December 3rd, 2014, 10:35 pm
The kids are playing a game with their toy soldiers. They're using these rules:FUBARThe kids are playing that a small group of talented heroes are wading their way through hordes of evil henchmen. To make it fair, how many evil henchmen should there be for every talented hero?Simplified, the rules are a bit like:For each soldier, roll a dice to see if he's activated. If activated, shoot at an enemy - roll dice to see if they hit.If a soldier is hit, roll a dice to see if their armour saves them. Else remove them from the game.My starting point was that each toy soldier should be worth the expected number of times it hits an enemy. So this would be a bit like doing discounted cash flows. My projected 'cashflows' could be approximated as p(soldier is activated)×p(soldier hits target).I'd then discount these by the probability that the soldier hadn't been killed immediately before that 'cashflow'. That seemed OK, assuming everyone had an equal likelihood of being hit every turn (I thought I'd get away with that assumption, as both armies are supposed to be equal at the beginning of the game). That way, when working out relative values between soldiers, the unknown discount rate cancels out. That then seemed to get messy when armour came into it. With armour, a soldier has a different discount factor. It seemed to me that I then needed to know the probability of getting hit. Hopefully I'm missing something obvious.Then there's the 'range' of the weapon. My thinking is that this should effect the discount rate of just the first few 'cashflows'. If you have a rifle with a long range, then you're going to stand well back at the beginning of the game. That way you get to make some hits before the enemy moves to get you within their shorter range. Beyond that, I reckoned a lot of the advantage had probably gone.I haven't really thought through the 'suppression' or vehicle rules yet. One thing that's bugging me though is how to quantify the fact that a vehicle can move faster. It means you can get troops in and out of combat faster, but how would you quantify the benefit?Any ideas welcome!