For those interested in such things, and I am one, I have been collecting my luck statistics for the 500+ Wargear Warfare 1 v 1 games I have played.  For those who curse Lady Luck you can see I have documented periods of 25+ games where there has been a 'bad luck' trends.  There have been ups and downs and overall I am at about -80 luck.  Hopefully I will trend back up soon. 

I have another stat I track which is Cumulative luck / Expected kills, this figure is about -.25% right now.  The chart gets a little busy when I display both.  I also have seat position and win/loss for each game if anyone is interested in win% by seat, win% by luck(+ or -), and the histogram of luck by game etc. Just let me know.

The chart is posted below.  I will post updates every 100 games or so.

Assuming that in each of those 500 games you averaged about 100 rolls (which is very conservative), that's 50,000+ rolls, which puts your cumulative luck stats at about -0.2%.

I just looked at a handful of my 1v1 games and I average well over 200 rolls per game.

SquintGnome wrote:

For those interested in such things, and I am one, I have been collecting my luck statistics for the 500+ Wargear Warfare 1 v 1 games I have played.  For those who curse Lady Luck you can see I have documented periods of 25+ games where there has been a 'bad luck' trends.  There have been ups and downs and overall I am at about -80 luck.  Hopefully I will trend back up soon. 

I have another stat I track which is Cumulative luck / Expected kills, this figure is about -.25% right now.  The chart gets a little busy when I display both.  I also have seat position and win/loss for each game if anyone is interested in win% by seat, win% by luck(+ or -), and the histogram of luck by game etc. Just let me know.

The chart is posted below.  I will post updates every 100 games or so.

 

These stats are very interesting. i would love to know mine.

Do you normally roll 3 v 2?

To Attila,

Yes as a rule I will only attack 3 v 2 (4 in attacking territory), 3 v 1, or 2 v 1, the only attacks that are favorable.

To M,

Yes, the % is low.  The stat I track as noted in my initial post is (Cumulative Luck / Expected Kills).  This number for the data tracked is -.25%.  Since luck is a deviation from expected kills, I feel it is best to use expected kills in the ratio. 

The interesting thing is that although the ratio .25% is low, I am still not sure whether it is 'significant' or not.  The knee jerk reaction is to say that .25% over 1000's of rolls is not significant.  Howver, in order to determine the significance of a ratio, one must know the sensitivity of a system.  Some systems that are very sensitive can be thrown completely off by a small deviation - especially those designed to be balanced.

Those who play 1 v 1 a lot can attest that a luck of -2 in the first round can easily lose you the game.  A -4 luck after several rounds is a severe disadvantage.  I will recalcualte my numbers, but I think that I win about 83% of the games with Pos luck and win only 31% of the games with Neg luck.  Although this is obvious it speaks to the strong sensitivity 1 v 1 play has to luck.  Because of this, being off by .25% after 40,000 rolls may be significant for 1 v 1 play.

Here is my latest update for my luck trend for 1 v 1 Wargear Warfare games.  From my last posting I dipped down to about -150 and have now bumped back up to about -100.  As mentiond in a previous post, I track luck % which is luck/expected kills.  This is about .20% now.

Here are some other interesting stats:

Overall Win %     59%

Seat 1 win %     72%

Seat 2 win %     39%

Win % if game luck is positive     85%

Win % if game luck is negative    33%

Win % for seat 1 and pos luck     93%

Win % for seat 2 and neg luck    19%

I think this illustrates the strong impact of luck for Wargear Warfare 1 v 1.  Although all games will be impacted by dice luck, 1 v 1 games are more sensitive to it.  In addition, I think this board is also more sensitive than others to a lucky turn because you can tip the balance of a game in just one turn.  For example, if you win 3 territories on the first round. 

I am not offering this data for any other reason than that it is interesting - thought others might agree. 

I'm not surprised - the biggest two factors always seem to be who goes first and how the dice treat you (since the game can change so quickly as you pointed out).   Very interesting to see the numbers behind it though.  Starting setup is another factor of course, but that's a lot harder to quantify.

It seems generally that boards that can handle multiple players (more than 2) easily tend to not be well suited for 2-player games.  For example, Wargear Warfare, Fall of Rome and Colossal Crusade all have winning percentages of 60% or higher for the first player in two player games I believe.

I've been thinking about changing the first and second player first round bonuses for my boards.. For example, in Fall of Rome I could make it..

1st player = 1 army  2nd = 2 armies. All others default. I'm already doing it with most of my newer boards.

New Earth has mods for seat numbers which are forced by scenario: for 2, 3-4, 5-10 players.

Anarchy has two scenarios for 4+ players, and one for 2-3 players.

If it's tweaked right, those first seat numbers should start looking a bit more pedestrian for those boards.

I too have been trying to release 'duel' scenarios for my new boards when appropriate.  My rule of thumb across scenarios is to have player bonus increase from 3 to 6 from first to last player.  So in a 2-player scenario I give first player 3 units, second 6.  In a 8 player scenario it goes 3,3,4,4,5,5,6,6.    This is still not perfect, because if that 8 player scenario also allows fewer players, it dilutes the incremental bonus.  For example a 3 player game on that scenario gives bonuses 3,3,4.  I'd rather have it be something like 3,4,5.  I think you'd need about 5-6 scenarios to cover all situations correctly between 2 & 16 players, but that gets cumbersome.

Well...above is my final post on this topic.  For those who get frustrated and despair about their luck, I wanted to show that eventually your luck will come back.

This charts shows my luck stats for Wargear Warfare.  The chart is 'cumulative luck' by game.  So, for example, if my first game had a luck stat of +5 and then my next game had a +2, then the next game -3, the cumulative luck would be 5+2-3 or +4.

You can see an initial surge of luck and then it plummeted and stayed down for a while.  Finally, after about 800 games, my cumulative luck came back to zero.

So, take comfort that all bad luck streaks can come to an end eventually! 

Keep rolling!

You never roll 1v1s or 2v2s?  Often in my games I will be done attacking what I intended to and be short 1 territory of depriving my opponent of an extra reinforcement.  In other words, whatever the circumstances may be, I was only able to bring her down to 15 when I really want to strip her of another unit by getting her to 14.  In this situation rolling 1 on 1 (2v1) would be a wise choice in my opinion.  Especially if the territory is not of particular importance so much so that I don't envision ever placing more armies on it.  And 2v2s are great when your units spawn clumped in one spot surrounding an enemy territory.  On Wargear Warfare this usually arises in Asia.  If these units aren't bordering anything strategically valuable and are also only near one enemy position, it would be a waste to use all my end-of-turn reinforcements to take one worthless territory when I could be using it elsewhere.  It does all depend on the position, but the odds of capturing a 3 if you attack it with three 3s are not bad at all and if you don't at least put a dent in it with the first attack then you can abort and stick with the more conservative approach without any real penalty. 

Minimal wrote:

You never roll 1v1s or 2v2s? 

@min - I think you might be misunderstanding.  SQ is talking about 1 player v 1 player games, not 1d v 1d rolls.