Chances of Winning

All things being equal (knowledge, skill, etc) is there be a 50% chance of victory for either player

  • Yes

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • No

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    0
I voted "no". I've played in a campaign, run a tournament, run multiple demos and mega-battles, played almost every fleet in the game, and designed my own rule set (before I discovered ACTA).

What is the source of the problem? Some ships are simply too weak or too strong for their PL. One of the mantras repeated over and over again is that you can't compare ship A vs ship B because the balance is only seen across whole fleets. If that's the case, why have a points system at all? If ship A costs me 1 Battle point but does less for my fleet than another ship or group of ships that would cost me the exact same amount, why would I ever take A?

If you want an example, look at a Poseidon vs 2 Avengers. Sure dropping the Poseidon costs me the +3 Command, but in exchange I get an additional ship for soaking initiative, the increased redundancy of having two ships instead of one (so a single crit can't shut me down completely), better Hull values, more firepower, and I can get my fighters out faster!

But what's even more wrong is if you compare a Poseidon vs an equal value of Corvans. Yes they're two different fleets, but again what's the value of a points system if not to make sure you and your opponent are playing with roughly equal forces? I only get half as many fighters (assuming 2 Battle Points), but they're all deployed at the start of the game, and I have 8 ships with Stealth, better speed, better maneuverability, and each with marginally better firepower than the Poseidon. Again, I lose Command +3 and now Fleet Carrier, but in exchange I get 8 Scouts.

Who'd take 8 Corvans you ask? Think about the much feared 5-Raid all-Sagittarius tournament fleet. Now think of what 15 Corvans could do to that fleet given their Stealth, Speed, maneuverability, etc. Sure they couldn't make use of their Scout against the Sag's, but who cares? Every Sag that misses its Stealth roll has that missile launcher shut down for 2 turns. Add to that the fact that (thanks to SFOS's rather squirrely VP system) my entire fleet is worth fewer VP than the Sag fleet, and I think Mr. EA is going to have a very bad day.

Now, I will fully admit that taking a Poseidon all by itself isn't really realistic since the Poseidon should be the anchor of a larger fleet. The point here was to look at what I get for spending that War point, and there-in is where the problem lies.
 
The issue that needs to be reinforced is that every fleet should have a resonable chance to win a given battle. 40% chance to win is acceptable. It doesn't have to be 50-50, but the closer it gets to 50-50 the better for mongoose as a whole. The more races that have a chance of getting a victory in a given battle, the more races people will tend to buy. I love the Drazi figures. Asthetically they are awesome, however I will never buy them because of how the race was constructed. On average if you are playing against a average experience level player you will win significantly less than 40% due to the severe arc restrictions on the weapons. Thus I will not put my $100 into a box set for a race that I won't play with since I have a very small chance of winning with.

Having a game balanced within + or - 10% of a even odds battle allows for the flavour of the game and still gives everyone a decent chance of victory.


Dave
 
Davesaint said:
On average if you are playing against a average experience level player you will win significantly less than 40% due to the severe arc restrictions on the weapons. Thus I will not put my $100 into a box set for a race that I won't play with since I have a very small chance of winning with.
Of course, you could take some time and devote some effort to learning effective tactics with the Drazi, but whatever floats your boat.

Wulf
 
different fleets of course WILL be harder to use, which is just like having different levels in a computer game, this seems perfectly acceptable in Doom and Quake, so should seem acceptable in another game. The league as smaller entities should be harder as however advanced, they don't have the pure resources to throw at ships unlike the EA for example. and the shadow Vorlon issue is being fixed, as Wulfs Playtest shows, the shadows are very hard (yay)
it is again down to inter fleet matches (ok, yes i complained about narn, as my 9 consective losses have come against many races - minbo, drazi, ea, dilgar) however I always fancy their chances against ISA and Vorlons which is odd... however this post will go on for some time yet :) we just all want to be right....
 
hiffano said:
The league as smaller entities should be harder as however advanced, they don't have the pure resources to throw at ships unlike the EA for example. and the shadow Vorlon issue is being fixed, as Wulfs Playtest shows, the shadows are very hard (yay)
To be fair, I was playing 10 Armageddon level Shadows where the scenario called for 10 War level, and with no couterbalancing addition to the Army of Light! The changes will make the Shadows (and Vorlons) harder, but exactly HOW hard in a balanced scenario is another thing.

