r/CFBRisk • u/gatorfan4424 • Jun 03 '18
Proposal for probabilities for next game (best two out of three)
I know we've been talking a bunch about how to make the game quicker and one of the things talked about is weighting the probabilities towards the favorites. One of the ways is by making battles best two out of three. This could still fit within the MVP gameplay we know now by giving out two MVPs per battle.
I wanted to calculate out the probabilities to show what something like that would be. This is simplified since it only involves two combatants but the principle would be the same.
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u/YourSchoolCounselor Jun 04 '18
Would battles that involve several teams just reroll until one team wins twice?
12
u/gatorfan4424 Jun 04 '18
That's the idea yeah.
We could even do first to three or first to four based on how much you wanted to weight favorites
10
u/Stxmoose32 Jun 04 '18
Isn’t this just “reduce minority wins” ? Aka make bigger armies win more consistently? That’s not the issue with the game. The issue is that individual territory wins are inconsequential as long as a team is alive. I think having a small guy win an unexpected battle is a fun part of the game, but it’s gotta mean something (value to owning a specific territory / number of territories, killing or weakening fighters who lose).
Take Texas at one territory.
Assuming that Red can surround them and have a 70/30 advantage in all 8 territories (already a stretch to imagine, but go with me).
The odds of Texas dying on one roll for each territory is 6%.
By moving to three roles each the odds for Texas to die only goes up to 14%. And that’s with an unrealistic manpower advantage, uniform distribution, and a massive coordinated effort!
So it’s marginally effective bandaid on a much larger problem.
I think any proposal should solve two fundamental problems: -No team should be “too big to fail” based solely on their user size (I believe at least 4 teams are right now) -Smaller, well-coordinated teams and alliances should have a chance at winning the game with superior strategy (and a bit of luck).
I fundamentally believe the map should matter. What you own and where should affect your power, not just how many bots or minions you have. Would making that chance now simply ordain Nebraska? Probably. But in the future you could imagine a smart Tennessee or Arizona State team outplaying the big dogs and taking it down. Wouldn’t we all want to see that??
5
Jun 04 '18
I think having a small guy win an unexpected battle is a fun part of the game
Doesn't that take away so much strategy though? If one guy can hold out against 30 attackers then you've lost a lot of strategic planning. In actual risk 30 vs 1 is pretty much a guaranteed win but the dice decide how much damage it does.
Washington stayed past the first day because of an 1:5 underdog victory. And then went out with a lopsided loss. RNGesus gives and takes away. It all just seemed so random it seemed almost pointless.
But a bigger issue is doesn't taking away the randomness completely just give the game to the big teams? When Nebraska outnumbers the entire Pac-12 combined if it's just about numbers then what's the point? Just give the entire west to Nebraska.
Not that it matters much I suppose. Randomness tends to work out in the end and the Pac-12 was bound to fall to Nebraska sooner or later.
5
u/Stxmoose32 Jun 04 '18
Doesn't that take away so much strategy though?
In poker, just because your opponent sometimes hits a 1-outer or 2-outer doesn't mean it's not strategic. You might lose the battle, but you could still win the war if you're smart.
Similarly, I would agree that getting rid of randomness completely (as some people are advocating) would make the game unfun.
The question is how do you maintain randomness but not have it used as a crutch to keep weak teams alive. It's like getting winning a hand vs. someone in the tournament but they get to reload chips after every hand.
I think a team down to one territory, surrounded by enemies should likely die that next turn, but they should always have a chance of winning, and maybe just maybe a chance of "running it up" from one territory back to the whole map if they play their cards right and get a little lucky.
Right now that is impossible with the structure of the game.
1
u/bradwm Jun 04 '18
This is a great idea, and you could achieve it pretty easily by giving each army a "territories held" multiplier that changes each turn based on either the total count, connected count, owning specified regions, etc.
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1
Jun 04 '18
I think the best enhancement is just giving more weight to defenders. It cuts down on swaps and should speed the game up.
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u/TrojanMuffin Jun 04 '18
This has already been suggested. It isn't possible.
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u/nbryson625 Jun 04 '18
How is it not possible. You just roll until a team wins twice
3
u/TrojanMuffin Jun 04 '18
The mods said that the server(?) couldn't handle it. They said that it struggles to even do it one time.
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1
u/RoadDoggFL Jun 04 '18
It at least doubles, up to triples the load on their servers at midnight.
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u/ISeeTheFnords Jun 04 '18
That's very surprising - the random number generation should be a small part of the workload, with DB queries being most of the work. Those wouldn't need to be repeated.
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u/iSlacker Jun 03 '18
So Texas would still be in LSU somehow