Frood AACalc Dicey / Sim / Odds Calculator: Updates and Opinions

[frood]

I think I see the problem - IE6 seems to substitute the dashes in the OOL with spaces or underscores. Now that I’ve narrowed it down to an IE6 issue it should be an easy fix. Thanks Rob.

[Jennifer]

There is a reason true techies and gamers don’t use MicroShaft’s Internet Exploder 6.

[frood]

Yeah, but good techies should test their web pages in IE6 too…  :-P

[newpaintbrush]

@Jennifer:

There is a reason true techies and gamers don’t use MicroShaft’s Internet Exploder 6.

I use it.

When I’m testing for interbrowser compatability.

Tee heez, it explodes, that sounds fun!

[frood]

I think I fixed it - one little line was still operating on the assumption that OOL entries should be separated by spaces. Which makes me wonder why it worked at all in Firefox…

[Guest]

Because Firefox is the SHITE!

Actually, it simply is a more lenient set of coding, with lots of user added (open source code) redundancies that prevent the errors that make IE such a beotch to use.

[frood]

I’ve added a new subpage to AACalc - now you can submit blind bids via http://frood.net/aacalc/bid/

[frood]

Okay some more changes:

• I think I finally fixed OOLs in IE. Hooray!
• If a  battle is run round-by-round and one side runs out of units, the round # and units are reset to make setup for the next battle easier
• In averaging mode, a new probability graph has been added for net IPC loss differential (Defender losses minus Attacker losses). This provides a better picture of the economic probabilities of a battle.
• Changed the options to use radio buttons. While taking more space than drop-down lists, this has the advantage of showing all the available options at a glance and allowing single-click changes.

[newpaintbrush]

I want German cheerleaders.

Uber-hawt.

[frood]

Like this?

FATASS Cheerleaders on German TV

[newpaintbrush]

Those aren’t German . . .

[Jennifer]

For an instant I didn’t like the radio buttons, but they’re already grown on me.

When you hit clear form does it now clear everything, including rules, number of rounds, number of attempts, or is it the same?  I’d prefer it reset everything to default myself.

[frood]

No, right now the Clear button resets units, OOL, e-mail, territory, and any special abort conditions, AA gun etc…

What it does not touch is the radio buttons. The reason for this is that presumably a player playing eg. LL Classic will not want to change that option every time.

[Jennifer]

To be honest, if that’s the reason that the radio buttons don’t change, in my most humble, girlish opinion, I believe that the e-mail address shouldn’t clear nor should the number of rounds field.  I’d use the clear function much more if I didn’t have to retype the recipient’s email address everytime.  :wink:

[jsp4563]

Any chance of Incorporating NA’s into the dice roller?

[frood]

Jenn, I see your point about the e-mail address field, but why would you not want the # of rounds field to reset? You mean the “Starting round #”, right? If you are starting a new battle, you would want to start from round 1 again, no?

I think now maybe I will enable the e-mail field to survive the “Clear” button, esp. as I have disabled e-mail sending for the evaluation-type modes. So you can run the sim without accidentally e-mailing your opponent the battle you are considering.

JSP, I could perhaps do some of the simpler NAs, but I think a lot of them would be too complicated to integrate. Can you mention a few you’d want to see?

[OutsideLime]

Ooh, NA Calculator….

(All my suggestions are LHTR)

Easy ones:

Russian Winter ® - Inf defend at 3
Fortress Europe (G) - Art Defend at 3
Radar (UK) - AA hits on 1 or 2
Most Powerful Battleships (J) - BB attack and defend at 5
Dug-in Defenders (J) - Inf defend at 3

Slightly more complicated are:

Atlantic Wall (G) - Inf defend at 3 for first round only,
Wolf Packs (G) - Attacking subs get +1 to their roll if there are at least 2 of them in the combat
Luftwaffe Dive-Bomber (G) - Fgrs attack at 5 for first round only
Banzai Attacks (J) - Inf Attack at 2, must be alone except for shore bombardment
Marines (US) - Inf attack at 2 in first round only
Superfortresses (US) - Bombers have only a 1/12 chance of being shot down by AA instead of the normal 1/6.

Difficult would be:

Joint Strike (UK) - UK and US units attack together, with each power’s units using only their own NAs
Kamikaze Attacks (J) - suicide fighters with specific targets.
Kaiten Torpedoes (J) - suicide subs with specific targets.

… and the rest of them are not really Combat NAs, so don’t merit inclusion here.  Multinational defending forces will screw up the numbers, since some units will get NAs while identical units from friendly nations will not.  Eg, American Inf defending a red territory with Russian Inf during Russian winter.

~Josh

[DarthMaximus]

Now that I’ve actually used the roller for a few games, I gotta say good job Frood.

I like the change you recently made with the clearing out the battles when they are over.

@froodster:

I think now maybe I will enable the e-mail field to survive the “Clear” button

That would be great.

[frood]

Thanks DM.

Here’s a thot on how to incorporate the NA’s - rather than having checkboxes as wargamersclub has, I would increase the number of unit types. This will enlarge the form somewhat, and perhaps I’ll have to split the units into three lines (Land, Air, Sea).

So eg. the land units line would have Inf, rwInf (Russian Winter Inf), awInf, (Atlantic Wall Inf), Mar (Marines), etc.

This would also solve the multi-national defence / joint strike problem because you just enter the Russian Inf in rwInf and the US inf in the regular Inf field etc.

The OOL naturally will get somewhat longer as well.

The increased number of units might slow the script down a bit  :-P, and I might have to axe the 10,000x option, leaving just 1,000x and 5,000x.

As for Kamikaze/Kaiten - complicated, and also stupid NAs IMO. I’d also have to add a field to enter which unit should be targeted.

Update: my sim had a record number of hits last month, just shy of 11,500! Maybe I’ll put an ad on the page again… During my first such cash grab, my Google Adwords earned… wait for it… $1.56! w00t!

[Jennifer]

I meant the number of rounds to go.  But I guess that doesn’t reset now that it’s a radio button.

And yea, now that I’m exploring NAs, a LHTR and a OOB NA options would rock. (I’d say your best pet is to flag them with radio on/off so you don’t need to make the grid bigger, but that’s just my old HTML 3.2 coding speaking.)