You know what I am talking about obviously! Funny how a misplaced ; can seem so deadly yet 100 of lines of code ready to roll back database transactions in case somebody kicks the power cord in the middle of a batch update never get noticed by the higher ups. Well until a fortune 500 company sues you because their database is corrupt
Knowing how much you will the battle with determines if the enemy can successfully counterattack you or not or even if its financially worth it. So you either go into a battle thinking “go so big I cannot be counter attacked” or you end up ‘dead zoning’ a territory then you only want to use just enough to take it. So if you are using 4-5 air units combined with 2-3 land units to clear out 2-3 enemy land units you want to win and have only 1 land unit left while your air units fly away. Winning a battle like that at the cost of a few airplanes is not success. In many battles you know the enemy can only counter attack you with a small land force, so you want to the battle 80% of the time with just enough forces that the enemy is 80% likely to take a larger IPC cost to counter attack your surviving force. I don’t mind winning the battle with 4 tanks and 3 infantry left knowing s/he is 72% likely to win a counterattack. The enemies 2 infantry and 6 fighters can no doubt counter attack me and win. I lose 29 IPC most of the time, but s/he loses 26 or 36 or 46 pretty much equally and a great chance of losing even more IPC to win the battle.
The other bar chart of value in AACalc is the IPC differential. Again, winning battles where the enemy loses 10 infantry and you win losing 4 tanks, 4 fighters and 2 bombers is going to lose you a war. It’s nice to enter a battle and determine not only the odds of success, and the distribution of likely outcomes vis-a-vis number of units remaining and lost but also the distribution of IPC differentials in various battle outcomes.
Again, using AACalc as an example running 1000 iterations of the battle of 20 tanks versus 14. There is a bottom section titled “Defender IPC losses in excess of Attacker IPC losses:”
This bar chart shows likely outcomes of the difference in IPC lost in the distribution of likely outcomes.
Maybe a new window or set of tabs where one one tab/window could contain the summery of the battle, what units started, where, other labels maybe, a second tab with a chart of likely outcomes as far as what units are lost and remaining, and a third tab with the distribution of IPC outcomes in the battle. That would capture the functionality of AACalc but in a much more modern GUI. Being able to resize the window and chart dynamically is great. Once you do it once you will re-use that code for every project. Being able to launch 2 or 200 windows is really no different in complexity but is really impressive having unlimited windows of information.
