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How much randomness do you like in your strategy vidyas?
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a fair bit, but battle brothers can lick my taint.
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>>2140480
I'm gonna be honest, not a fan of big swings. Like attacks doing 5-7 damage I can live with, yeah sometimes you''ll get cucked with an enemy on 1 hp, but it's fine and maybe exciting.

13% chance to crit and the enemy crits?

FUCK YOU
FUCK YOU
FUCK YOU

Percentage crits are the gayest shit fuck off. If you want a skill to be able to crit require a pre-req like, you use expose weakpoint or something THEN your next hit will crit.
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>>2140480
If you can't handle randomness you're just solving puzzles, not playing strategy games
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>>2140480
I think some randomness is needed, but it needs to be managed right.

Having a chance based outcome to actions that can cause a huge shift in a game can be fine, but only if those actions are numerous enough to reward good decision making. For example, take the difference between new XCOM and old XCOM's gameplay. In the new XCOM, your soldiers have pretty good accuracy and are fairly powerful, but missing even a single shot can have huge ramifications during a turn, let alone missing multiples in a row. In old XCOM, you have over a dozen soldiers that can attack multiple times in a turn--each of those attacks has a discrete chance to hit, and it's usually fairly low, but the way the game works you can leverage the fact that if every soldier fires three shots per turn with a 30% chance to hit and you have 12 soldiers, you're going to get an outcome pretty close to 10 hits.

In another example, randomizing a player's challenge but not theirs or their enemy's toolset is good too. FTL does this by sending different enemy ships at the player. although each ship can be better or worse than its peers. You can potentially get a string of very easy ships, or if you're unlucky, a bunch of hard ones. But every fight is within your grasp to win.
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I love BB but I would probably gamble all my life savings away if I didn’t play RNG vidya
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There are two types of randomness: Input and Output.
Input randomness generates a random situation (random map, random item, random event) and has you deal with it. This is fine - it tests your preparedness and improves replayability.
Output randomness decides the outcome of actions (chance to hit, chance to crit, chance to avoid detection). This is hit and miss, literally. It's good enough for casual party games to test your luck, but in singleplayer it just wastes your time and encourages savescumming.
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>>2140637
Do you actually have a gambling addiction? That's tough man
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>>2140480
Not much and that's why I enjoy brain using games such as battlebrothers and into the breach
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>>2140830
maybe he's just asian
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Y'all cowards would instantly commit sudoku if you ever had to play a Blood Bowl tournament. Better stick to crossword puzzles.
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>he didn't appease nuffle and preload his dice
pathetic
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>>2140877
they're soft, and weak
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>>2140480
I think attacks doing damage within some range rather than always doing a set amount is fine. Same with some secondary effects having a certain chance to trigger is also ok.

