Just now, Kieransi said:

No, it was my brother, my dad, myself, and a few of my brother's high-school friends. My dad lost his whole army trying to take Siberia and take over all of Asia.

That kind of stuff is why I hate Risk.

7 minutes ago, Kieransi said:

I think it was slightly different than your scenario. If I recall correctly, it was like 25 or so attackers and 2 defenders, with the attackers withdrawing once there were only two of them.

Either way, Risk is a super frustrating game.

Yeah. For kicks I'll see what 25v2 works out to when I get home tonight and have access to my scripts.

Axis and Allies handles combat better in that regard, overwhelming numbers actually helps.

7 minutes ago, MajorJuggler said:

Axis and Allies handles combat better in that regard, overwhelming numbers actually helps.

I mean, overwhelming numbers helps in Risk, too, in that you have so many waves to send in.

No one expects 37 million-to-1. That's something like the entire attacking army being lost in a massive earthquake chasm.

I love Risk.

On 5/28/2018 at 6:32 AM, Chucknuckle said:

Look at it this way: you've used up like a lifetimes worth of bad luck on those dice. It should all be smooth sailing from here on out!

That exact attitude is why some people fly or drive into Vegas for a weekend of gambling, and walk out. ?

5 minutes ago, PanchoX1 said:

I love Risk.

Lord of the Rings Risk is superior - much better game play and an actual guaranteed soft endpoint.

2 minutes ago, direweasel said:

Lord of the Rings Risk is superior - much better game play and an actual guaranteed soft endpoint.

but only 4 players, right?

1 minute ago, PanchoX1 said:

but only 4 players, right?

Oh, yes, that is correct. So if you commonly have more, that could be an issue.

Welcome to X-Wing! A slightly glorified Dice Game we've all slapped the veneer of "tactics" and "strategy" and "podcasts" over to convince ourselves that the game is, at it's core, a good competitive game.

Any game where it is DICE versus DICE to resolve anything is going to be ridiculously luck-skewed. But of course, then it's harder to justify the money we've spent on this, so we listen to podcasts, read strategy forums, and slap more coats of veneer onto this pig so that when we win, it's because of our excellent flying and brilliant decision-making, and when we lose it's because of those damned dice!


In reality, in competitive X-Wing you need to be LUCKY and LUCKY and GOOD to win a big event. All the best on table decisions in the world won't matter if your opponent has hotter dice (esp at key moments). Of course, dice luck isn't the only luck you need. You also need luck in the random pairings, where you need to avoid your worst sorts of match-ups as much as possible.

Show me anyone who wins a big X-Wing event, and you've found someone who made good decisions but also probably got super lucky at multiple moments in the day.


tl;dr: as much as we try to treat X-Wing like a competitive strategy game, you can't perform well at big events without getting really lucky (or, conversely, avoiding getting really unlucky).

3 minutes ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

Welcome to X-Wing! A slightly glorified Dice Game we've all slapped the veneer of "tactics" and "strategy" and "podcasts" over to convince ourselves that the game is, at it's core, a good competitive game.

Any game where it is DICE versus DICE to resolve anything is going to be ridiculously luck-skewed. But of course, then it's harder to justify the money we've spent on this, so we listen to podcasts, read strategy forums, and slap more coats of veneer onto this pig so that when we win, it's because of our excellent flying and brilliant decision-making, and when we lose it's because of those damned dice!


In reality, in competitive X-Wing you need to be LUCKY and LUCKY and GOOD to win a big event. All the best on table decisions in the world won't matter if your opponent has hotter dice (esp at key moments). Of course, dice luck isn't the only luck you need. You also need luck in the random pairings, where you need to avoid your worst sorts of match-ups as much as possible.

Show me anyone who wins a big X-Wing event, and you've found someone who made good decisions but also probably got super lucky at multiple moments in the day.


tl;dr: as much as we try to treat X-Wing like a competitive strategy game, you can't perform well at big events without getting really lucky (or, conversely, avoiding getting really unlucky).

