First of all, the chit distribution is not listed in the rulebook.
Thus, when you inevitably lose a chit, your game becomes skewed and
you have no way to fix it.
Dirtside II is a science fiction micro-armor game published by Ground Zero Games that uses chit pulls for damage resolution.
There are two irritating things about this approach.
First of all, the chit distribution is not listed in the rulebook.
Thus, when you inevitably lose a chit, your game becomes skewed and
you have no way to fix it.
Apart from buying a new set of chits from GZG ofcourse. Well, to be fair, the chit lists are on a number of Dirtside fan sites, including a number of computer programs for the task and variant systems.
However, the far more serious shortcoming is the nagging feeling that no one really knows the odds. There are 119 chits of which up to five are pulled at the same time. I tried brute-forcing the solution, but back then my workstation just choked on it -- after all, there are 21,916,472,760 ways to pull five chits out of 119.
Enter APL. At the time I was working at Statistics Finland, and a number of my collegues were simply in love with APL. This proved to be a good subject for them to prove what APL could do while netting me a usable result.
I was stunned. The APL program (which I've sadly lost, but it was really pretty simple) churned out the results in a couple of minutes -- out of a first generation Pentium workstation.
After getting the raw distribution results I wrote a small program
(which I still might have somewhere) to digest them according to Dirtside
rules. Then I entered it all in an Excel
sheet, calculated the actual probabilities for all results and wrestled all
that to fit in a d100 table. Well, two tables since infantry targets use
different rules.
It should be noted that while the d100 tables naturally contain rounding errors, you can get the pure, exact numbers in the big Excel sheet.
Note: The results are based on the actual rules as printed, even though in my humble opinion they do not make sense in all cases.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time someone has actually calculated the various damage probabilities for Dirtside II. And probably the last. Enjoy.
| Excellent | guest | May 14, 2007 15:43 |
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We are planning to have a go at this in the next few weeks and I was obviously looking at the probabilities. While the various specials and hit probabilities were easy to do, the chits was clearly going to be a nightmare - you just save me loads of effort. |
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Copyright 2003-2021 Mikko Kurki-Suonio
Sucks!
