firing their guns and write down their shooting orders accordingly; referees would then use tape measures to measure the actual range and would use upside-down golf tees to mark the position of the shell splashes, and the players would then use these splashes as reference points to adjust the range of their next salvo.  Great fun, but very labour-intensive and obviously quite unsuitable for A&A board games (though it could be applied to the A&A naval miniatures games).

CWO  that reminds me of the days in my bedroom were we were always shooting army men with a BB gun.

@SS:

CWO  that reminds me of the days in my bedroom were we were always shooting army men with a BB gun.

This puts you in very distinguished company because, if I’m not mistaken, the spring-loaded cannon method of combat resolution was recommended by H. G. Wells in his book “Little Wars.”

I played a low luck game tonight for the first time on this map (I’ve used it on other maps) and boy oh boy did it feel like I was playing a completely different game.

As someone who had only played G40 the normal way, running into someone who wanted low luck and already had specific strategies that worked in low luck (but probably wouldn’t work nearly as well with dice) was a completely demoralizing experience.

My opponent played Axis and it felt like he had the game’s entire play sequence completely mapped out before we started. It was an enlightening experience, but not fun at all (and not just because I got spanked).

Maybe it’s just sore butt syndrome, maybe it’s just that I ran into a really good player who steamrolled me (and I made plenty of mistakes to help him along, to be sure), but low luck really felt like a lobotomized version of the game, and that a lot of things that usually worked out well for me just weren’t effective at all.

When dice are used, it is inevitable that attacking forces will encounter setbacks every so often, but that’s never the case with low luck. There is something just not right with always knowing the outcome of a battle before it starts, which makes the game qualitatively different from knowing the probable outcomes but not being certain in any given case.

A slightly underdefended territory might still be too risky of an attack with dice, whereas with low luck the attacker just needs that one extra unit to be certain of victory. 50/50 outcomes disappear almost completely, as does everything else between 100% and zero. Picketing sucks when two inf and two planes will capture every time and never fail. AA loses its bite when an attacker can calculate exactly how many planes - and no more - will go down to it. And the precisely calculated strafe is just cheesy.

@SubmersedElk:

…low luck really felt like a lobotomized version of the game…

When dice are used, it is inevitable that attacking forces will encounter setbacks every so often, but that’s never the case with low luck. There is something just not right with always knowing the outcome of a battle before it starts, which makes the game qualitatively different from knowing the probable outcomes but not being certain in any given case.

…And the precisely calculated strafe is just cheesy.

All of these points are spot on. The game loses its soul, as I say. Low luck may have its place for convoys (or tech, if you play with that (I don’t)) or whatever, but for combat rolls…

And you probably are a bit butt hurt, but your points are still entirely relevant regardless :p

I’ll just add that I am a dice man and agree with those who have said that LL is actually less strategic.  It conjures up the image of a poker table where everybody plays with their cards face up on the table.

@ShadowHAwk:

Well as long as the dice are playing nice it isnt that bad.

But once you got all your planes shot down by AA gun fire, or having 10 tanks hit once where his 5 inf all scored hits and it becomes painfull.

With dice some battles really can deside the game by a simple throw. If your attack with the pacific fleet goes the wrong way or russia defends against abnormal odds then the game is desided right there and then. Does not mather if your opponent made all sorts of mistakes hell you can even lose to the AI opponent that way.

But it is a slightly different game with low luck, it benefits the attacker in every situation, but then again so do dice as the attacker can retreat. You just get rid of the extremes of dice that especialy if you are playing it online are frequent to happen as the dice roller isnt really random at all.

I find that a lot of those bad rolls can have interesting strategic effects on the game in the form of withdraws.  In LL you’d never have reason to retreat from a battle, barring a strafe attack.  In a normal dice game you have to decide whether or not to carry out fights.