But I'm not a big fan of random hit chance and especially when attacks are very impactful. Battle Brothers and I guess also XCom are fun games but I think the early game in both suffer from how big an impact a single hit from an enemy can have. You can set up a series of good attacks but they all miss and then one of your guys get oneshot because your dudes are weak early on. If missing an attack is a common occurence for both player and AI then I don't think a single attack should have battle deciding power.
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>>2140480
Strategy games need some degree of variation for them to truly qualify as strategy games, ideally you want to have complex systems that appear "random" to an outside observer, but RNG can be an acceptable replacement for simplicity's sake.
My problem is with pure random chance mechanics, usually based on dice. Board game cancer has held back strategy games for decades and we need to get away from it.
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>>2140480
Without any chance, it becomes a puzzle game and strategy games aren't supposed to be puzzles. It also adds some excitement. Getting a crit or doing better than expected is a nice feeling.The winds of fortuna are always omnipresent in our lives and to deny that is to deny reality.
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>>2141148
>>2141145
>>2140540
>a strategy game requires randomness
unfortunately, the dullwitted on this board are more numerous than previously believed
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>>2140657
Why do people like you get upset at chance to hit so much?
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>>2141357
I missed once
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>>2140480
I want to combat my opponent, not my luck. The less RNG the better.
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>>2140540
This would be true if the game state was simple enough that you could just "solve" everything. Generally it isn't. If your game relies on randomness then you're just rolling dice, not playing strategy games.
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>>2140480
games with a RNG mechanic should always allow the player to mitigate or recover from negative RNG
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>>2141425
Mitigating risk is a skill
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>>2141451
Yeah just like being born in a nice family is a skill.
No.
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>>2141454
Real life has luck
Real battles involve luck
Reacting to luck is a test of flexibility
A game with no luck may as well be a process diagram
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>>2141456
I don't care about real life. I just want to focus on the game.
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>>2141357
Depends how well it's implemented. Battle for Wesnoth is an infamous example - getting stuck in a cave level and having slap fights in tight corridors while on a time limit is just not fun. There's a mod that replaces hit rates with damage reduction, making the battles quicker, more reliable and more brutal. Jagged Alliance was nice, though. You could choose whether to aim carefully or fire off more shots. The hit percentage also wasn't shown, which made the system feel less gamey and relied more on player's experience.
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>>2140540
>implying puzzles games do not have randomness
Have you ever played TETRIS before?
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>>2141357
There are games where there's place for it and games where there isn't.
Losing a crucial battle just because of insanely bad RNG is not fun.
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>>2141357
I will say that there's games where the punishment for missing enough is having to reload a save and that's bad if you can't do something to adjust your strategy for the fight
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>>2141933
There's some games like underrail that let you make some risky melee builds where you rush your opponent and fuck them up but if you roll badly and can't kill enemies which are right next to you there's literally nothing you can do outside of loading a save and trying again.
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>>2141818
A well-designed strategy game won't be that swingy.
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>>2142620
ur moms a swinger
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>>2141495
>There's a mod that replaces hit rates with damage reduction, making the battles quicker, more reliable and more brutal.
It also turns all units that can inflict the slow status OP as fuck.
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>>2140480
depends on whether i'm winning or losing at the moment

real answer is, as always, that it depends, and either could be the right choice, or any point in between the two absolutes. though i disagree with some others here about big swings. that's what creates risk, tension and stories. if you don't have single big rolls, and instead have many, it becomes a game of averages and statistics -- if i have dozens of attacks per turn, you may as well just have each attack deal 3.5 damage instead of d6 or whatever, because outside of extreme freak scenarios that's what you're playing around. bloodbowl is peak rng-game btw, if you dislike that kind of stuff you're just a pussy.
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>>2142620
Ah yes, the mythical well-designed strategy game with chance to hit. If it existed I'm sure it would solve every problem inherent to shitty RNG laziness.
Troubleshooter gets pretty close though
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>>2140877
I only played BB(in vidya format) with a friend before and neither of us knew much of the rules and strats.
But man I fucking loved it.
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>>2143474
I played BB a little with the steam games tried to organize some fumbbl games with my friends but I couldn't get them into the game.
It's annoying because I don't care to grind ladder or join online tournaments with people I don't know
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The problem is that strategy games need some predictability. RNG is fine as long as it's predictable. You can't have a large variance in outcomes.
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>>2140480
I can tolerate a large amount of randomness as long as you can work around it and it doesn't lie about the %. Working around would be like planning to lose a certain amount of forces or increasing the number of chances or using aoe attacks and so on. Something that happens 10% of the time should happen fairly often but if it is constantly happening or not happening because something is at play like balancing pity hit chances or it not taking into account effects then it's bullshit. The game shouldn't be entirely hit or miss chances anyway, which goes back to being able to plan for and work around randomness.

Besides battles, I feel randomness of the environment, environmental conditions, and your starting situations are necessary for a good game.
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>>2140480
Damage differences are fine, preferably no more than 20% from the base value.
Critical hits shouldn't be random and certainly shouldn't boast a huge damage boost, at most it should be 150% damage.

That said having randomness to things like maps, enemy layouts and team compositions is something I always look forward to as it requires you to think on your feet without relying on glorified gambling, or just learning the layouts
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>>2140611
How the fuck did "2 Actions, at most 1 attack" per turn become popular for squad-sized games? It's horrible. Like in the shadowrun games they can get away with it because the gameplay is balls anyway, but why the fuck did they stick with it for nucom
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>>2144446
It's simple, and it was popularized by nu-XCOM.
Turn units are too complicated for normie gamers, despite the fact they give the most options.
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>>2144446
simple sells
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>>2144446
It's very discrete and makes turns snappy. Having 1 move+1 attack is easier for people to parse, plus it causes big effects for every action (Good or bad) which is more exciting to most players. The problem is that it's incredibly affected by the roll of the dice and losing through no fault of your own is extremely frustrating.

