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

@Frood:

PS I hope the dice gods curse you mightily, UPS5224621124104939. And watch out, I am on rather close terms with some of them…

Man, I would not want to be on the blacklist of someone who has the power and ability to write code to skew random results based on a UserID.

Don’t worry Frood, you do a great job and all your work is very much appreciated.

People just get used to a certain look.  Plus dice rolling is a touchy subject to begin with.  And now there is easy access to a creator of a popular dice rolling program.  Look out!

I think you have fixes for non-emails (your game log) so I’m not sure if that is too much of an issue, plus DAAK is notoriously bad at emailing at least from my experience.

I would like to say something about the OOL upgrades/changes:

I think some of the issues are, that while it is nice to customize the OOL or put in what you want, that the majority of the battles are land battles and 95%+ of the time you use standard OOL.  (inf, rt, arm, ftrs)

Which means your “old” form or standard form is great for most if not all battles as is.

Sure there could be a bomber but in cases where the OOL is not “standard” it is a disadvantage to the defender to say what he will lose before hand.  We do it for convenience in some games here but I’ve had very recent games where I would have denied an early request for OOL and made the attacker commit, attack, and see how many hits he got before I say what I lose.  Which If I understand some of your changes, might defeat the purpose since he’d need to wait for the defenders response anyway.

I’m certainly not going to tell someone I’ll lose my Bom in the first wave before he even types out his turn and commits to battle just to make it easy for him when he does a dicey roll so he can paste it in there.

Now for Naval battles things can get really screwy and usually players can see a big battle coming and again will puposely not declare an OOL.
I’ve seen players lose BB’s over trns cause they won the last round of battle, but you won’t see any player say my OOL for this battle is 1-hit BB, 2nd hit BB, then trn, just to make it easy for the attacker to do his battles.

My point is, that almost any battle where you need to do a Customize OOL you will need input from the defender which will slow do the battle process anyway.  These battes also tend to be the “important” ones and at that point no one wants to give away any strategic hints prior to the battle.

I often say “I’ll give you my OOL when/if you attack”, but sometimes I even wonder if that is giving too much away and will purposely make no mention of it in other cases, so I don’t encourge/discourage an attack I may/ or may not want.

My final thougts are, there is value in customizable OOL, but how much when probably 95% of battles are “standard” and those that aren’t are usually important enough where the defender may not wan to tip his hand.

I can see a lot of value in the Sim aspect of people wanting to see some alternatives in what happens if they lose this units first, etc.  But that would seem more like what I defender might do when trying to decide what he’ll leave in a territory during Non-Com.

And you are doing a great job and keep up the good work!

Darth

Short version…

1.  e-mail glitches happen.  Fortunately they are rather uncommon from Dan’s server.  The down side of that is that, since they are so uncommon, when they DO occur, people expect there to be a reason for it, so they go looking for one.  And site changes are an obvious place to try to pin the blame.  That is the downside of being more reliable than DAAK… EVERYONE expects THAT dicey to screw up.

2.  Many people dislike change.  Rapid change in particular.  They want TIME to get used to new concepts, new things.  Folks who ahve been gaming for pretty much any amount of time online have used a Dicey that was little boxes that you put a number in, and then click a button to run it.  When a new version comes along that is different, it takes folks time to get used to it.  Some never will.

I think that sums up most of the past several dozen posts.

One last thing…
Frustration happens.  Gods knows I have been a bit frustrated with the losing streak I have been on of late (about 90% of my past 10 games).  And when you are TRYING to improve, and trying to get better, and there is no recognition of that (using my example I keep losing), the frustration can boil over.  The good news is that, for most folks, once it boils over, the pressure is relieved.  That frustration can be even greater when it is something that is your personal creation that is creating the pressure, especially if it is pressure from something outside of you and your creation.

So um…  yeah… what Darth said.  :wink:

Dan-

I apologize for my brash comments, they were born out of frustration.  I do appreciate all your efforts, in fact I think your dice roller is far superior to any I’ve seen, that’s why it sucks when it stops working.

Dan, did you delete your rant?  That’s too bad it was a good one!  :lol:

Hey Dan!

If you are looking for another opportunity to rant at someone….  :-D

I know you are just sitting around with nothing to do besides listen to whining from ungrateful users so I thought I would give you something to do. :-D

I like both the text box entry format and the individual unit boxes but as I use each method I realize that what I am doing is mousing then keyboarding, mousing then keyboarding.  It would be really nice if I could add or delete units just by mousing, especially when I’m using your awesome website :mrgreen: to examine the odds of potential attacks.

Is it possible to have the text entry blank and the individual boxes on the same page and have increment/decrement buttons next to each unit type?

This would allow a cut and paste text string entry to then be modified by a series of “what if I brought an extra tank, fighter, battleship” clicks.

So, uh, since you are just sitting around doing nothing but waiting for my brilliant ideas, I was wondering if you would have this up and running by Friday?

:evil: :evil: :evil:

WHAT!!???

How dare you say that to ME?  :-D

Anyway…  I can see how needing javascript would slow things down.

I guess I will just have to live with this inferior product… <sigh>:wink:

Keep up the good work and if I come up with any more boneheaded ideas I’ll be certain to demand you implement them immediatelly.  :-D</sigh>

I tried running 1 sub vs 1 sub in AACalc 2.0 and it would allow combat to occur.

I tried various combinations of abbreviations (as per the example) with no success.  I verified no check boxes were checked (not chicken subs).

Any ideas?

Hmmm.  I left out the key word “not” in that first sentence.

I was running a sim of 1 sub 1 bmb v 3 tran and AACalc 2.0 was not recognizing the existance of the sub.  I added one to the defender side and still no subs.  I removed everything except the subs and still no subs (no combat).

I shifted to AACalc 1.0 and the subs were recognized just fine.

If it happens again I will book mark it.

I could prolly write up a thingy in JavaScript.  Someday.  Lol.