Then how come I can roll much better than my opponent and still lose badly

Well, for me, crappy dice are the norm. In fact, at my last tournament, I went 0-5 dropping the sixth match. I was so mad that my dice weren't working at all that I haven't and won't play 1.0 games anymore...ever. I would love to see a redesign of the dice to at least reduce the chances of total/near total blank outs. I won't get what I want though, so I'll try 2.0 and if the crap luck continues, I'll just sell my collection and retain my sanity.

30 minutes ago, Jeff Wilder said:

I mean, overwhelming numbers helps in Risk, too, in that you have so many waves to send in.

No one expects 37 million-to-1. That's something like the entire attacking army being lost in a massive earthquake chasm.

Right, the point being that in Risk your army's combat power is linearly proportional to the size of your forces, whereas in Axis and Allies (and X-wing for the most part), your army's combat power is proportional to the square of the size of your forces. If you have 30 guys in Axis and Allies, then they each roll a die with a chance to hit. In Risk all it gets you is more meatshields. I also have a script to calculate Axis and Allies combat, I'll have it calculate the absurd impossibility tonight of 2 beating 30, just for kicks.

18 minutes ago, direweasel said:

Lord of the Rings Risk is superior - much better game play and an actual guaranteed soft endpoint.

If you like Lord of the Rings Risk, then I highly recommend War of the Ring Second Edition, which is a far better game. It's currently #2 ranked war game on BoardGameGeek, and #5 ranked thematic game (was #1 thematic until it was dethroned by Pandemic Legacy).

3 minutes ago, MajorJuggler said:

If you like Lord of the Rings Risk, then I highly recommend War of the Ring Second Edition, which is a far better game. It's currently #2 ranked war game on BoardGameGeek, and #5 ranked thematic game (was #1 thematic until it was dethroned by Pandemic Legacy).

I've been told in the past that I would like it, I definitely do need to check it out. Thanks!

58 minutes ago, MajorJuggler said:

Yeah. For kicks I'll see what 25v2 works out to when I get home tonight and have access to my scripts.

Axis and Allies handles combat better in that regard, overwhelming numbers actually helps.

I love Axis and Allies.

Back when my dad was in college and completely broke, he bought the original Milton Bradley one for $40. He said it was kind of worrisome to spend that much money on something that wasn't tuition or food because when he graduated he had literally no food in the pantry. But he never regretted it! After X-Wing, that might be the game I've spent the most time playing.

The original is still my favorite. I know the devs for the later ones said they like tanks defending at 3, but I always liked the trade-off of having to decide whether you want to attack or defend.

Of course there's also a good deal of luck in that one too. My best moment was when as the USA I left a transport stranded so two Japanese bombers attacked it. They both died and the transport lived. At the time, we did the odds, and they were very low.

46 minutes ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

Welcome to X-Wing! A slightly glorified Dice Game we've all slapped the veneer of "tactics" and "strategy" and "podcasts" over to convince ourselves that the game is, at it's core, a good competitive game.

Any game where it is DICE versus DICE to resolve anything is going to be ridiculously luck-skewed. But of course, then it's harder to justify the money we've spent on this, so we listen to podcasts, read strategy forums, and slap more coats of veneer onto this pig so that when we win, it's because of our excellent flying and brilliant decision-making, and when we lose it's because of those damned dice!


In reality, in competitive X-Wing you need to be LUCKY and LUCKY and GOOD to win a big event. All the best on table decisions in the world won't matter if your opponent has hotter dice (esp at key moments). Of course, dice luck isn't the only luck you need. You also need luck in the random pairings, where you need to avoid your worst sorts of match-ups as much as possible.

Show me anyone who wins a big X-Wing event, and you've found someone who made good decisions but also probably got super lucky at multiple moments in the day.


tl;dr: as much as we try to treat X-Wing like a competitive strategy game, you can't perform well at big events without getting really lucky (or, conversely, avoiding getting really unlucky).

Paul Heaver must be really lucky to make it into the bracket year after year.

