I like keeping all my options on the table at all times, but I have to agree that this is probably ill-advised if you haven’t planned on Turkey at a minimum. On Round 2 it is almost a certainty that Italian or German units will be in Greece allowing for Turkey to be activated on Round 3. This is going to be crippling for Russia as their defense is immediately flanked and the Axis get earlier access to all their Middle East NOs.
I’m curious as to why the Buryatia stack R1 is considered such a bad idea. Sure, the Japanese can take this out but it comes with an opportunity cost as the air units involved are then not able to participate in the Pearl Attack or hit China J1. Japan then has to keep an eye on Manchuria, too. It’s work done, walk the stack out R2.
If there is a bug, I wonder if it might be that whatever twiddles the dice rolls so that a player can’t lose the tutorial battles is not disabled in the main game.
@Black_Elk Just had the Burytia stack + Russian fighters happen against me in a game. I ended up resigning immediately as my 90% attack on the territory failed as I scored no hits on my first round and the defender had a higher-than average set of rolls on defense. I might have soldiered on anyway but on the UK’s turn they were successful in the 2/3 chance at taking both Borneo and New Guinea. On my counterattack I also lost an extra fighter as I accidentally clicked it to attack New Guinea instead of the UK navy.
Clearing this stack severely limits Japan’s ability to do anything in the south unless you’re willing to risk Russia taking Manchuria R2, especially if you get the UK fighter there as well so there are 3 fighters. But as you said it seems only useful if the plan is full-on KJF.
@Black_Elk said in How does Russia stay alive in KJF?:
Anyhow have fun on the next one! Glad to see Redrum’s AI still pulling out some strong play
Speaking of the AI, it is definitely much improved from when I first used TripleA many years ago. It is definitely an expert at projecting air power, so I always have to watch out for my units at extreme ranges that I usually assume would be safe from attack. Although sometimes this sniping does leave the units vulnerable to counterattack as you point out.
The AI is also expert at realizing Japan is on the ropes. Usually when this happens or just before the entire Japanese air force will be sent to Europe where the Axis can then clean out any Allied fleet with a 1-2 punch (although at the expense of the Japanese air of course). I haven’t seen any human opponents cotton on to this trick yet.
I have this reply now from the Beamdog support staff, so basically you have two modes: transport-picks-up-unit and unit-gets-on-transport. The former is a bit slower to use but the only way to get things to work when the movement is more complex, such as if a transport must pick up a unit outside its starting area or be very explicit in what sea zones it moves to:
From Beamdog
Transport -> Unit Loading (Original, Classic method)
Select Transport Stack (left-click on Transport Stack you want to move)
Load a unit in an adjacent region if desired (right-click on Unit you wish to load)
Move Transport to Region you want to move the Transport to (right-click on target region (blue highlight))
Load a unit in an adjacent region if desired (right-click on Unit you wish to load)
Optional: Move Transport to Region you want to move the Transport to (right-click on target region (blue highlight))
Unload units into target region (right-click on territory you wish to unload the units into. Transport will move to the adjacent region and automatically unload the cargo into the desired region)
Unit -> Transport Loading
Select Unit you wish to load into Transport (Left Click on unit stack)
Move the Unit into the Sea Zone with a Transport (right-click on target sea zone)
Select the Transport Stack in the adjacent sea zone (left click on Transport Stack) OR click on Destination Marker for loading to open the Dossier to select the Transport.
Optional: Open Dossier, confirm which Transport is selected by observing the glow effect around the desired Transport. To select the desired Transport, left-click on the Transport you wish to move)
Move Transport to Region you want to move the Transport to (right-click on target region (blue highlight))
Select Unit you wish to load into Transport (Left Click on unit stack)
Move the Unit into the Sea Zone with a Transport (right-click on target sea zone)
Select the Transport Stack in the adjacent sea zone (left click on Transport Stack) OR click on Destination Marker for loading to open the Dossier to select the Transport.
Optional: Open Dossier, confirm which Transport is selected by observing the glow effect around the desired Transport. To select the desired Transport, left-click on the Transport you wish to move)
Optional: Move Transport to Region you want to move the Transport to (right-click on target region (blue highlight))
Unload units into target region (right-click on territory you wish to unload the units into. Transport will move to the adjacent region and automatically unload the cargo into the desired region)
@Imperious-Leader said in 
PRNG dice support group — and ranting:
“Tit for Tat” isn’t bad dice rolls, its a tendency that the defender will hit if you hit and miss if you miss. I am close to 200 games for 42 online and it never wavered in my observation of these results. I do get bad dice at times, but the average results i observe is this tendency.
