The Tao of Gaming

While thinking about football, I noticed that the geek has the alternate game matrices used for the official WBC tournament.

You are on the one yard line, you need a TD, the clocks about to run out. What play to call (Pro-style offense). What defense? For simplicity, ignore offenses 13-20. [You can't use them inside the 10 yard line anyway]. Let's look at the coach's sheet....

I've flipped the chart around to make offenses run down the side. This is basically taking each chart and answering the game theory question ... does this win me the game? (1,-1) means that the offense (me) wins while (-1,1) means I'm the goat. Note that 5D is (0,0). That's because it's a defensive penalty, and we'll get another play (at the one yard line). Those zeroes should be equal to the value of the rest of the game, but I'm not about to figure that out.

Anything jump out at you?

For this situation, there are some strategies that are Dominated. If you win with Power Tackle, you would have won if you picked Power Middle ... and Power Middle wins a few time that Power Tackle doesn't. With a lot of math (or a computer program) you can solve this exactly. (I did this, but then the file got corrupted and I'm not typing that matrix in again. Maybe I need a better tool). The optimal strategy involves picking three offenses 1/7th of the time, and two others 2/7ths. Ditto for the defenses. (The symmetry of the answer surprised me, which is why I remember it).

Football Strategy is solvable in these "DoOrDie" situations, the real issue is "What do you do on 1st & 10 at your 20 or 25, with the game tied and plenty of time on the clock." How do you value each yard? I could use some ideas that football sabermetricians are using. In fact, I may.

Yes, I have a side project. Right now I'm working on the framework, but I'm also doing this to learn about MFC (which stands for Microsoft's Effin Classes, I believe). Don't expect anything soon, but if anyone has any thoughts about how to place a value on yardage in a "long distance" situation, I'd like to hear it.

Oh, and a good repository of Linear Algebra algorithms would be nice.

After a few missions, characters become quite differentiated beyond starting characters. Each rank gives an ability (like a feat from D&D 3rd edition). Enemies just get better numbers. While I had most of the rules down after the first solo play through, I'm still finding implications. [I'm playing fast, so I'll often see things during the enemy phase that I missed during the player phase. Or vice versa].

The current mission is piracy ... capture or destroy a freighter in a convoy before it can get to the planet, and try not to get smashed by the enemy destroyer (one size class bigger than my scout). At the end of the first turn, I belatedly realized that the PCs had left a ramming opportunity, which the destroyer gleefully took. But the PCs luck turned it around (ramming rolls are one of the few where the players cannot use their numerous luck or abilities to interfere with the dice). Both ships took equal hull damage, but the destroyer lost over a quarter of it's modules (including the teleporter, critically wounding the boarding party in the process) and both ships got spun around. The enemy destroyer ended up facing away from the scout and frigates, with no working guns to bear, leaving it open for a missle volley. Very lucky, and a quick win for ... uh, me.

When I'm playing this sometimes I feel like a Star Fleet Battles snob, preferring the detailed energy allocation, and details. Othertimes I think "Why did I ever play that?" [Star Fleet has some solitaire missions, by the way.] The games take very different paths to the same genre. SFB has an excrutiatingly detailed sequence of play. (Several pages long, in small type. Knowing the order of actions is a crucial key to victory). Battlestations has free-form actions (for the most part), but you can do some tricks to get double actions, or conditional actions via overwatch.

Solitaire still works, for now. (Social gaming update -- I played Shadowfist. I lost. Nothing to report here.)

Daniel Karp (a likeable chap) wrote a geeklist on "How to keep your game collection manageable." I was going to write something about it a while ago, but it slipped my mind. I just got a trade offer and now I remember!

No arguing with the basic rules ("Don't buy OK games", "Try before you buy"), but last point "Apply these rules to trades" only makes sense if you assume that you've been scrupiously correct in buying games.

If that were true, you wouldn't need the list. Let's face, I have some trade chaff (even only counting average games, not even the stinkers). Since I'm a neophile, trading these average old games for average new games is a win, well worth shipping costs. I'm a dispassionate stone when purchasing ... except where games and books are concerned.

And there is another way to keep your collection in order -- Buy a bigger house. And my wife wanted that anyway! So I've got all these average-ish games. Make me an offer!