28 minutes ago, MajorJuggler said:

Right, the point being that in Risk your army's combat power is linearly proportional to the size of your forces, whereas in Axis and Allies (and X-wing for the most part), your army's combat power is proportional to the square of the size of your forces. If you have 30 guys in Axis and Allies, then they each roll a die with a chance to hit. In Risk all it gets you is more meatshields. I also have a script to calculate Axis and Allies combat, I'll have it calculate the absurd impossibility tonight of 2 beating 30, just for kicks.

This has always been a question that's been nagging at the back of my head for your Math-wing calculations. You're looking at something akin to Lanchester's Square law right? Do you have to make any adjustments to the equations when you're dealing with a 3x3' X-wing mat with obstacles, limited range 3 firing range, and the arcs themselves? How often is it full volley vs full volley etc?

30 minutes ago, Glucose98 said:

This has always been a question that's been nagging at the back of my head for your Math-wing calculations. You're looking at something akin to Lanchester's Square law right? Do you have to make any adjustments to the equations when you're dealing with a 3x3' X-wing mat with obstacles, limited range 3 firing range, and the arcs themselves? How often is it full volley vs full volley etc?

Yes, it is essentially Lanchester's Law. The resulting "power curve" equation assuming exact focus fire is slightly different than Lanchester's solution, since he assumed the armies can be dissected into an infinite number of small components, vs X-wing's discrete number of units that continue to put out damage until they are totally dead. (The resulting equation is not published in my old thread, only an approximate curve fit.) But at a high level yes the approach is the same.

Most of what you describe can be modeled as changing a ship's firing duty cycle, which is a function of player skill and also arc type. Fundamentally, a ship's firing duty cycle and efficiency are linked together. Obviously if you get more shots on target, then your expected damage output goes up, and along with it your efficiency. So there are two ways to approach it.

1) You can calculate a ship's combat value assuming a 100% firing duty cycle to get it's straight-line jousting efficiency. These are the oft-quoted "jousting values" but don't tell the whole story. Now you need to figure out what firing duty cycle is required to get this ship's efficiency to match the standard baseline. For example, a turret needs to get more shots because its straight-line efficiency should be much lower than a jouster. There is a direct mathematical relationship between the two, and we also have a lot of empirical data that tells us what the "efficiency goldilocks zone" is for different ship types: jouster, arc dodger, turret, etc. So if you know what the target efficiency should be, then this is the simplest approach.

2) You can change the ship's duty cycle directly, by multiplying it's expected damage output by some scalar value. When you calculate the resulting efficiency it now has the "I flew better/worse than you and/or had a turret" directly baked in, so you can compare apples to oranges and are looking for all ships to have about the same efficiency. (bombers and control type ships obviously excluded). This approach is very useful as a player, because it defines what you need to do tactically to be competitive. However this is slightly less useful from a design standpoint, because player skill has a wide distribution. It still makes for a good check that you're not requiring players to have to fly TOO good to make a ship viable, but remember that you can still back into it via method #1 if you know ahead of time what the target efficiency is.

There is another factor: swarms of ships have difficulty all getting shots on target if the opposing force is smaller, or at the very least they have an inferior range bin distribution for attacking. I.e. if you only have 1-2 ships then you can focus on the closest TIE in a swarm, but the TIEs in the back are stuck shooting at long range, effectively lower the TIEs' expected damage output. Right now I'm not directly including this effect (yet), so it can gets lumped into the catch-all "firing duty cycle" coefficient above, which more broadly can encompass any effect not just missing shots. A better way to account for this effect would be to uniquely define the range bin distributions for each ship, but I will have to redo my code to do that. Since I'm not publishing numbers for Second Edition, refactoring the code is lower on the priority queue. :-)

2 hours ago, Glucose98 said:

Paul Heaver must be really lucky to make it into the bracket year after year.

I mean, kinda. He's obviously an utterly fantastic player, and his lists are designed to mitigate bad dice luck as much as possible, but there's a limit to the amount of bad luck you can overcome. When the 1HP enemy Nym survives two modded 4-die attacks in a row at time, there's not a whole lot you can do.

11 minutes ago, RampancyTW said:

I mean, kinda. He's obviously an utterly fantastic player, and his lists are designed to mitigate bad dice luck as much as possible, but there's a limit to the amount of bad luck you can overcome. When the 1HP enemy Nym survives two modded 4-die attacks in a row at time, there's not a whole lot you can do.

