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Is the game getting too complex?

Discussion in 'Access Guide to the Human Sphere' started by Space Ranger, Oct 30, 2018.

  1. inane.imp

    inane.imp Well-Known Member

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    TBF the default is you're supposed to know that before building your list.

    This is one reason that I've started advocating tournaments with very similar missions such that you could conceivably do all of them with a single list (eg. BTV + Frostbyte + Frontline). This allows your second list to be tailored for table or opponent rather than mission.

    I do agree that you kinda need to accept compromise points costs formalas: in most games, on most tables, in most matchups this is an appropriate cost.

    BUT I don't think this is accurately reflected across the board. Take CC 14-16. In game terms the situation where any CC in that range will matter is vanishingly slim: vs anything likely to put you in CC you're usually either rolling for a Crit or hoping they roll extremely low. But it's priced as if it actually matters.

    Mimetism is the opposite: because that trooper has mimetism the likelihood of them getting into a BS FTF is higher (because players use the unit for its strengths). This in turn means that the impact of mimetism on the game is higher than would be expected based on simply the number of profiles with mimetism.
     
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  2. Hachiman Taro

    Hachiman Taro Inverted gadfly

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    The solution really is over time to decrease the weight of trying to price the skill / stat for it's usefulness and increase the weight of pricing the entire model based on its frequency of use. Which is a good potential use of the list data CB collects from the OTM. Has to be done skillfully and with some good assumptions of course, but at least it hopefully reflects a closer to real average situation, taking into account all the myriad of things you couldn't possibly accurately account for trying to predict (or even playtest).
     
    #702 Hachiman Taro, Feb 4, 2019
    Last edited: Feb 4, 2019
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  3. inane.imp

    inane.imp Well-Known Member

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    Sure, but that requires a realisation that something appearing in 95% of all lists is not a normal distribution.

    Edit: interesting aside, you'd end up with different prices for vanilla and sectorials if you did that... which is interesting... and might price fireteams appropriately.
     
    #703 inane.imp, Feb 4, 2019
    Last edited: Feb 4, 2019
  4. RogueJello

    RogueJello Well-Known Member

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    Agreed. Further the practical guarantee of CC being B1 makes CC boosts less useful than BS boosts. It really feels like anything that's not a CC monster should not be paying for CC.

    That's been a thing for a while, at least for Military Orders, where some of the Spec Sgt profiles have an additional +1 SWC tacked on. Not sure if this is because of the utility, or for fluff reasons.
     
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  5. Mahtamori

    Mahtamori Well-Known Member

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    Agreed on the CC issue. It wouldn't be such a big deal if there weren't so many similar units and so many factions across which similar builds will eventually pop up making one or the other clearly favourable simply because of these extra costs.

    Only the OS Spitfire+MSV2 profile has extra 0.5 SWC tacked on, unless you mean vanilla PanO.
     
  6. meikyoushisui

    meikyoushisui Competitor for Most Ignored User

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    Usually this is to discourage profiles that might be too cheap/strong otherwise, though it is used in a kind of strange way generally. You'll notice a lot of camo lt have SWC taxes in other armies. It makes them less of a braindead choice IMO.
     
  7. RogueJello

    RogueJello Well-Known Member

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    Correct, different prices in Vanilla vs MO, in reference to this comment "you'd end up with different prices for vanilla and sectorials if you did that".
     
  8. toadchild

    toadchild Premeasure

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    Currently prices only vary in SWC costs, but there are definitely troops that are optimized for sectorial or vanilla play, and don't find favor in the other.
     
  9. Hachiman Taro

    Hachiman Taro Inverted gadfly

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    Yeah, sort of depends on the assumptions I guess - like your assumption could be that a profile needs an acceptable pick rate in vanilla OR sectorial rather than vanilla AND sectorial. I did a little work on this for another game and quickly found that determining the assumptions to make was the hardest bit.

    The idea that CB always follow a fixed pre determined formula and never vary it seems a bit outdated though, esp since they've adjusted pricing at times without changing the profile (eg Hospitalers).
     
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  10. toadchild

    toadchild Premeasure

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    I've been playing since 2nd Edition, and as far as I can tell, the price formula gets at least small tweaks at every book release. The issue is that they don't always go back and retroactively apply the changes to existing troops. But if you had a good enough feel for things, you used to be able to spot trends in cost/ability ratios based on which book a unit was from.