Going back to poker as an analogy: the best poker players in the world would all tell you that a key part of winning is knowing when to fold, even if that means folding the best hand.  If you’re playing hold’em and you’re holding two aces, one spade one club, you bet big.  If the flop comes down and it’s  all hearts, well you need to proceed with caution.  If the next card is also a heart you may have to accept that, even though you had the best hand to start and placed a big bet, you need to back out and live to fight another day.  In my mind, that’s true strategy (then again, there’s a lot to be said about what’s going on in my mind…)

It’s more than just the extremes you get rid of with low luck.

For example: are two hits from two defending infantry an “extreme” outcome? It should happen on average every nine times you throw the dice - in other words, it occurs many times during a normal game with normal probability.

How about three inf on defense missing all their shots? That’s a 30% probability outcome with dice, zero percent with low luck. And at the same time, those three inf will never hit twice in a round - when you add up the possible outcomes that disappear with low luck, you’re actually throwing out up to half the actual outcomes that occur. The three-inf case, if you work out all the probabilities, is actually really really REALLY different between dice and low luck - in a way that’s really bad for the defender: one third of the time three inf will score two or three hits. Eliminating those very common, very frequent outcomes has a huge impact on the amount of commitment an attacker needs to make (many fewer attacking units needed over the course of a game) as well as that for a defender (many more defending units needed).

Consider a must-take scenario for an attacker. With two defending inf, 11% of the time they’ll deal two hits. In a must take scenario, that’s not acceptable, so the attacker needs to commit three land units to take (assuming you don’t want to trade your planes for inf). With dice, you never need the third unit to be sure, so now that third unit can be used in a different attack, as are all the overkill units that are normally used in a must-win combat.

Swap that around to the defender’s side - you want to at least have the possibility of dealing two hits to an attacker (let’s say that’s all he can move into a given fight before he loses planes). In a normal game, two inf produce that threat. With low luck, you need twice as many inf to produce that same threat - minimum four inf just for the mere threat of dealing two hits in defense.

In this scenario, low luck cuts the attacker’s commitment by a third, minimum, while doubling the defender’s! That’s a massive balance change, so much so that it changes the very nature of the game.

Sure everyone has seen those fraction-of-a-percent outcomes which change the winner of a game, but the vast majority of the time it doesn’t happen. To throw out 30% outcomes in order to avert the possibility of a 0.1% outcome has a “baby with the bathwater” kind of feel to it.

I have abs. no idea why someone would want to play a “simplistic, unrealistic” style wargame (which to me, AxA is the paragon of) and then eliminate luck.

Do you guys not see that the brilliance of AxA in the first place is the d6 system it pioneered?  It is a reaction to years, decades (1960-1985) of overcomplicated and equally silly debates about balance, luck, strategy etc (see Avalon hill wargames) that are much more easily resolved by simply playing the game more often and playing a variety of games that do not all have the same disadvantages (unplayably long, high learning curve, poor balance) etc.

d6 is a simple system and as you can see, entire unit types (tactical bomber, cruiser) are pretty much just upcosted variants of existing units.  The entire game worked fairly well with 2 ground types 2 air types and 3 sea types for 15 years.

It is also a really bad system (for randomness, realism, flexibility, variability, pricing, balance etc.), as it breaks the entire odds system down to a dice rolling mash up (%16 is the smallest available chance to the designer).  d8 and other systems are far superior, but they are more complicated and not usually for the better (see old Warhammer 40K).

Now, I like rolling dice well enough, but the elephant in the room here is the concept of “Regression to the Mean/Odds” that no one has mentioned.  This principle states that when you roll small numbers of dice, there is a greater chance of anomalous or unusual results, but when you roll tons and tons of dice, the results will tend to be much more averaged over time and will appear more like the calculated odds.

This in my mind is why this is an absolutely silly debate;  Larry knows about this concept.  Small battles tend to be capricious.  Large battles tend towards the averages.  THAT IS AN INTEGRAL PART OF THE GAME.

The idea that you would want to play a game that is “simplistic and unrealistic” and then eliminate luck or chance is simply silly.  Go acquire other games that do not have such a basic or capricious style of combat system, play them (subsequently,  get annoyed at tracking minutiae and arguing about rules) and then come back to AxA!