I'll be trying to get AndyG to replay this after we get the final draft of Armageddon.

Wulf
 
Wulf Corbett said:
Davesaint said:
On average if you are playing against a average experience level player you will win significantly less than 40% due to the severe arc restrictions on the weapons. Thus I will not put my $100 into a box set for a race that I won't play with since I have a very small chance of winning with.
Of course, you could take some time and devote some effort to learning effective tactics with the Drazi, but whatever floats your boat.

Wulf

Actually Wulf, the Drazi player in our group has tried all of the tactics you have suggested on the forums, and still has a less than 40% win total. I am not going to get into the discussions we have had in the past on this. I am pretty sure I know what changes need to be made to the Drazi to make them born again hard, but right now I consider them one of the weakest races out there.


Dave
 
I look forward to hearing the report :) I didn't realise, I thought you had balanced it, I was truly scared ....
 
I would be quite interested to know exactly how many battles fought it takes to make conclusions on what fleets can *never* beat other fleets.

The very first ACTA game I playes was 2 pt Battle - EA vs Minbari. I was EA. I was introduced to Stealth. I lost. Badly! I barely scratched the hull of the Minbari player's Sharlin and only one of my ships survived to tell the tale of my incompetence (by leaving the board). If you asked me at that point I would have said that I didn't stand a chance in hell of winning that supposedly "balanced" game...in fact I did :) However, having had more practice I can hold my own against the boneheads and then some. Maybe there are some mismatches (especially at some PL levels) but I've certainly not felt (apart from that first time!) that I can NEVER win.

Re: Shadows vs. Vorlons
Q. Can Vorlons do All Stop and Stop and Pivot SA? I'm assuming they can't as then I can't see how the forward arc thing is much of a problem...also, how about using more fighters vs. Shadows? I know from experience Shadow Ships are quite vulnerable to fighter swarms which can also be used to steer their ships into your capital ships F arc...
 
Hash said:
Re: Shadows vs. Vorlons
Q. Can Vorlons do All Stop and Stop and Pivot SA? I'm assuming they can't as then I can't see how the forward arc thing is much of a problem...also, how about using more fighters vs. Shadows? I know from experience Shadow Ships are quite vulnerable to fighter swarms which can also be used to steer their ships into your capital ships F arc...
All Stop & Pivot! is not one of the permitted list of Vorlon SA in SFoS. Fighters are effective up to a point. The point at which you realise you've been pounding that Shadow Ship with 24 Flights of fighters for 4 Turns, and he's still in perfect nick! As of the Tournament List Shadows (which still aren't hard enough according to most people), Shadows just have too many Damage points to die by fighter fire within a single lifetime...

Wulf
 
If someone said this, ignore it, I didn't read all the responses.

Maybe part of the problem is that some of the fleets lack diversity. If you field EA, you WILL have a selection of ships from which to put together a decent fleet. They have great variaty in their strenghts and weaknesses.

While the Centauri have a great deal of interceptable weaponry, they do have a number of good ships with beams to defeat highly defensive ships.

Now look at Vorlons. Almost all vorlon ships suffer from the same design flaw, forward arc, low manuverability. They don't have X ship for X roll and Y ship for Y roll like the EA, or some of the others do.

The Shadows don't suffer so badly from this because their weaknesses aren't as blatent and exploitable.

So, maybe it is nessacary to give mroe diversity to some of the fleets, allowing them to engage opponents in a larger spectrum.
 
Hash said:
I would be quite interested to know exactly how many battles fought it takes to make conclusions on what fleets can *never* beat other fleets.

Thats the point of the thread. If there is a voice for specific matchups that seem to be one sided then an adjustment may be necessary. Hence the reason for posters to post the fleets they use and the fleets they face...

Also, not all abilities are equal. Manueverability is pretty important in this game, even more so if your ship is limited to specific arcs.

I33tpenguin makes a good point that maybe a few different designs may help certain fleets. The only question then is, are we getting farther from the feel of B5 for the sake of game play and this is what the designers I would think have always had to weigh....
 
B5freak said:
What is the source of the problem? Some ships are simply too weak or too strong for their PL. One of the mantras repeated over and over again is that you can't compare ship A vs ship B because the balance is only seen across whole fleets. If that's the case, why have a points system at all? If ship A costs me 1 Battle point but does less for my fleet than another ship or group of ships that would cost me the exact same amount, why would I ever take A?

