What percentage is luck involved in a games outcome?

Luck only involves the outcomes of battles.

Decision and strategy of units involved to increase probability of favorable or unfavorable results in battle outcomes.  Do you attack a territory with 1 inf, 1 ftr v. 1 inf, or 2 inf, 1 ftr v. 1 inf?  Or do you use your bomber to SBR instead of support ground troops?  The outcomes of the battles heavily depend on whether you approach the game conservatively or agressively.  Agressive tendencies will usually result in a wider range of possibilities, and increase the probability that expected results occur farther away from the average.  Conservative tendencies will usually narrow the possibilities and decrease the probability that expected results are further from the average.

Both approaches work, and two people evenly matched and skilled players can have totally different philosophies.

Giving up territories to secure board position is another.  Or giving up territories to increase your counterstrike could be another.  With AAR, there is almost no one game’s outcome that mirrors another with an exact board setup.  In chess, probability of battle outcomes does not exist, and a board setup could be the exact as the previous match.

Pagan, good thoughts.  Just wondering if you voted in this poll and if so what % you believe luck plays.

Welcome aboard.

Hail and well met, Pagan!

Just for clarity (as I was one of the main “Equal skill” proponents) I do not believe the game is 100% luck. My view is that luck is only the deciding factor when the players are close enough in skill to allow it to play a role.

As an example, I lost my round 2 tournament game as a result of very poor strategy on my part. By the end of round 3 no amount of luck would have saved me, so luck was not a significant factor. If I were to play myself however luck would play a much bigger role, assuming both of “me” played with pretty equal skill.

Maybe that puts me in the luck=10% category, but fundamentally I just don’t think that the importance of a factor can be measured as a percentage. Rather, you can only look at it in terms of its role in an equation.

Example: the area of a circle equals pi times the radius of the circle. What “percentage” of the area of a circle can be attributed to the radius? Or to bring in two factors, In the case of an ellipse, what percentage of the area of an ellipse can be attributed to its length and what percentage to its width?

If we define game outcome as the result of two factors: difference in skillfulness of play and difference in luck, how can you attribute a percentage to either one? What fraction do you divide to measure this?

If people thought all along that I was arguing for 100% luck then either people aren’t reading my posts or I just am not able to communicate very well.

Luck is always there. Anyone who has ever lost that battle with a <1% likely outcome, knows that. Hopefully, that bad outcome occurred on a battle that was not crucial, but sometimes it does. To say that luck is 100% of a game, is wrong. Even if players are equally skilled, there are different ways to play, different openings, many different choices to make,and many different ways to respond to the small fluctuations in luck that occur (one extra INF here, one less there, that battle went great, but that battle sucked…)

There are definitely games that are completely determined by the luck of the rolls, but those games tend not to last long. Personally my favorite games are the ones where luck is pretty average, or when one side gets really lucky in one area and really unluck in another, resulting in a complete change in the game.

My argument against luck (I put it at about 20%) was because I’m looking at it long term.  Of course in any given game you can have just terrible dice and lose b/c of it, but if you start losing 5, 10, 15 games and say you get terrible dice you might want to start looking at the attacks you are making.

For example, say you have a trading scenerio with Russia where you can attack both Kar and Ukr with 75% to win each battle OR just attack Ukr with a 95% to win.

Hey great, I’ll take the 75% chance to win each, not too bad.  But in reality you only have ~55-60% to win both.  It is not luck that may cost you here it is your decision to do two 75% battles vs. one 95%.  Given the game circumstances that may be worth the risk but you should start to see where this becomes problematic.

Take 3 battles where you have 80% to win each.
( .8 *.8 *.8 ), now you are down to only about a 50% to win all 3.  It is not necessarily luck if you lose a 20% battle here.  It was 50/50 that you’d win all 3 to begin with.

Even 3 battles of 90% (.9*.9*.9) = ~72%.
Add in a 4th battle at 90% and you are down to about 65% to win all 4.  Odds are still on your side but I think 65% success rate starts to near the threashold of whether you want to be that risky (depending on game circumstances of course).

