Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 19:13:37 +0100 From: Tournament Headquarters(by way of Robert F. Heeter) Tutorial #4A: Guide to Tournament-Style Combat, Part I *** This tutorial summarizes the combat system. Tutorial #4B explains *** how to use WarBOT and provides a number of very helpful tips for fighting *** effectively. 1. ORIGIN OF THE COMBAT SYSTEM: Like the Hero rules, the Tournament combat rules are designed to prevent cheating while minimizing the amount of reverting players need to go through. Prior to the Tournament Rules (and WarBOT) there was no way of knowing if your play-by-email opponents won their battles fairly, or by reverting. This caused a lot of anxiety and in more than a few cases players were caught seriously cheating. In many groups of email gamers, the de facto standard was basically that you were allowed to "rationalize" any battle if the odds were in your favor, and you could win the occasional battle against the odds if you could reasonably explain that you were really desperate and had to try it, but if you started winning a lot of battles against the odds, people got suspicious, angry, and hostile. Meanwhile, you rarely saw someone mention that they'd attacked and lost, even though even in an attack with >75% chance of victory, you'd expect players to lose up to 25% of the time! Needless to say, it's hard to run a fair tournament if you can't count on players to accept their luck! The tournament rules take that de facto PBEM etiquette and formalize it: for each battle you wish to fight, enter the units into WarBOT, and figure out what the odds are. WarBOT calculates the battle odds and tells you which units are expected to live and die in the battle. (Basically, attackers die unless they have over a 50% chance of surviving, and defenders die unless they have 50% or more chance of living. Ties (50% exactly) go to the defender.) You are then entitled to revert the battle until you get this expected, average, official outcome. (You can do worse if you like, but it's not usually a good idea! If you do better, you simply disband any extra survivors.) 2. MAKING THE COMBAT SYSTEM WORK EFFECTIVELY Important: You have to paste the *entire* WarBOT report (headers and all) into your Turn Report, so that your opponents can check that you actually had those units available, that you got the terrain and unit strengths right, used the right flavor of WarBOT, and didn't fudge the numbers to win a battle unfairly! The header is also important for debugging purposes in case a WarBOT bug rears its ugly head. If there's a mistake in the battle report, it often comes because the terrain was chosen incorrectly, or the wrong "flavor" of Warlords was selected. It's not normally a big deal, but it's essential if there's a rules argument for the Moderator to have the full WarBOT report in order to decide if there was cheating or just a dumb mistake. Players, be very careful to check the battle reports, because a faked battle report is a cheat that might work if you aren't paying attention! Even the smallest battles can have big strategic impacts, so to be completely safe, check *every single battle* that is fought. (Often in doing this you learn things about how to fight your own battles too, which will make you a more effective player.) Cheaters - remember, if you get caught, you're out of the tournament and no one in the tournament is likely to ever respect you again. It's more important to have fun and play fairly than to win. More on this topic in a future Tutorial. Bottom line: Please make the entire WarBOT output public so that any errors get caught immediately and no time is wasted in replaying lots of moves. The game will move faster and everyone will have more fun. 3. SUMMARY OF PLAYTESTING EXPERIENCE: The Tournament combat rules work beautifully in practice. You never have to wonder about that mysterious enemy stack that keeps killing your dragons, heroes, and double-blessed spiders in your super-fortified cities. In every battle you know exactly what the results will be. Furthermore, as the attacker, you have at least a 50% chance of getting a good result on any given run of the battle, so you rarely have to revert more than once or twice to get a good outcome. (If you do better than WarBOT says you should, you just disband your surplus survivors and move on. If you don't disband your surplus units, your opponents will generally catch you and call a rules error on you. If you develop a bad habit of making rules errors, you'll get thrown out of the tournament as a suspected cheater...) However, from a traditional Warlords point of view, there *are* some liabilities to these rules. First, because all battle outcomes are known in advance, the random spirit of the game can be lost, and the game becomes like a very sophisticated form of Chess or Diplomacy. Defenses can be planned that leave you completely invulnerable to attack, and offenses can be planned that are guaranteed to succeed. Traditional Warlords isn't like that. However, even with the luck taken out of the combat system, the game is usually so complicated that something like randomness prevails, and it's very difficult to plan more than a turn or two ahead. That keeps everything interesting, and with no anxieties about cheating, Tournament Warlords is a hell of a lot of fun! It definitely beats the ordinary crush-the-computer Warlords, and it's certainly not a Kasparov-vs-Deep Blue, Chess-style game. Nearly all of our playtesters love it, and many of us no