Huge +1 there. But with the cavet that You do have to take it in the context of a fleet. For instance scouts and bombardment ships are typically weak 1 on 1 by in a fleet are worth it.

However in some cases races can lose a game just on the PL level roll. (does anyone really want to fight minbari at war right now?)
 
So, maybe it is nessacary to give mroe diversity to some of the fleets, allowing them to engage opponents in a larger spectrum.

Alternately, for races like the Vorlons that rely on a very limited number of ship types, how about making those ships more functional. For example, if the design intent is for the Vorlon Heavy Cruiser to sit back and pound the enemy while the Destroyers or Transports guard its flanks, how about giving the Cruiser's weapons a bit more range and the escorts a bit more maneuverability?

Likewise, if the intent is for a ship to be a good generalist, how about making it capable of actually functioning all by itself? The Hyperion and Omega are good examples. Throughout the series we saw these ships deployed all by themselves, and the fleet gathered to stop Sheridan was composed of nothing but Omegas from watching the episod, but would you ever build a fleet of nothing but Omegas?
 
Geekybiker said:
However in some cases races can lose a game just on the PL level roll. (does anyone really want to fight minbari at war right now?)

I would second this statement for certain fleets at certain PL's. I would like to think that you have a chance no matter what the PL.
 
however I believe this is part of the balancing mechanism in campaigns, that some fleets are horrendous at some levels.
 
I don't think its a case of balancing out all the fleets. If you continue too far down that road then eventually all the ships will just become generic variations of each other with the only difference between races being the name of their ships and their shapes. Who wants to play a game like that?
A different approach is to look at the victory conditions for the game and try to come up with a system that works based on the strengths and weaknesses of the various races.

As an example, I have a historical wargame on my shelf which is based on the air war in Vietnam. One player plays the Americans and gets hordes of aircraft but his opponent playing the NVA gets some SAM batteries and at best a handful of fighters. In a straight shoot-out fight its impossible for the NVA to win but they gain victory points for simply disrupting the american air raids not necessarily destroying their aircraft.

Historically there are alot of cases of asymmetric warfare like this with one opponent superior to the other whether in terms of numbers or technology. Returning to babylon 5 you can apply the same logic. As an example, having an EA battle against the Minbari based solely on victory through destroying ships doesn't really cut it. We know the Minbari are vastly superior with their all-round arced beam weapons and stealth. I recently bought the Earth Minbari War book and although i haven't played the scenarios in there yet on a brief read through there are a few scenarios where the Earth Alliance player wins if ANY of his ships survive the battle with the minbari forces. Sure as the EA you can't win in a blaze of glory sweeping the minbari from your sky but you can still win through clever tactics and sheer tenacity. Going back to historical games for a mo' i have a world war 2 pacific theatre strategy game which uses the same kind of idea and works excellently. The japanese player faced with an evermore powerful US forces has to basically survive until the end of a number of game turns to win the whole game.

What i am trying to say is that with the different races i wouldn't want everyone to have an equal chance of winning based purely on their ships being reasonably equally matched. I'd much rather have a scenario based system where if i am playing the Minbari player i can win by charging in with my superior ships and wholesale wiping out vast amounts of the Earth Alliance or equally if not more technically satisfying by playing the Earth Alliance where I can win with my meagre and outclassed Earth Force by simply holding off the superior Minbari for a certain length of time etc.
 
hiffano said:
however I believe this is part of the balancing mechanism in campaigns, that some fleets are horrendous at some levels.

Is this fun though? If you know your fleet is weak at a certain PL you will always strive to avoid that PL. Your opponent will always strive to get that PL. It's not a guarantee you wil get a specific PL but the odds are there to help make it happen. In addition, by building this in, this is what causes the inequality of fleets at equal PL's and therefore is what skews the PL system towards one fleet over another making matches "less equal".
 
Thinking about this, i just had an idea pop into my head! Maybe someone else has already thought of this and posted it. But if not here goes...

How about an additional victory point addition based on your opponents initiative bonus? The initiative bonus i think is a fairly good indicator how hard each fleet is and therefore would be a good reflection of the difficulty in fighting them.

So if you are playing EA against the minbari the Earth player automatically gets 4 VPs (minbari+4 initiative) whilst the minbari player gets 1 Vp (EA +1 initiative).

Might need some tweaking up and down by a factor say double the initiative bonus or whatever to really make it a worthwhile bonus but still its an idea.
 
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