There is also the question of “What do you consider lucky?”
For instance, I may not consider losing a 70-30 battle to be unlucky, heck 1 out of 3 times I’ll lose that battle.  But someone else might.  Of course I’ll be mad that I lost, but should I do the exact same battle everytime I’ll end up on the 70% side waaay more often then the 30% side.

I think a key is seperating the really bad luck from whether a move was bad or really good luck from a good move.

That’s why I have the 20% stance.  I basically think that 1/6, say a trn hits your bom in an attack can be classified as luck.  That’s 16%, so I just round up to 20-25% and flat out tell myself that 20-25% of the games I play I’m not going to win no matter what, I still try to win but… 
Somewhere along the line I’ll lose a key battle where I had a 80%+ chance to win, and poof I’ll lose.

So what I try and do is to try and maximize the 70-80% of games where I do get the middle of road dice (or close to it) for the first 2 rds.  Then leverage any advantage I gained into a long term adv where the number of multiple attacking rds or “risky” battles decreases.

Over the long term you’re probably going to win as many “lucky” games as you lose “unlucky” games, so you have to take the gift wins when you get them but really concentrate on the games where you do get the middle of the road dice early and try to put yourself in a postion to not have to worry about luck later, or limits its impact as much as possible.  Say only do 1-2 major attack (90%+) vs. 3-4 minor (70-80%+) where the odds of success on all diminish.

Sorry, it’s been about 12 years since I took intro to philosophy and informal logic.

I guess what you’re saying is that you can’t make a mathematical equation out of non-quantifiable variables? I appreciate that my formula is a “rough” one and that the factors in this game are difficult to quantify. However, I believe they can be at least roughly quantified (through means such as player ratings), and I don’t much care whether my conclusion is inductive or deductive, as long as it appears to be likely to be valid?

So you disagree with my conclusion that luck is less of a factor (won’t make a difference) in the outcome between a very good player and a very bad player, than it will between two very good players? I don’t really need the concept of “equal players”, that is just the theoretical “pure” scenario. It works as well thinking about players who are roughly in the same “league” compared to say if ncscswitch would play my 7-year-old nephew who’s never played before.

I think the phrases “You don’t stand a chance” and “You’ll need all the luck you can get” etc. testify to the fact that people understand what I’m saying - in some situations you don’t need a lot of luck, in some situations you need a little or a lot of luck, and in some situations no amount of luck will save you.

The “Skill” of sports teams cannot really be quantified, but that doesn’t stop bookies from roughly evaluating their strengths and weaknesses so they can set odds at which they expect to make a profit taking bets. Are there ratings verifiable from a strictly logical view? No. But do they make money on them? Yes.

So, to predict the outcome between NCSCSwitch and my nephew, you would not spend too much time wondering about how lucky my nephew is going to get on his rolls before you decided that NCSCSwitch would probably win.

On the other hand, between the two finalists in the current tournament, whoever they may be, it could be anyone’s guess as to who will win. Both players will probably be pretty good players, so on the basis of “skill” it will be hard to predict who will win, and most people would recognize that the dice have at least the potential to make the difference in that game.

Ergo, the dice are a more significant factor in that game, especially if both players play at the top of their game. But if one of them makes a mistake early on, that could also make the difference.

The fact remains though that playing against my nephew, I could afford to have a few bad rolls. Playing against ncscswitch though I would need consistently average or better dice to stand a chance - I could not afford many bad luck battles. I would be hoping for good luck much more than against my nephew, because I know intuitively that luck will make a bigger difference in that game.

I don’t know if that is inductive or deductive. I do know though that you can’t assign a percentage to the importance of luck.

Philosophically, I can’t prove that my brain really exists in my body, or that I’m not living in a dream. But you pay your money and you take your chance.

Luck is a qualitative factor which can be manipulated quantitively through increasing/decreasing the random probabilty of expected outcomes.

Skill is a qualitative factor which cannot be manipulated.  Strategy is a qualitative factor which cannot be manipulated, except to manipulate luck.

Luck could defined as either good or bad for this example.

