Gameplay Suggestion: Reduce RNG

[gbem]

No, it wasnt a "standard doctrine" to fire at something until it catches on fire.

No, its completely irrelevant, as its still a huge number of shells fired per one tank claimed. Where claims could still be divided by two, and it would be optimistic.

Or until the crew bailed out visibly... such is not possible under low visibility conditions however and fire smoke and the cessation of motion is a more reliable method of gauging a successful penetration in combat... also doesnt affect the probability of two or more tanks engaging a single tango... which wastes shells too....

Most tanks were knocked-out by 1-2 hits, and burned as well.

lotsa pics showing tanks with as many as 3 or 4 perforation marks on the frontal hull/turret... then again its not a reliable measure of gauging soo yeah...
i also found this tidbit
"two bazooka teams and a 57mm anti-tank gun took several minutes to even disable a single Panzer - I believe it was a Mark III or IV. Their combined fire damaged it and tore a tread off, but it was only a chap running up and chucking a grenade through the hatch that finished it off."

another tidbit
"A T-34 was carted into a repair base with 17 penetrating hits once, but who knows how many it sustained after the crew bailed (or died). The same report states that, on average, a T-34 takes 1.8-ish penetrating hits before being knocked out."

and lastly
"A veteran's memoirs describe a Tiger hunting maneuver, where everyone in a T-34 but the gunner would hit the deck, and hope that the shell didn't get them as it flew through. With sufficiently ductile armour, and assuming the shell doesn't hit a gas tank on its way in, the tank might take a few hits before the crew is forced to bail."

now that doesnt exactly prove much as its not a statistic..... but its worth a read

Range_______75mm gun_____88mm gun
100-200_______10.0%_________4.0%
200-400_______26.1%________14.0%
400-600_______33.5%________18.0%
600-800_______14.5%________31.2%
800-1000_______7.0%________13.5%
1000-1200______4.5%_________8.5%
1200-1400______3.6%_________7.6%
1400-1600______0.4%_________2.0%
1600-1800______0.4%_________0.7%
1800-2000______0.0%_________0.5%

Soviet tanks and assault guns knocked-out during 1943-1944, from Red army handbook.

this sorta aids my point though... engagements have occured at the 1800-2000m range while most kills occured at 800-400m for both guns... this means that even at 2000m the germans have already began shooting the enemy... where accuracy is dead awful.... LOS is worse and targets cannot be as easily gauged for a successful penetration..... this means a huge waste of shells

another thing to note is LOS and morale.... something factored ingame.... the issue is morale is not kept as a constant between ingame and statistical comparisons.... it could be that those shots were all made while the crews were under return fire.... and just like ingame it makes accuracy really really bad..... issue is we dont have a statistic of a calm unstressed unit firing at a tank in combat conditions... rather all we have is a lumped up statistic that could have been made by suppressed or panicked units...

LOS in contrast means that potential sight blockers such as fog or smoke could have been present in those conditions... this worsens both accuracy and the ability to gauge a knocked out target... this is sorta simulated in SD... however tanks do not fire into the smoke as in real life...

the closest thing to a statistic concerning unstressed and calm unit firing at a tank in combat conditions is the accuracy tests done with the said german guns.... well all guns had this test but the german statistic is the most common

the thing is even in the best of conditions tank accuracy is still horrible in SD... and those "bad factors" in real life such as morale and LOS blocking are already simulated in SD.... with only multiple penetrations per target to KO being undermodeled... as a result realistically speaking those guns underperform to their real life counterparts....

 

[Claremont Waltz]

^Claims not to make appeals to realism, then immediately makes appeals to realism. Good lord dude you're completely out of your head.

Bottom line for the not insane parts of the thread is that RNG in moderation is fine, but extreme RNG is not. As RNG increases, the importance of player decision making declines.

Ex 1: My carefully positioned units in ambush lose to an enemy tank charging ahead unsupported because they have 0.28 accuracy and whiff all their shots. I am punished for my good play with a bad outcome when I should have been rewarded.

Ex 2: I have a gun in open field nowhere near cover/LOS breakers that I dumped out of a truck after an enemy tank shot at it gets a lucky roll on a 0.28 chance to hit and a 0.02 chance to pen and pops the enemy tank. I am rewarded for my poor play with a good outcome when I should have been punished.

Be cause outcomes are often not what anyone would have predicted, players have no frame of reference for combat and no way to properly allocate resources.

Ex3 if enemy has four tanks and I have two of equal value, I should lose. This would imply I should buy AT assets to compensate. But if I get a couple good rolls I can easily win that fight and then my AT gun spend is wasted while my opponent's infantry buy to support his tanks is wasted.

In theory this stuff evens out in the long run. Law of Large Numbers and all that. In theory I can mitigate many of these issues by holding fire until absurdly close ranges aka paying a micro tax. Novice players won't know to do that, so they'll lose even when their overall plan and unit placement are good because RNG. And then they'll get sufficiently frustrated and quit.

RNG issues are compounded by the vast gap in performance between a low vet accuracy 4 unit and a high vet 7 accuracy unit. One will hit at about 0.28, the other at about 0.98. This gap is absurd and leads to enormous frustration. Carefully planned ambushes that randomly miss every shot will be brutally murdered by a lone 2 star KT that in real life would have struggled to turn the turret fast enough to acquire a nearby flanking target. T34s sitting in hay bales and popping KTs from the side as they drove past is how the first KT combat action turned into a total cluster fuck. In game the outnumbered T34s would have missed and then been murdered by a single KT because of bizarrely huge performance gaps.

