Mathematics of A&A

I don’t know about all that math stuff but there are some interesting delimnas[sp] involved. Buy a fighter or 4inf. If thinking about attacking both addup to 4. But how do you factor the fact that the fighter can land somewhere else after battle? Correction the fighter attacks at 3. Even so, the flexibility of the fighter and the value of it, goes beyond simple math. I undestand your interest, but considering the flow of a particular game, I don’t see much use.

Maybe guest ment a ftr’s movement won’t effect the attack, but it could effect the casualty choices since planes can’t land in or capture a new territory, their retreatability or the prospect of being able to use them rd after rd after rd, where a tank may get taken out on the counter strike, but this has more to do with AI stuff then straight up odds calculating.

Anyway this brings me to my question, are you looking to just create an odds calculator or do you have a greater purpose in mind, meaning trying to create something that could then be used to make an AI?
Or do you want something to be able to just figure out the least amount of each unit I need to bring into a certain battle?

I’m just a little confused on what your looking for, cause it seems like you have the odd’s calculator stuff down pretty good.

DM has it about right. As it might be fun or interesring to develop an odds calculator, the decision to use a particular mix of weapons depends much on what position you want to be in after the attack. For instance, attack with fighter or armor? Attack with fighter , and the armor could be used to reinforce elsewhere. Attack with armor, the conquered territory will have more defense. My small brain can’t imagine an odds calculator takung these considerations into account.

I only play the board game, so my little system is very crude, but, I’ve found, reasonably effective for the purpose. When I’m considering an attack or a defense I simply add up all the unit values for the appropriate circumstances and compare that to the enemy’s. What I mean is like, for instance, 2 INF & 2 ARM attack 4 INF. The attackers attack at 2-at-1 (INF) and 2-at-3 (ARM). The defenders defend at 4-at-2. If a unit’s attack/defense value is considered as “points”, then the attacker has 2 “attack points” for the INF, 6 “attack points” for the ARM, for a total value of 8 “attack points”. The defender has 8 “defense points” (4 units defending at “2” each) so in this battle the odds would theoretically be even. Works pretty well with very large battles, less well with smaller ones–but it’s the big battles I need an “odds calculator” for anyway so there you go. In smaller battles, experience and intuition serve just as well…

I know this is gonna really bug the odds wizards out there but I’m only posting it because its a system any dope (such as myself) can use on the fly in a live boardgame situation…

Ozone27

I do a similar thing, Ozone. However, I add up all the points and divide by 6 to determine how many hits i score, and do the same for my opponant, mentally subtract units on each side for my kills, rinse and repeat :)

Hey that’s a really good system ozone! It’s simple and it works! I’ve done calculations by writing out odds of winning like 2/3 for each bomber attacking, 1/2 for each tank attacking, and added up each sides’ chances of winning by counting every total more than one (say, 4/3) as a hit. If there are any fraction odds left you carry them over to the next round. Carrying on the battle counting hits for both sides, you seem to get the same results as ozone’s method, for example, 4 armour and 4 inf attacking 8 inf is an even battle.

wehrmacht you made a very good point when you said that the strong get stronger and the weak get weaker. This is something many people don’t see in A & A. Because of this a probability calculator does not actually help very much in deciding what to do in a battle. I downloaded a small program from somewhere once that would give the attacker the odds of victory.

Several years ago my brother, math prof. at U. of Chicago, wrote a simple program that was by far the most useful I have ever seen for A & A. You entered in the units on both sides and told the computer how many times to run the battle. It then created a histogram showing the number of times every result occured. From this information you could easily figure out that after the attack you there would be a 40% probability that you would have 5 units left and a 80% probability that you would have between 6 and 4 units left and so on. This type of information is much more valuable to the player than just there is a 75% chance you will win. Unfortunately, the pc crashed and burned before I copied the program and have never put forth the effort to write one myself. It was not hard to do and it only took him a couple of hours to write. We also decided that we could only use the program during the game after the battle had been fought, because the information was too valuable.

Indeed, if it can be made such a program will be very valuable in a computer-game context, because it’s much more useful to know how many units you’d have left than just whether you would win or not. Personally, though, I would need a system one could use on the fly in a real-time situation since I only play the board game. If someone could come up w/ something like that it’d be extremely worthwhile…

Ozone27