Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: Zsolo007

My belief is that there is no such thing as randomness. You just need to sufficiently understand the system to see how it works.

The 'problem' is not the machine, it's the man inside. You can have well built and thought out carriers if the crew uses the available tools improperly (sinking of Taiho for example).
Man happens to be a quite complex system. I believe that on a certain level it can be understood and predicted, but! There's a thing called free will. And that's where the 'real problem' starts. I don't think there will ever be machines that are able to tackle that one.

So in my mind randomness=free will :)

On the other hand I also believe that current games use random elements for things that the computers are not fast enough to model/calculate.

(Was unsure about posting this, I believe this to be a philosophical 'problem'...)

quote:

ORIGINAL: DOCUP

Gary

These are my thoughts on the matter. No ill feelings to anyone on what I type here.

We will never know if combat is random. We will never get a redo (ie never have the same exact people, weapons, weather, plans experience etc in a second battle). I myself have gotten mad at the computer over the randomness of some battles.

In my belief, there is more than just quality and quanity in battle. I would like to believe in quality, leadership, training, espirt de corp, experience, and something that is call Murphy's Law. History has shown many battles and wars won that contridict these thoughts. Ie Vietnam, Russian Afghan war, American Rev war under trained, under quality troops etc beat the well trained, equiped troops of there enemys.

As Herwin stated you cannot simulate combat, whether its in a video game, training mission. To many variables that can't be determined until the bullets start flying. It is then that leadership, training, experience, heroism (espirt de corp) and quality of equipment, tatics, murphy etc will decide the outcome of the battle and war.

A long post short. There are variable that can't be programmed because of them being unknown or unable to be put into the program.

Doc

quote:

ORIGINAL: Gary Childress

How random and unpredicatable is war? My belief is that victory or defeat in war, especially on the macro scale is USUALLY attributable to certain predictable factors added together and not so much to pure randomness.

Take Midway: was Midway a fluke or were the Allies pretty much destined to win based upon things like carrier design, damage control effectiveness, the ability to warm up aircraft engines below deck and things of that nature? If Midway could be "reloaded" 10 times, how many of them would have been victories for the Allies regardless? Was Midway really as much a "lucky break" for the Allies as is commonly believed?

I've been thinking about randomness as it is commonly used in strategic scale computer games and the more I think about it, the less sense it makes to me to introduce radically divergent, random outcomes to combat. WWII was largely a numbers game. Germany and Japan lost because in the aggregate they failed the numbers game (both in quality and quantity), not because they were unlucky in combat. Success in computer simulated combat should be mostly attributable to who has the better quality or quantity and who uses their forces more wisely, not to blind luck of the die roll.

Maybe I'm wrong but it seems to me that computer games that rely on wildly random combat results are inherently flawed to some extent.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Gary Childress
Take Midway: was Midway a fluke or were the Allies pretty much destined to win based upon things like carrier design, damage control effectiveness, the ability to warm up aircraft engines below deck and things of that nature? If Midway could be "reloaded" 10 times, how many of them would have been victories for the Allies regardless? Was Midway really as much a "lucky break" for the Allies as is commonly believed?

quote:

ORIGINAL: Gary Childress

How random and unpredicatable is war? My belief is that victory or defeat in war, especially on the macro scale is USUALLY attributable to certain predictable factors added together and not so much to pure randomness.

Take Midway: was Midway a fluke or were the Allies pretty much destined to win based upon things like carrier design, damage control effectiveness, the ability to warm up aircraft engines below deck and things of that nature? If Midway could be "reloaded" 10 times, how many of them would have been victories for the Allies regardless? Was Midway really as much a "lucky break" for the Allies as is commonly believed?

I've been thinking about randomness as it is commonly used in strategic scale computer games and the more I think about it, the less sense it makes to me to introduce radically divergent, random outcomes to combat. WWII was largely a numbers game. Germany and Japan lost because in the aggregate they failed the numbers game (both in quality and quantity), not because they were unlucky in combat. Success in computer simulated combat should be mostly attributable to who has the better quality or quantity and who uses their forces more wisely, not to blind luck of the die roll.

Maybe I'm wrong but it seems to me that computer games that rely on wildly random combat results are inherently flawed to some extent.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Gary Childress

How random and unpredicatable is war? My belief is that victory or defeat in war, especially on the macro scale is USUALLY attributable to certain predictable factors added together and not so much to pure randomness.

Take Midway: was Midway a fluke or were the Allies pretty much destined to win ...

Stratford, Connecticut, U.S.A.

"The Angel of Okinawa"

Home of the Chance-Vought Corsair, F4U
The best fighter-bomber of World War II

quote:

ORIGINAL: PaxMondo

Regarding the OP .... what is certain is the Gary (Grigsby) is a big beleiver in randomness and always has been.  I would characterize it by saying it is his hallmark as compared to other developers.  Not to suggest other developers don't use randomness, they do, simply not to the extent that Gary does.

As to reality ... there are any number of major historical events that sure seem to be pure chance.  My favorite is Mao's escape.  So, there seems to be at least some basis for high randomness at even high levels of conflict.

quote:

ORIGINAL: crsutton

The outcome of the war could not have been random. Given the economies of the Allies vs that of the Axis powers the end result was almost a certainty.

The outcome of any single event, yes. The bullet might hit or miss.

quote:

ORIGINAL: brian800000

There needs to be randomness in the game because the player's control is so abstracted.

Take an engagement that matches a few destroyers against a fleet with cruisers and battleships. Obviously the destroyers are overmatched. But as Taffy 3 showed, if the destroyer commanders are extremely aggressive and have a few breaks go their way, and the other side is confused and not determined, they have a chance.