lhughes wrote:Ah! The explanation of the mechanic makes it clear to me. You are rolling a lot of dice. So there is not an immediately obvious way to avoid some very extreme results on rare occasions. Well that helps with understanding. I suppose you could still achieve the more moderate result though by simply capping the extremes. For example, you roll 6 dice. You only hit on a "6". But you only allow a max of 4 hits regardless.
I guess where I struggle with PC (compared probably primarily to PG2 and Open General.. it has been a very long time since I played original PG) is when my tank attacks an infantry in the open in early war and takes extreme damage from the infantry. Just seems like it shouldn't happen.
Interestingly this reminds me of debate of spearmen killing tanks in the early civ. Somehow they managed to remove those kind of mentally upsetting
results in later versions.
But at least mentally I can maybe accept more now as "very rare"... Still I would prefer a more moderate "capping" that allows for less extreme results. Maybe I am just asking for that. "Variation +/- n but not more than n "
This is a complicated issue. There are certain predictions which are almost never wrong. For instance, if you attack an artillery with a tank and it predicts 0-7, you will never get 5-0. When one unit completely outmatches another, extreme results are almost never seen.
Extreme results are more common when two units of comparable firepower meet. The JagdPanther vs the SU-100 is a good example, the prediction is in favor of the JagdPanther, but sometimes the SU-100 can completely turn the tables. I think this is fine.
The tanks taking damage from infantry in clear terrain in early wars is a result often of the player using either the Panzer IIIF (bad SA value) to attack or an inexperienced Panzer IVD. If you use a 3-star overstrengthed Panzer IVD to attack an infantry in the open, I guarantee you will never see bad results. If you use a 0-star Panzer IVD, then on occasion you might take some damage. And if you use a Panzer IIIF, then yes, you can take more damage than you should, but I personally think that is fine. The Panzer IIIF is meant to engage tanks while the Panzer IVD is better against soft targets.
It's not like these extreme rolls occur that often either. If you carefully keep track of the rolls, you'll find the vast majority falls roughly in line with the prediction with only a few extreme outliers. People tend to remember those outliers, which can help you just as much as they can hurt you. If you want a large sample of combat results, just check out the videos I made. There's good and bad luck on occasion here and there, but on the whole extreme deviations are rare.