Something like this can be frustrating, but I'd honestly not blame my dice. Just in terms of my own feelings if this had happened to me, I'd think: 'Why was I in a position where Nym surviving those attacks caused me to lose? If I had more mods on those attacks would the outcome be different? If I decided 3 turns ago to focus instead of barrel rolling, Nym would have 1 less HP and be dead by now, would that have been a better choice? Should I have prioritised killing Nym first?' etc etc etc.

If the answer to any of those questions is that I'd be better off than I currently am if I'd flown any different, then it wasn't my dice that failed, it was me. Good flying takes variance into account and plans for it.

For the record I suck at x wing, but since I adopted this way of thinking about games and variance, I've been improving so much faster than before.

47 minutes ago, player2072913 said:

Something like this can be frustrating, but I'd honestly not blame my dice. Just in terms of my own feelings if this had happened to me, I'd think: 'Why was I in a position where Nym surviving those attacks caused me to lose?

This is insane. If you could be in a position where you would win if you could do 1 damage with two modded 4-die attacks against AGI-1, it would be literally foolish to turn that down. You should pray for that situation. In every game. And if you find yourself in that situation, on the wrong side, but win anyway, you just got immensely lucky.

This is the problem with the fallacy of overestimating skill versus luck in X-Wing ... people get wrapped up to just absurd lengths.

(If anybody thinks that 4-straight with Han in 2014 wasn't incredibly lucky -- i.e., the kind of coin-flip that decides the entire outcome -- then your opinion on this is -- wid' all due respec' -- meaningless.)

23 minutes ago, Jeff Wilder said:

This is insane. If you could be in a position where you would win if you could do 1 damage with two modded 4-die attacks against AGI-1, it would be literally foolish to turn that down. You should pray for that situation. In every game. And if you find yourself in that situation, on the wrong side, but win anyway, you just got immensely lucky.

This is the problem with the fallacy of overestimating skill versus luck in X-Wing ... people get wrapped up to just absurd lengths.

(If anybody thinks that 4-straight with Han in 2014 wasn't incredibly lucky -- i.e., the kind of coin-flip that decides the entire outcome -- then your opinion on this is -- wid' all due respec' -- meaningless.)

I don't think I framed my comment well there. I'm not saying variance doesn't play a part in x-wing. I'm just saying that for the sake of my own improvement, I've found it a much healthier and more successful attitude to analyse my own decisions in a game rather than just shrug off any wins and losses as 'cos dice'.

Yes, not killing nym there is insanely unlucky (1/1000 chance!), but I'd still attempt to critically analyse my play there to see if I could avoid it happening again, was all.

5 hours ago, Jeff Wilder said:

I mean, overwhelming numbers helps in Risk, too, in that you have so many waves to send in.

No one expects 37 million-to-1. That's something like the entire attacking army being lost in a massive earthquake chasm.

1938: Finland OP, plz nerf, thx, Stalin.

7 minutes ago, player2072913 said:

Yes, not killing nym there is insanely unlucky (1/1000 chance!), but I'd still attempt to critically analyse my play there to see if I could avoid it happening again, was all.

Okay, but why?

In a case like that, it is a much better use of your time and analysis to figure out "how can I get into this incredibly advantageous situation again" instead of "how can I avoid being in this incredibly advantageous situation again."

Thinking about the latter instead of the former is exactly a case of over-estimating skill versus luck in X-Wing. Do you see what I mean?

5 minutes ago, Jeff Wilder said:

Okay, but why?

In a case like that, it is a much better use of your time and analysis to figure out "how can I get into this incredibly advantageous situation again" instead of "how can I avoid being in this incredibly advantageous situation again."

Thinking about the latter instead of the former is exactly a case of over-estimating skill versus luck in X-Wing. Do you see what I mean?

Yeah that does make total sense!

In the future rather than say 'If I lost it was because of me not my dice', I'll probably start saying 'Realistically, how could my play have changed to get a better result'. Not quite the same I see