Bad luck has the inverse relationship to good luck.  One person’s bad luck is the opponents good luck.  Bad/Good luck occurs when the random outcome of the battle falls outside the range of probable expectations.  When the expected random outcome occurs, we consider this normal.

However, luck as defined above can be manipulated through increasing or decreasing the probability of a normal and expected outcome.  Adding one additional attacking unit can make a big differnce.  Same with leaving one extra defensive unit.  These are options are a part of strategy.  These options in themselves, have nothing to do with luck.  However, should an attack occur, they increase/decrease the probability of the outcome of an attack.

Therefore, these options have nothing to do with luck in themselves, but they can influence the probability of bad/good luck occuring, and hence, no game is 100% luck.

Reading the poll question again, it does say “All things being as equal as possible regarding player skill”. I read this to mean that skill is being defined out of the question. In that case, unless there are other factors present, luck by definition will determine 100% of the outcome.

So the question really is, assuming that skill is not different between two players, what else makes the difference? Is luck the only other factor? The question really is worded as eliminating skill as a factor (even if admittedly this is only possible in theory), so what’s left?

Here are some things that have been put forward:

1. Who makes MORE mistakes?

This really is part of skill. If you have one player making more mistakes, then within that current game they are playing less skillfully, and then you are not discussing the hypothetical raised in the poll.

2. Who makes the earlier mistake?
   Again, within an individual game, this can either be considered part of skill, in which case again you are not answering the poll question. Alternatively, if you look at mistakes as random events that happen regardless of skill, then the timing of mistakes really falls under luck, although not under “dice” luck.

So the question then might be "If skill is equal, what percentage impact do bad DICE have in comparison to other luck-based factors such as timing of mistakes?

3. Who manages their risk better?
   Again, you are simply asking which player has more skill, which is counter to the premise in the question, which is that skill is as equal as possible.

So here is the question that really needs to be answered first:

“Aside from good/bad strategy and good/bad dice, what else contributes to the outcome of an Axis and Allies game?”

If there is nothing other than skill and dice, then by definition if you take skill out of the equation, as the poll question here does, then dice are all that is left.

But is there anything that does not fall under skill or dice? I can’t think of anything other than if mistakes can be considered to have an element of chance.

Maybe it’s purely a semantic debate about whether mistakes are determined by luck or by skill. I’d say that the frequency of mistakes is a function of luck, but the distribution of mistakes is determined by luck. And then of course your level of skill is determined by your good luck in being born with a good brain.

I would simply echo Darth’s comments on this one.

He and I appear to see eye to eye on this front.

The poll question was @froodster:

“All things being as equal as possible regarding player skill”.

I do NOT read this as excluding skill.  Hypothetically two players could be equal skill, or Frood could play vs. Frood, but these are just hypotheticals, not “All things being as equal as possible regarding player skill”.

There is also the interesting issue of the team imbalance built into the game itself.  Playing Axis is extremely different from playing Allies.  You could be much better at playing one side than the other.

Imagine that we have two players, and also that we can accurately quantify each player’s skill on a scale of one to ten.  Let’s say both players have the same levels of skill for all nations.

Example:

Russia 8
Germany 6
UK 9
Japan 5
USA 8

Now, looking at their statistics, it is plain that the players are equally skilled.  Both of them are better at playing Allies than Axis nations by a good few notches.  Thus, when they play each other, the Axis player is at a serious disadvantage.  Equal yet unequal.  Another facet of the game that is part of the equation.

~Josh

Yeah that all makes sense.

Now, does anyone disagree with this though:

“The more similar two sides are in all other respects, the more important dice become in determining the winner of the game.”

In other words, as other differences decrease, the importance of luck increases. Conversely, the greater the other disparities between players, the less critical dice become.

Does anyone disagree with that idea of a “sliding scale” for the importance of luck in different games?

Do you agree that a good player can beat a bad player even if the bad player rolls better dice?

@froodster:

Do you agree that a good player can beat a bad player even if the bad player rolls better dice?

Yes

Except in the RAREST of cirsumstances.