Keep in mind if this was true, then 1) the game would have to be deliberately coded to cheat, and 2) if the game was coded to cheat in this way, it would have to affect everybody.
Yeah, the current system is pretty annoying. Even after having worked a management-level position in a game development company I’m still amazed by the odd UI quirks that end up in games. I’m always running across things that make me think ‘how did the developers themselves not find this immediately annoying and try to fix it’?, like having your ships decide to move to the ‘wrong’ (from your view) SZ by default.
@brian-cannon said in PRNG dice support group — and ranting:
@eqqman So sayeth another one of the dice defenders.
Not really, as it happens. I have two major issues with the game that have caused me to quit playing twice: I don’t like being able to play only country a day in a game and then spending 23 hours waiting for my opponent to do something and I don’t like the dice outcomes (for example, I ‘feel’ like Battleship bombardments fail at a much higher rate than 1/3 of the time). The former is hardly a fault of the developers and the latter I am honest enough to admit is an opinion not backed up by any personal analysis of the dice results, it’s anecdotal.
What I -do- defend however are hypotheses backed up by data and real proofs over opinions. Read any post complaining about the dice and you will find a lot of emotion that drowns out all acceptance of the facts. The ‘facts’ usually presented are ‘I and everyone I know had a bad experience (or continue to have a bad experience) therefore the algorithm doesn’t produce a random result’. This is not a proof that withstands any scrutiny but players having a bad time expect it to be taken as gospel because they are frustrated.
Consider this example: a player rolls a single die to attack with three Fighters and three Infantry and gets 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. No analysis I can think of on this data (a real math wonk can correct me here) will indicate that the dice rolls as an aggregate show anything out of the ordinary. If the player chose to roll their Infantry first, they will complain that the dice are unfair because they ‘should’ have gotten at least one hit from their Fighters. If they rolled the Fighters first they may be aware that the rolls seemed to have given slightly more hits on average but are very unlikely to complain that the dice are unfair. Player interpretation of the rolls has zero bearing on the randomness of the algorithm producing the rolls.
Anyone who swears that the dice are not sufficiently random is welcome to try the following experiment: play a game and record every dice roll that occurs and then total them up for how many times each number occurs -only-, so for example if you logged a total of 957 rolls you know that a 1 was rolled 342 times. If for example you find that by doing this over the course of several games the expected value of the dice is many standard deviations off then maybe there is something there about the dice being poorly randomized. If the person doing this experiment is also one who swears that these kinds of rolls ‘never’ happen to them in real life, I would also then recommend performing an equal number of real life rolls by hand and comparing the outcomes. Forum posters love to state that such bad luck as happens in A&AO never really occurs to them, but since no person I know has ever actually logged the results of their dice throws playing a face-to-face version of A & A such statements are supposition and not proof.
A subset of posters claiming they’ve ‘proved’ the dice aren’t random like to say things such as ‘the dice are broken because in X games I wrote down the number of AA rolls and AA hit more than Y amount of the time’. The flaw in these arguments is that probability doesn’t care if you’re rolling for AA or not. Players are adding additional layers of outcome requirements that have zero to do with genuine randomness- like AA ‘should’ hit 1/6 of the time or if every battle I fight has 80% odds then I ‘should’ win 80% of my battles. Sticking with the AA example, players complaining that AA outcomes ‘prove’ the dice are broken need to go back and do the experiment to see if the number of 1s rolled over the course of the entire game seems to be about 1/6 of the total rolls or not.