    The current release style upends that a bit, but even so, you make a valid point that sometimes a unit gets a points change while similar units see nothing. This implies one of several possibilities: the formula is getting an ever increasing number of special case discounts that not all units trigger, the formula is being updated but not always reapplied to all units simultaneously, or they are making by-hand adjustments outside of the bounds of their official formula.
     
  11. RogueJello

    RogueJello Well-Known Member

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    Honestly, I hope that it's that they're making by hands adjustments outside of the official formula. The formula sounds like a good idea for getting a decent idea of where something stacks up, but it's very possible to need to adjust that based on the rest of the force it's going into, and how those things synergize.

    For example, if Ariadna got a pitcher it should be a heck of a lot either cheaper (because they can't use it as effectively as more hacker rich factions), or a heck of a lot more expensive (see the Wardriver's high SWC cost) because they can't get hacking stuff as effectively as other factions.
     
  12. Section9

    Section9 Well-Known Member

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    Well, yes and no. You really should know your tables before you build the army list, except for tournaments. And I'd like to see tournaments posting pics of their planned tables beforehand.

    But when you can reliably say "players are more likely to put their big guns on high BS units" you can get away with costing BS increases based on the effect they have on the big guns. It's an acceptable and easy-to-do simplification in your points formula. Yes, it does mean that basic rifles/shotties overpay a little for being on a high-BS platform. But in terms of reducing the number of variables in your points formula, it's invaluable.


    That's called hand-adjusting prices, and CB really doesn't like that.



    More like a not-so-subtle hint that it's either too good or has no good competition. No, those are NOT the same statement. "No good competition" can still mean "least bad option"!


    I think we can still fix the pricing formula in general, mostly because Frenzy/Impetuous is entirely too cheap, even if a trooper is in Vanilla.


    With all unit profiles being online now, they can fix that problem. Army is run off of a database, so make unit price a calculated field instead of an entered field! With that, tweaks to the pricing formula would be reflected across all armies instantly.
     
  13. RogueJello

    RogueJello Well-Known Member

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    If they do that, anybody who can read javascript can probably pull the entire points formula out of army6 with a little work.
     
  14. Section9

    Section9 Well-Known Member

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    OK, that's a reasonable issue. How hard would it be to have an offline database with the unit price as a calculated field and then update that to the online Army database? (I'm asking because I'm a very weak computer programmer. I can unify spreadsheets to import by hand, but I suck at actual database work!)
     
  15. toadchild

    toadchild Premeasure

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    I usually build lists I want to try and then look for an opportunity to play them, rather than cooking everything up on the fly.
     
  16. RogueJello

    RogueJello Well-Known Member

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    Honestly, I'm not sure how worried CB is about the formula leaking. From what I can tell it's almost an open secret right now anyway.

    However, it's not a big deal with go from an offline datasource, (say a database, or spreadsheet, or a file) and put just the results into Army6. To be frank, I suspect they already probably do this, since I have never heard about points or stats being different between Army and the PDFs when they're published. If they're smart, they probably have one source that they use to generate everything once, rather than manually typing everything in.
     
  17. Wolf

    Wolf https://youtube.com/@StudioWatchwolf

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    I think we know they're not using a real database themselves to back the Army application, because otherwise they wouldn't be having difficulties with sorting out the Fireteam attributes. Also, there's a very peculiar approach to storing your lists ('Local' meaning in your browser, and ITS meaning in their system somewhere, but both of which are weird, and the former being like something we thought was usable in 1996!).

    Those things would be straightforward if they were using a database, because whole point of using a database is to obviate those kind of problems. You don't use them to give yourself extra work, you use them to reduce the difficulty of managing the job you have.
     
  18. Section9

    Section9 Well-Known Member

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    This is CB we're talking about! Given some of the odd typos we've seen, I think they're using manual (Manuel?) data entry...
     
  19. Sabin76

    Sabin76 Well-Known Member

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    I couldn't find one with subtitles, but I think most have seen this, right?

    [​IMG]
     
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  20. RogueJello

    RogueJello Well-Known Member

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    Maybe I'm missing those times when it's happened then. It really could be done a number of ways, but I've yet to hear of a typo for anything involving a number, such as stats, points, swc, etc. Do you have a specific example? Location of the typo really matters for this sort of thing.
     
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