Many games do not accept that random luck should determine much about the outcome of a battle at all.  Warhammer 40K is a great example;  you roll absolutely tons of dice, over multiple phases, but the result is always the same–weak units cannot damage strong ones and teams with high average skills dominate the numerically large teams.  d6 does not provide enough flexibility to keep that game random or simple, and the creators refuse to address this ultimately fatal problem that compromises the rules and play.

Don’t make the same mistake with “beer and pretzels” games like AxA.    We shouldn’t be calculating odds at this point–I can see whether I have a high or low chance of victory at a glance.    I also do not need to discuss classic or ‘perfect’ openers–we have discussed these to death and the only thing that creates any variability or uncertainty at all in the outcome of the game is…

Luck.

Game 94(G40) 12/6/15  woohoo!!

If I had to choose it would be dice because a dice game is more complex and dynamic.  Dice games require more thought and deliberation.

On the other hand sometimes I prefer a low luck game when I want a pure strategy game, like chess.  If my goal is to test out the efficacy of a strategy, I will likely learn more from a low luck game than a dice game.

Low luck changes the flow of the game in a way the player needs to be aware of.  There are tactical options in low luck that aren’t available in dice and vice versa. However, strategies that work in low luck tend to adapt well to dice games, as long as the player is experienced in dice games and ready for the variability of dice.

OK, here’s a stab at CWO’s Low Luck / Med Luck / High Luck idea. You pick a stance for all your units at the beginning of each of your turns, when placing reinforcements, and then you’re stuck with that stance for all battles and units until the start of your next turn. First number is offense, Second number is defense. As in OOB, must roll the target number or lower to score a hit.

Low Luck (roll d4s for all units)

Infantry 1*/2 (+1 offense w/ artillery)
Artillery 1/2
Tanks 2/2
Fighters 1/3
Bombers 3/1
Subs 1/1 (sneak attack on offense, submerges unless blocked 1:1 by destroyers)
DD 1/2
CA 2/2 (bombards)
BB 2/3 (bombards, 2 hit to kill)
CV 1/1 (2 hit to kill)

Medium Luck (roll d6s, same as OOB)

Infantry 1*/2 (+1 offense with artillery)
Artillery 2/2
Tank 3/3
Fighter 3/4
Bomber 4/1
Subs 2/1 (sneak attack and submerge unless stopped by 1 or more DDs)
DD 2/2
CA 3/3 (bombards)
BB 4/4 (bombards, 2-hit to kill)
CV 1/2

High Luck (roll d8s)

Infantry 1*/3 (+1 offense w/ artillery)
Artillery 3/2
Tank 4/2 (scores two casualties on a roll of 1)
Fighter 3/5
Bomber 5/1 (scores two casualties on a roll of 1)
Subs 3/1 (sneak attack unless stopped by DD, no submerge)
DD 2/3
CA 3/3 (bombards, scores two casualties on a roll of 1)
BB 5/5 (bombards, two-hits to kill)
CV 1/1 (two hits to kill; on a roll of one, repairs itself mid-battle)

Low luck is for crybaby’s.

There are No Gaurantees in War, LL provides guarantees which shouldn’t be there.

whats the point in playing a dice game if your not gonna play it right.

Low luck takes away a lot of the fun and Borderline attacks or defenses.
Hailmary plays are taken away completely., the game is just not meant to be played this way.

I have yet to buy a A&A game that comes with Low Luck calculators or charts.

Agreed ShadowHAwk. Dice vs. LL to me is more a matter of where you are in your personal life.

As a younger man, LL was absurd to me - what’s the point? Variability adds an element to every game that is unpredictable, to allow for far more outcomes and deep game strategies to develop. You have to think on the fly, rather than play by rote.

However! As an older man, with a family and way more responsibility, the entire dynamic shifts. If I can play all the time, who cares if a game goes fifteen incredible rounds and then someone gets diced? You get over the sting by playing another game quickly. But, if carving out the time to play is in and of itself a chore, getting diced late game becomes horrible.