I'm not saying no RNG. A fully deterministic game isn't that fun. I'm saying that the gap for long range performance should be between 0.7 and 0.85, not between 0.2 and 0.98, and that veterany should at most provide a couple percentage points of accuracy. The vet ROF buff is still so powerful (fire up to 0.45 faster) that the loss of accuracy would barely matter when determining the value of veteran status.

And as previously stated, history can go hang and you can all shove those sekrit history dokuments right back up your asses.

 

[gbem]

^Claims not to make appeals to realism, then immediately makes appeals to realism. Good lord dude you're completely out of your head.

if someone makes a claim i have the right to refute it.... but note it wasnt me who started the realism argument.. it was the opposition.... i merely refuted his claim however my argument has always been about gameplay

Bottom line for the not insane parts of the thread is that RNG in moderation is fine, but extreme RNG is not. As RNG increases, the importance of player decision making declines.

Ex 1: My carefully positioned units in ambush lose to an enemy tank charging ahead unsupported because they have 0.28 accuracy and whiff all their shots. I am punished for my good play with a bad outcome when I should have been rewarded.

Ex 2: I have a gun in open field nowhere near cover/LOS breakers that I dumped out of a truck after an enemy tank shot at it gets a lucky roll on a 0.28 chance to hit and a 0.02 chance to pen and pops the enemy tank. I am rewarded for my poor play with a good outcome when I should have been punished.

Be cause outcomes are often not what anyone would have predicted, players have no frame of reference for combat and no way to properly allocate resources.

Ex3 if enemy has four tanks and I have two of equal value, I should lose. This would imply I should buy AT assets to compensate. But if I get a couple good rolls I can easily win that fight and then my AT gun spend is wasted while my opponent's infantry buy to support his tanks is wasted.

In theory this stuff evens out in the long run. Law of Large Numbers and all that. In theory I can mitigate many of these issues by holding fire until absurdly close ranges aka paying a micro tax. Novice players won't know to do that, so they'll lose even when their overall plan and unit placement are good because RNG. And then they'll get sufficiently frustrated and quit.

RNG issues are compounded by the vast gap in performance between a low vet accuracy 4 unit and a high vet 7 accuracy unit. One will hit at about 0.28, the other at about 0.98. This gap is absurd and leads to enormous frustration. Carefully planned ambushes that randomly miss every shot will be brutally murdered by a lone 2 star KT that in real life would have struggled to turn the turret fast enough to acquire a nearby flanking target. T34s sitting in hay bales and popping KTs from the side as they drove past is how the first KT combat action turned into a total cluster fuck. In game the outnumbered T34s would have missed and then been murdered by a single KT because of bizarrely huge performance gaps.

I'm not saying no RNG. A fully deterministic game isn't that fun. I'm saying that the gap for long range performance should be between 0.7 and 0.85, not between 0.2 and 0.98, and that veterany should at most provide a couple percentage points of accuracy. The vet ROF buff is still so powerful (fire up to 0.45 faster) that the loss of accuracy would barely matter when determining the value of veteran status.

exactly what ive been saying.... reduced RNG...but although the law of probability means that the numbers even out as n approaches infinity.... ingame n never comes close to infinite... and results can be.... wild ingame... this means that an individual player might get 5 10 or even a hundred unlucky strikes in a row with much higher probability than with a less RNG dependent system... even if the player can migitate said RNG via micro positioning and tactics.... 0.5 accuracy still leaves 0.03125 chance that the user will miss 5 times in a row.. which is bad for gameplay... in contrast 0.7 acc gives 0.00243 chance of such a mishap from happening.... 12.86 times less chance of it happening...

however i was thinking along the lines of 0.5 probability for a 5 acc gun and 0.7 acc for a 7 acc gun at max range so as to create a larger margin to give somewhat more decent emphasis on properly used accurate and expensive equipment instead of lotsacheappuunits... sorta to prevent spam... this is alot closer to wargame tbh accuracy wise and we know these changes improved wargame`s gameplay

veterancy can return to the 8% multiplier system in wargame... it was good and nobody hated it...

 

[gbem]

Pointless. It's too much of a change and it won't solve the core problem - lack of reliability. And increasing accuracy all over the table paired with your penetration suggestion will make things even worse then they are now. As I've said, system, while can be frustrating as hell, is fine as long as most of the players are ok with it, so get over it and play. The only issue is veterancy which is another topic.

there is reliability in my suggestion.... theoretically one can stay beyond the "penetration circle" and remain reliable against the enemy....it is the job of the side with qualitatively better units to stay outside the "penetration circle" of the cheap units (if not then just prevent an overrun)... and the job of the quantitative side to close in unharmed... of course this already exists ingame but with much more RNG involved in its calculation.....

ie 2% chance to pen when AP = AV... in contrast to what ive suggested...

rescaled ap/av chart to armor and penetration values presented by the tanks themselves reduced by a factor of 10 instead of 8.18 as currently represented
and 50% chance to pen when AP = AV scaling with 25% increments per point of deviation...