longer enjoy playing the old way anymore! The other major liability to the tournament combat system is that it relies on WarBOT, and it becomes extremely important to understand how WarBOT and the Warlords combat system work, in order to make the best use of your units. This is also true in traditional Warlords play, but it's even more true in the tournament. Optimizing your stacks becomes a life-or-death issue for your kingdom, rather than simply a statistical advantage. We knew this from the beginning, and designed the Tournament Armies to take advantage of it. Nearly every unit has unique combat properties, allowing an expert player to build a "stack for every occasion". The best way to win in the Tournament is to choose your city builds carefully so that you get the best use out of your production, and to choose your fight order and combat stacks carefully so that you lose as few units as possible. Conversely, if you don't know how to handle WarBOT, waste money on useless builds, and squander units needlessly in battle, you can lose big even if you know everything else there is to know about Warlords. Part B of this tutorial is dedicated to providing some examples of how to use WarBOT and how to adapt to the Tournament style combat rules. The full details about battle bonuses can be found in the WarDocs included with WarBOT. Look for the file bonuses.htm or visit http://www.heeter.net/w2home/info/bonuses.html As always, if you have any questions about the Warlords combat system or the Tournament Rules, just ask your Moderator! -- Tournament Headquarters P.S. Those who just want to know how to play and win should move on to Tutorial 4B. But if you really want to know how the Warlords combat system works, as we have figured out and implemented in WarBOT, read on: >Date: Wed, 23 Jul 1997 13:43:52 +0100 >From: "Robert F. Heeter" >Subject: Detailed Battle Algorithm Info (Tutorial 4C) > >Hi Iskander - > >Thanks for writing! > >I sent Yuri Khvorostanov some answers yesterday; I've copied >the message I sent to him at the end. To answer your questions: > >>Questions: >>1. May I receive or download accurate WarBot's algorithm description? >>I saw different texts about it, but I'd like to get more. > >(1) See the message below. >(2) See http://www.heeter.net/w2home/info/battlemath.html >(3) See http://www.heeter.net/w2home/info/battle.html >(4) See http://www.heeter.net/w2home/info/bonuses.html >(5) Email Mike Leung, mleung@uclink.berkeley.edu, since he wrote WarBOT. > He'll send you more information and perhaps even source code if you like. > > >>3. How can I receive or download history of previous practice round >>games have been played by other players? > >See the Remailer archives at >http://www.pixgen.com/elam/warlords/ or >http://www.pixgen.com/elam/warlords/History.cgi > >All of the games listed are tournament games except for >PLBRem and Usher. The best game to read is probably Duel III >or Shades of Hadesha. If you want to learn a lot about the origin >of the rules you should read Duel2. To get a feel for what the >Practice Round will be like look at T01 through T06. (We ran >a "Test Round" as a brief rehearsal for the Practice Round.) > >>I'd like to download archive of .SAV files. (Can I?) > >Sorry, that's a bit hard at this point. If you contact one of >the players involved in one of the games you are interested in, >he might be able to help you. > >>Your answers I can resend to other players which could not explain me. > >No problem! Here's what I sent to Yuri: > > >>Hi Yuri - >> >>To answer some of your questions: >> >>>Iskander [...] also asked me about tournament roules: >>>1) About WarBot calculation mechanics: How it does? >>>What the formula it based on? >> >>The information is in an appendix in the Warlords manual. >>Basically, each of the two units in the battle rolls a die. >>The die is 20-sided for "normal" combat and 24-sided for "intense" combat. >>If the attacker rolls his strength or less, he gets a "hit". >>If the defender rolls his strength or less, *he* gets a "hit". >>If the attacker hits and the defender misses, a hit is deducted >>from the defender; if the defender hits and the attacker misses, >>a hit is deducted from the attacker. Otherwise the roll is done >>over again. >> >>Each unit has two "hit points"; in other words, it takes two hits >>to kill each unit. >> >>Over the past few years we worked out the mathematics of how to >>compute the probabilities of all possible results of a given battle. >>(See http://www.heeter.net/w2home/info/battlemath.html) >> >>What WarBOT does is to use the information in the algorithm above >>to determine a "state table" indicating the probability of all possible >>final states of the battle. It then reports those results and >>indicates which units are expected to live or die according to >>the tournament rules (only units with over 50% chance of survival >>get to live). >> >>>2) About winning condition and estimation of battle results? >>>He also interested in exact equation for this. >> >>There's not an exact equation that you can plug numbers into; >>at least not one that works for all battles. The basic source >>code for the WarBOT probability calculation is available with >>either the Mac or IBM basic battle calculators. Those are on >>the web at >> >>http://www.heeter.net/w2home/info/battle.html >> >>>I seems I've already seen this formulas on your WL2 pages. >>>Hence, I've advised to Iskander look on your site. >>>Also, I told him about my glance to this problem. >> >>Sounds good! >>