And think of it this way, those big swings don't happen as much on lower difficulties where you can take multiple hits. The majority of people play on easy and normal and so they rarely see something like a soldier dying to two critical hits through heavy cover because their soldiers likely can just tank the shots. As you go up though, suddenly a single bad roll is enough to wreck your entire mission.

The short answer is XCOM wasn't made first for old grognards, it was made to be something the masses could muddle through, similar to games like Fire Emblem and such.
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TUs suck ass, it's just RTWP with extra cope
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Using CoH as an example for good RNG:
>Mortar teams shell targets but their mortars land in a random area around them
>The chance of the very first shot causing high damage is virtually zero, but the longer a target holds still in the firing zone the higher the chance of them taking a direct hit becomes
>However, the damage progression isn't discrete and fixed, so the opposing player has to make a gamble how long their HMG/AT team can continue to fire at their targets before they retreat

Same game but bad example:
>All tanks have a certain amount of armor and weapons have a certain amount of penetration
>If penetration is higher than armor, shots always deal damage
>If penetration is lower, there is a chance equal to (penetration / armor) the shot will penetrate and deal damage
>Cue frustration when your T-34's shell bounces off a Panzer IV three times in a row despite having an 80% chance to deal damage each time
>There's also a miss chance added to tanks in motion, so sometimes the crew just completely whiffs a few shots against a stationary target

Tank duels were always a game of chance in it, but it felt so wrong when the WFA dropped and Americans were putting out two or three tanks compared to the Germans or Russians. At least on that though there were so many shells flying that you got a nice bell curve distribution of hits.
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>>2143474
It's unironically one of GW's most fun games, but man is it RNG-heavy. I can't think of any other game where your dudes can just randomly die from running too fast. It's more of a risk management game than an actual sports game.
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>>2144641
>It's more of a risk management game than an actual sports game.
If you play ladder on the steam version you will sometimes find kill teams that solely exist to murder your guys in the hopes you resign.
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>>2145019
There's actually a legitimate strategy called the "2-1 Grind", which focuses on just killing the enemy tearm as much as possible, that slow but strong teams can use to force a win against much faster and more agile teams.

Basically in the half where you receive the ball, you spend the entire half murdering the opponent's team and only try to score a point on the very last turn of the half, giving the opposing team no time to even the score. And in the half where the opponent's team is receiving, you still murder the fuck out of them but you also ignore the ball and leave them a way to score very easily. Hopefully they will score in like 2 or 3 turns, leaving you most of the half to score your 2nd goal and win the match against whatever's left of their team.
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>>2145043
>a
the only. what are you, an elf?
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>>2145074
It isn't a great strategy against other bashy teams who will gladly go toe-to-toe with you, or even defensive teams like Dwarfs who won't give you the time you need to score that second point and aren't as scared of injuries. Even Elf teams can potentially beat it by playing keepaway and stalling on their drive so you can only get a 1-1 draw at best. If you're not careful enough or simply unlucky, they could even score on your drive which kills the entire strategy. Bashy teams rarely have the skills to quickly come back from a turnover and if an agility team manages to get a 2-0 you're entirely fucked, especially since after that they can just spend the rest of the match dancing around you and avoiding unfavorable engagements. The best you'll likely to get at that point is a 2-1 loss, so they don't really care about playing the game "properly" at that point. Yeah you might've hurt their team for the next match, but that doesn't help you if you're knocked out of the tournament.

