The Way of the Troll

[GoIndy]

I did have another thought,
Assuming the Knights and Trolls meet up, no matter who wins, (from what I see from you guys analysis), is going to get hammered.  This is where that regeneration is really going to matter, because a one box Knight that survives is going to be begging for some accuracy type cardage or 1 point smoking.  The troll won't really have that problem.

Kind of like how I think healer mages if the game goes on for a bit will totally rule all, a troll in a long engagement is going to to be tough to handle.

[elgin_j]

I say this all respect to Zelc, but my results seldom matchup with his combat simulator.  When I test out units, I get out the pen and paper and annotate the results to see where the 'break points' are, then I compare them with some actual dice rolling and compare them to my game experience.  Its seldom that those results match up with the simulator. 

So maybe I'm way off base here, but my feeling is that the mathhammer of his simulator is missing something that is crucial in context.  Given my working with the formula and how it can produce stuff that doesn't accurately capture the context of the table top, I'm thinking the same thing is happening there.

I'm willing to accept that to an extent.  BGFW is not just about straight matchups - the symbiosis of units in an army and the matchups they face can often be critical to their effectiveness.  However, the results do show that it isn't a foregone conclusion in the manner you suggest and, putting aside hyperbole for effect, there remains a burden to show that they really are as bad as suggested.  I am not yet convinced and whilst I accept they might not be a popular unit I find that as a long-time Hawk player neither Scouts nor Pikemen ever feature in my armies and so that is not damning evidence in and of itself.  So, what I'm saying is that while I accept that Trolls are underpowered, I wonder how much of the criticism of the unit is relative to the army in which they find themselves and the personal play preferences of players.

[Hannibal]

Well, I'm not talking about situations of context like cards and army abilities an maneuver (although that is something no formula will really ever be able to catch).  I'm saying that I don't often get results like Zelc's calculator.  In fact, I almost never do.  I don't really have the time (or frankly the inclination) to dig into the nuts & bolts of his calculator, but all I can say is that starting from the end stage of playtesting of Alexander vs Persia, his calculator produced results that never matched up with the ~120 playtest games I did over two years.

Certainly cards and abilities will affect those results, but even my pencil and paper of pitting Macedonian phalanxes vs Greek hoplites (i.e. no cards or abilities) matched up with my experience but not his calculations.  So I really take it with a pinch of salt.

My experience of Trolls vs things like Knights comes closer to 70% win for the Knights than 50% win for them.  Some folks can accuse me of cooking numbers to match my experience, but its worth noting that I came to the same numbers as some folks in terms of damage inflicted.  Its just, I took the next step of accepting that numbers may average, but dice do not, and that they operate in discrete elements (5 points of damage or 6 points, not 5..  From there, I extrapolated the real-world outcomes, which others did not, perhaps because it did not support their hypothesis.

[Kevin]

...or that you messed up.

For example:

If you're assuming that, then it's equally likely to assume the Knights will do 6 pts of damage on turn 2 (since they do 5. bringing that first red check on Turn 2.  But it also lowers the damage inflicted to 1 pt by the Trolls on turn 3, which means no Red check for the Knights and another Red check for the Trolls which they will fail 60% of the time

.

Trolls have 7 green boxes, not 6.   So any claim that Knights doing 6 damage by the end of turn 2 will put Trolls into the red is simply wrong, and further calculations which were based on that assumption are junk.

(You technically say "6 damage on turn 2" but I think you meant "6 damage by the end of turn 2" as claiming that the Knights' turn 2 attack--6 dice at 5s and 3s--should yield 6 damage is plain silly.)

[Hannibal]

...or that you messed up.

Certainly!  I make mistakes all the time.  However, in the case of Zelc's calculator vs playtesting, if I made mistakes and came to incorrect conclusions, they were ones to which you also consented.

Although, its worth mentioning that during the Pila debate when Zelc's calculator showed Libyan Foot to be on par with a non-pila 275 pt unit, you were equally happy to question the results and parse the data in search of evidence to support your conclusion.  Just saying, glass houses and all...   

Trolls have 7 green boxes, not 6.   So any claim that Knights doing 6 damage by the end of turn 2 will put Trolls into the red is simply wrong.

(You technically say "6 damage on turn 2" but I think you meant "6 damage by the end of turn 2" as claiming that the Knights' turn 2 attack--6 dice at 5s and 3s--should yield 6 damage is plain silly.)

Probably.  Or heck, maybe I just full-on spaced it.  Been known to happen.  Suffice to say that this conversation has moved into the "repeating ourselves" stage.  And one of the nice things of being just-a-gamer is I can play however I wish without having to follow rules I don't really like so as not to skew playtesting, etc.  Meaning, you can call me wrong, I can say the Status Quo Monster lives another day, and we can merrily agree to disagree.   


Sometime in the future, I'll test out the Regeneration-every-turn combined with the no-Red-Cge penalty and report back.  For the moment, I'm moving on to skirmishers.  A battle report to come soon.

[Kevin]

Although, its worth mentioning that during the Pila debate when Zelc's calculator showed Libyan Foot to be on par with a non-pila 275 pt unit, you were equally happy to question the results and parse the data in search of evidence to support your conclusion.  Just saying, glass houses and all...  

Just to set the record straight about my supposed "glass house."

It's true that I initially thought that pila were too powerful for their cost and needed to be cut to (3) x/5.  Then Zelc posted a simulation showing that Libyan Fail were slightly under evan odds to beat a simliarly-costed vanilla unit.  Then the very first reply on that thread after Zelc's post was me changing my mind and no longer supporting downgrading the initial pila attack.

To summarize:  I had an opinion; evidence was presented which strongly suggested that my opinion was incorrect; I immediately changed my opinion.

Now, it's true that later on I suggested that the model needed a mathematical correction factor to account for a fast kill being worth more than a slow kill.  Bohan then reran the numbers and showed that with that correction factor taken into account, pila-throwers were within a few % of vanilla units (in fact, slightly below).  At that point I was 100% happy with the status quo.

...and that's all she wrote.

[Hannibal]

Just FYI...I can't see your links.  I don't eat lunch at the cool kids' table anymore. 


(Although, perhaps we should move this one off this thread, lest we go even further off thread.  PM me if you want.)