An Inquiry: RNG for Battle Outcomes?
Posted: Fri Aug 30, 2013 5:06 pm
My father is a hardcore Panzer General player and has been for years. He's played everything from the original to the latest incarnation which is Panzer Korps. He has played these games thousands of times and has intricately deconstructed virtually every aspect of each game in order to play with maximum efficiency (inflict maximum damage and take 0 losses, maximize unit experience within each scenario and campaign, etc.). Once he reaches a particular goal a few dozen times he will usually come up with a new goal and play all over again trying to achieve it.
Now, I mention all this because I had a conversation with him the other day about Panzer Korps. He noted something I thought was interesting, despite how skeptical I was. Now I preface this by saying that normally I wouldn't have given it a second thought due to how 'outrageous' it sounded, but, knowing how much he has played these games, I just couldn't completely disregard the idea he put forth.
He was absolutely convinced that battle outcomes were directly linked to where you clicked on the target reticle. That is, for each scenario that you play, there is a randomly generated spatial layout performed by the computer with respect to the target reticle and for the rest of that particular scenario (not limited to but I'll stick with this as an example), this 'map' was used and the randomness is simply built into the player's actions of where they clicked.
For example, you begin a scenario. The computer determines that a region upper left quadrant of the target reticle that, when clicked on, would produce a more favorable battle result than say the bottom right quadrant. Or, clicking just outside the reticle circle as opposed to inside would give you a favorable outcome. My father said that this was the case '90% of the time'.
Now I just had to ask but is a random number generator used for battle outcomes or some other technique like the one I described above?
Now, I mention all this because I had a conversation with him the other day about Panzer Korps. He noted something I thought was interesting, despite how skeptical I was. Now I preface this by saying that normally I wouldn't have given it a second thought due to how 'outrageous' it sounded, but, knowing how much he has played these games, I just couldn't completely disregard the idea he put forth.
He was absolutely convinced that battle outcomes were directly linked to where you clicked on the target reticle. That is, for each scenario that you play, there is a randomly generated spatial layout performed by the computer with respect to the target reticle and for the rest of that particular scenario (not limited to but I'll stick with this as an example), this 'map' was used and the randomness is simply built into the player's actions of where they clicked.
For example, you begin a scenario. The computer determines that a region upper left quadrant of the target reticle that, when clicked on, would produce a more favorable battle result than say the bottom right quadrant. Or, clicking just outside the reticle circle as opposed to inside would give you a favorable outcome. My father said that this was the case '90% of the time'.
Now I just had to ask but is a random number generator used for battle outcomes or some other technique like the one I described above?