It's a good strategy in the right circumstances (I actually like it more vs Skaven than vs Elves) and some players will find it very hard to counter, but if the 2-1 Grind is your only strategy you're going to lose a lot.
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>>2144446
I'm not a fan of it but it does fix some problems of turn-unit-based games, like the heavy reliance on overwatch and the advance-shoot-retreat gameplay style.
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>>2145147
>fix some problems of turn-unit-based games, like the heavy reliance on overwatch
Is this a joke? Overwatch crawl was such an unbeatable strategy in nuXCOM that they added time limits to nuXCOM2 just to prevent people from spamming overwatch.
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>>2145101
very interesting, please continue writing things i'm absolutely reading
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>>2145158
Don't be a loser all your life.
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>>2145147
>heavy reliance on overwatch
Just reduce the reaction fire chances to make it unreliable?
>advance-shoot-retreat
Map design and AI issue. If the map has enough cover and AI can push semi-intelligently, you can't camp.
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Rng is fine but most of it should happen before player decisionmaking.
If your game has both to-hit and damage rolls, any kind of planning is pretty much impossible because the spread of possible outcomes it too great.
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>>2145459
Ill help you since you're stupid
You should make a plan for when you dont hit enough and for when you get hit too much
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>>2145543
>build your plan around the .01% lowroll

Damn, do you give lessons?
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>>2141447
Dungeons of Nahelbeuk did this right.
Fumbling rolls (and enemy crits) filled a meter that granted abilites.
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>>2145663
The first lesson is stop blaming the rng
The second lesson is git gud
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>>2146022
>git gud at dice rolls

You should write guides.
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>>2144446
that and the dogshit pod spawn system or whatever it's called made me never touch xcom2
I tried phoenix point which was slightly better but dropped it for other reasons
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>>2145101
>if the 2-1 Grind is your only strategy you're going to lose a lot.
not ere ta win
just ere ta krump
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>>2140480
RNG should be big enough that it forces you to change your plans but not enough that it can cause swings between I won and I lost.
A 90% chance to hit when it takes 4 attacks to kill or die is perfectly fine. It gives you multiple turns to solve the issue. A 90% hit chance when it takes 1 attack to kill or die isn't, you either play like you will hit that 10% every time or you will lose when you hit that 10%, and if you play around it then hit that 10% twice you alt+f4.
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>>2140480
I fucking despise hit probability. Mostly because it's always dumb shit that makes missing too likely and you sit there watching your unit carefully and slowly fuck up all of your planning and timing by whiffing three shots in a row after you gave him every possible situational advantage.

Otherwise I like most RNG elements because it adds variety and luck.
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>>2140480
In my games in gneral I prefer randomness of scenario, i.e. having the dice decide on relatively equal setups of map layouts or neutral army compositions, natural features or assets.

What I strongly dislike is randomness of outcome, becoming worse with greater deviations, especially if the scenario or campaign expects of you to work with tight resources with no room for contingencies and still pull off a perfect run in order to get the best outcome.
For example, Panzer Corps or Panzer General has some scenarios in which you can at times only pull off a decisive victory if every attack goes as predicted. If one or two units are especially lucky in avoiding damage or even inflicting damage, you need to spend more turns dealing with them and even more to repair, therefore missing the goal. That has nothing to do with strategy, if the same setup leads to a wildly different outcome the next time when RNGsus decides to not throw a massive wrench into your plans.
Civilization V did well to limit the influence of randomness in combat. I think it was limited to 10% or 25% deviation of the predicted result and you most often had enough resources, i.e. space or time to trade to heal a badly damaged unit or enough production to build a new one.

>>2140657
That is a nice and concise way of putting it. Thank you.
Good game design doesn't encourage save scumming and possibly even removes the possibility of it by generating a random seed at the start of the game and then keeping it throughout its course.
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>>2146869
donald krump
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>>2147931
krump yourself
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>>2140480
I think the best use of RNG was in World of Tanks (an otherwise shit game, don't play it).
Armor Penetration was a boolean result, you either bounced and did no damage, or pierced and did full damages.
Armor thickness was constant, but shell's armor penetration had some RNG.
The game was balanced (probably more by luck than anything) so that in 90% of all situations there was effectively no RNG: you were either guaranteed to pierce due to big gun/good angle/weakspot/etc or you were guaranteed to bounce.
RNG was only there when you picked a target that you should be able to 100% pierce, but decided to not wait for an optimal angle & distance.

For a XCOM/BB/etc type of game, it would like if hit% was pretty much always 100% or 0%, and the in-between an edge-case that could be solved by moving one just more tile.
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>>2147931
that's the new Ogre player in the Bögenhafen Brawlers isn't it?
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>>2146189
Fortuna is a skill.
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>>2149312
Yeah and get this... he's... ORANGE!



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