At the start I mentioned I don’t like the dice rolling either. I’m very disappointed only around 1/3 of players (I think, it was pretty low) wished for the low luck option as this makes it unlikely to be pursued by the developers. My own opinion (not fact) is that the algorithm being used produces streaks of results too frequently, giving lots of situations that result in excessive hits or misses. But this doesn’t mean that the rolls skewed too heavily one way or another over the course of a game. Our problem here is that we prefer to have a more even distribution of values over an extremely small sample size (i.e., less than a dozen rolls). I have no idea what algorithm currently developed by computer science gives this result better than the one currently in use by the game. I suspect if there was one the developers would switch to it in a heartbeat. Either way though, the minute you say ‘I want random but I don’t want streaks’ you’ve moved away from a ‘genuinely random’ system. I wrote in another post and I stand by it that nobody playing this game really wants a truly random number generation, they only want one that ‘feels’ random. Be honest- if the dice ‘felt’ right to you, would you care enough about the actual randomness to go into any in-depth analysis on if the numbers would truly be random enough? Anyone who ‘feels’ like their AA is hitting consistently 1/6 of the time should actually be suspicious since it would be odd that such a small specific subset of all the dice rolls in a game happened to have such an even distribution all on its own.
Likewise I don’t understand why players insist that the developers release some set of data for them to scrutinize. Anyone who already thinks the dice are unfair will never be convinced otherwise by looking at some imagined developer data since logic rarely trumps emotion. You can see it already in the posts where people -do- attempt rigorous analysis of the rolling only to be countered by what basically amounts to ‘don’t confuse me with facts, I know what I know’ arguments.
Apologies for the overly long response, and good luck to you with your gaming.
@squirecam Thanks for the tip, I signed up right away. Not sure why Julius also didn’t post in here…
@drdachel said in newbie with a bunch of questions:
- My wife surprisingly is willing to play this online with me.
Oh, and by the way, if you’re with a woman willing to play board or video games with you, especially strategy games, you better be sure you’re treating her like gold!
@drdachel said in newbie with a bunch of questions:
- My wife surprisingly is willing to play this online with me. We played one board game already and online should work better. Her work laptop can’t have anything downloaded to it. For the online game, can she just create steam account, buy game and play “online” or is there software that needs to be downloaded? If not, then we’ll have to do the hotseat scenario I assume.
Steam is still going to download portions (if not all) of the game locally so it wouldn’t be a good idea for a workplace machine with strict rules.
This comment appeared in the dice thread and I wanted to discuss it but it’s not relevant to that particular thread so I started a new one:
@aardvarkpepper @Imperious-Leader “You’re the first and only player (other than myself) that I’ve seen build a German Mediterranean cruiser.”
How exactly would this be more useful than any other naval purchase the Germans might make? You’ve saved a little money over buying a Carrier just to get far less operational capability. Given how the general-purpose advice is to avoid Cruiser purchases as it is, this seems even more risky for a player like Germany that is already gambling when building boats.
@brian-cannon said in PRNG dice support group — and ranting:
@eqqman So sayeth another one of the dice defenders.
Not really, as it happens. I have two major issues with the game that have caused me to quit playing twice: I don’t like being able to play only country a day in a game and then spending 23 hours waiting for my opponent to do something and I don’t like the dice outcomes (for example, I ‘feel’ like Battleship bombardments fail at a much higher rate than 1/3 of the time). The former is hardly a fault of the developers and the latter I am honest enough to admit is an opinion not backed up by any personal analysis of the dice results, it’s anecdotal.
What I -do- defend however are hypotheses backed up by data and real proofs over opinions. Read any post complaining about the dice and you will find a lot of emotion that drowns out all acceptance of the facts. The ‘facts’ usually presented are ‘I and everyone I know had a bad experience (or continue to have a bad experience) therefore the algorithm doesn’t produce a random result’. This is not a proof that withstands any scrutiny but players having a bad time expect it to be taken as gospel because they are frustrated.
Consider this example: a player rolls a single die to attack with three Fighters and three Infantry and gets 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. No analysis I can think of on this data (a real math wonk can correct me here) will indicate that the dice rolls as an aggregate show anything out of the ordinary. If the player chose to roll their Infantry first, they will complain that the dice are unfair because they ‘should’ have gotten at least one hit from their Fighters. If they rolled the Fighters first they may be aware that the rolls seemed to have given slightly more hits on average but are very unlikely to complain that the dice are unfair. Player interpretation of the rolls has zero bearing on the randomness of the algorithm producing the rolls.