So far a time-deprived old man like me, LL becomes a necessary component to avoid a deep frustration, when I can only dedicate myself to a certain amount of gaming.

This was a really tough choice and is a tough choice every time I play. Dice makes things so much more fun but nobody likes losing because of dice. Forget the rolling part of it(unless you you don’t shake your rolls enough which I will gladly point out) it’s all about gameplay. Having dice makes things more interesting, nerve-racking, different every time, and strategicly engrossing. Of course there are bad parts such as extending an already long game, losing when your stratehy was better, and getting your blood pressure up(lol).
So what did I pick? Dice. Why?  Well a few months ago I would say low luck but after playing dozens of games I notticed low Luck was doing something terrible! It was making things repetitive and I was getting bored of the alltime greatest game! So dice it is(I still think that no one shakes their rolls properly)

Good point. Most of you play online for the most part, but I have a real game set up 24/7 always ready to be played. I never played online.

I totally agree.

Methods for determining combat results in wargame are either human-based or system-based or some combination thereof.

In the purely human-based method (which tends to be seen more in professional military games rather than recreational ones), the referee or game director decides the outcomes based on his judgment and/or on the learning objectives of the exercise; basically, he functions as a controlling deity.

In the purely system-based method, the outcome gets determined by a mechanism which is built into the rules and over which there is no human control.  (Rolling dice, by the way, isn’t human control; it’s human action, but as long as nobody’s cheating it’s not human control.)

There are many potential types of combination methods, but generally they start with a mechanism-determined tentative outcome and then submit it to some kind of human-influenced modification.

Now let’s disregard the purely human-based methods and the human-influenced combination systems, and go back to the purely system-based methods that I mentioned.  Fundamentally, there are only two types of system methods: deterministic and random.  In a deterministic system, the same inputs will always lead to the same pre-determined outcome.  There is no chance involved.  An example would be a professional game in which casualties are calculated according to tables, with the inputs being (for example) large-scale force ratios.  To completely make up an example, a division-sized force of, let’s say 10,000 men will always suffer (let’s say) 2% casualties when confronted with enemy of force of the same size and composition, and will always suffer (let’s say) percentage casualties four times higher when an enemy force of the same composition but twice as large.  (These aren’t real numbers; I’m just making the point that in such pure systems, Force X doing battle under Condition Y will always end up with Outcome Z.)

If a system-based method isn’t deterministic, then it’s random.  I’m not sure there’s anything located between “deterministic” and “random”; I think it’s more correct to view the choice as a two-step one: deciding whether the system should be deterministic or random, and then (if the choice was to go with “random”) deciding how random one wants it to be.  It can be random within a very narrow and simple range of possible outcomes (“heads or tails” being as narrow and simple as you can get), or random within a broader and/or more complex range of possibilities.  One die versus two dice illustrates the difference between range and complexity.  One die (6 outcomes, each with a 16.7% chance) has more range than a coin toss (2 outcomes, each with a 50% chance), but not much more complexity because all the outcomes are equally probable in both cases.  Two dice, however, not only increase the range but also the complexity, because the chances for each possible result (ranging from 2 to 12) are distributed along a bell curve rather than a straight line.

Let me tell you this straight. Using a deterministic system, there is no way to historically correct reenact crazy battle outcomes like the Japanese attack on Singapore, the Italian attack on Egypt, the German attack on France, or the German attack on Norway, the Russian attack on Finland, etc etc. WWII history teach us that the random outcome is the natural one. Leaders that suddenly surrender because they got surprised or by lack of moral and fighting spirit, have a bigger impact to the battle than pure number of men.

IMHO, if you are a real man, gambler and wargamer, with a strong military power fantasy you urge to play out in your basement, then ditch the lame LowLuck, and go straight for the random dice. If you fear the dice, then A&A is not for you.

:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :wink:

A big + to SS for being supportive