🚀 go-pugleaf

marshall@seas.gwu.edu (Christopher Marshall) writes:

>Does anybody know how Walter Bright's PC Empire conducts combat?

I think it's just like the manual says it is, but the random number
generator seems to generate "streaks" (consecutive hits vs one of the
combatants) more often than it should.

>I seem to run into a lot of very unlikely combat results, like an army
>doing 2 points of damage against a destroyer.

Or an enemy Fighter destroying two Armies and sinking an undamaged
Battleship and an undamaged Transport (w/6 Armies) in a single turn.
(Yes, this happened to me, once.)  The moral is: don't place any great
reliance on any one unit; just play for mis-matches in your favor (e.g.
use Destroyers vs Transports, Cruisers and Battleships vs Fighters,
etc), and eventually the odds will even out.

>The manual talks about how the two pieces 'trade hits' until one is dead.
>Assume piece A attacks piece B.  I imagine what Empire does is roll to see
>if A hits B.  Apply damage to B if A hit.  Roll to see if B hits A.  Apply
>damage to A if B hit.  Continue.  My question is, how do you calculate
>the probability of A hitting B given the attack factor of A and the defense
>factor of B?

Unknown.  You've read the manual, so you know as much about it as any of
us.

Eric Wang
wang@cs.uiuc.edu