Anyone who swears that the dice are not sufficiently random is welcome to try the following experiment: play a game and record every dice roll that occurs and then total them up for how many times each number occurs -only-, so for example if you logged a total of 957 rolls you know that a 1 was rolled 342 times. If for example you find that by doing this over the course of several games the expected value of the dice is many standard deviations off then maybe there is something there about the dice being poorly randomized. If the person doing this experiment is also one who swears that these kinds of rolls ‘never’ happen to them in real life, I would also then recommend performing an equal number of real life rolls by hand and comparing the outcomes. Forum posters love to state that such bad luck as happens in A&AO never really occurs to them, but since no person I know has ever actually logged the results of their dice throws playing a face-to-face version of A & A such statements are supposition and not proof.
A subset of posters claiming they’ve ‘proved’ the dice aren’t random like to say things such as ‘the dice are broken because in X games I wrote down the number of AA rolls and AA hit more than Y amount of the time’. The flaw in these arguments is that probability doesn’t care if you’re rolling for AA or not. Players are adding additional layers of outcome requirements that have zero to do with genuine randomness- like AA ‘should’ hit 1/6 of the time or if every battle I fight has 80% odds then I ‘should’ win 80% of my battles. Sticking with the AA example, players complaining that AA outcomes ‘prove’ the dice are broken need to go back and do the experiment to see if the number of 1s rolled over the course of the entire game seems to be about 1/6 of the total rolls or not.
At the start I mentioned I don’t like the dice rolling either. I’m very disappointed only around 1/3 of players (I think, it was pretty low) wished for the low luck option as this makes it unlikely to be pursued by the developers. My own opinion (not fact) is that the algorithm being used produces streaks of results too frequently, giving lots of situations that result in excessive hits or misses. But this doesn’t mean that the rolls skewed too heavily one way or another over the course of a game. Our problem here is that we prefer to have a more even distribution of values over an extremely small sample size (i.e., less than a dozen rolls). I have no idea what algorithm currently developed by computer science gives this result better than the one currently in use by the game. I suspect if there was one the developers would switch to it in a heartbeat. Either way though, the minute you say ‘I want random but I don’t want streaks’ you’ve moved away from a ‘genuinely random’ system. I wrote in another post and I stand by it that nobody playing this game really wants a truly random number generation, they only want one that ‘feels’ random. Be honest- if the dice ‘felt’ right to you, would you care enough about the actual randomness to go into any in-depth analysis on if the numbers would truly be random enough? Anyone who ‘feels’ like their AA is hitting consistently 1/6 of the time should actually be suspicious since it would be odd that such a small specific subset of all the dice rolls in a game happened to have such an even distribution all on its own.
Likewise I don’t understand why players insist that the developers release some set of data for them to scrutinize. Anyone who already thinks the dice are unfair will never be convinced otherwise by looking at some imagined developer data since logic rarely trumps emotion. You can see it already in the posts where people -do- attempt rigorous analysis of the rolling only to be countered by what basically amounts to ‘don’t confuse me with facts, I know what I know’ arguments.
Apologies for the overly long response, and good luck to you with your gaming.
@brian-cannon said in PRNG dice support group — and ranting:
…we simply want dice that are truly random
Anyone who uses the phrase ‘truly random’ is likely one who will refuse to accept a ‘truly random’ result if it wasn’t to their liking. Everyone on the planet rolling a ‘1’ on a six-sided die at the same time is a ‘truly random’ outcome. All of the ‘dice defenders’ often equate improbable with impossible.
@hirohito22 Been a while since I wrote that post, but UK can send Transport alone to take Borneo at bad odds while all other warships attack the Japanese DEI fleet at 2/3 odds.
@Brian-Cannon said in I do not see any difference as far as a change in dice rolls in this season.:
Devs said they were reverting to a model they had used previously…
Yes, so if you didn’t like it before, it will be the same since there are no changes yet to ranked play dice. The nature of the headline of your post implies you thought things might be different for some reason.
@Brian-Cannon You shouldn’t expect to see any change if you’re playing ranked games, the ‘stabilized dice’ were only supposed to be appearing in custom games.
Not sure why I started thinking about this…
In chess (as far as I know) you only have 1 rating even though there are two sides to play. Yet in A&AO you have a separate rating for each side. Let’s say for the sake of argument you need a 80% win rate to be a platinum player. So how can you maintain an 80% win rate against people who also have to win 80% of the time? Having 80% for one side would seem to imply that the other can be 20% at best. I’m presuming this can only be possible if a loss lowers your score far less than a win does, but it still seems odd.