Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

The anecdote about Sid Meier hard-coding a guaranteed "win on the third attempt" for a battle with a 1/3 victory probability was very interesting. It reminds me of the way designers of the modern XCOM games have also fudged with probability to mitigate the anger of missing a 85% shot [0]:

> “The fact is, we’re trying to entertain players,” said Solomon. “So how do you deal with a player who’s missed an 85 percent shot? Emotionally, they’re probably strained. We don’t want the players missing multiple 85 percent shots, because then the game starts to feel punitive...That 85 percent isn’t actually 85 percent. Behind the scenes, we wanted to match the player’s psychological feeling about that number.” That 85 percent, according to Solomon, is often closer to 95 percent."

As much as I love the XCOM games, I really enjoyed the refreshing deterministic approach by Klei's Invisible, Inc. [1], another turn-based squad tactics game, in which all valid shots are guaranteed to hit. This places all of the onus on the player to correctly anticipate positioning -- so, basically like chess. There's still plenty of luck involved, with the levels and loot locations being randomly generated. But the "luck" feels more of a fun obstacle to overcome, rather than a cruel arbiter of fate.

On a tangent: the fact that the human mind finds randomness to be unappealing reminds me of another game design essay, "The Nebraska Problem", about the optimal way of generating visually-pleasing grass [2]

0: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/266891/Jake_Solomon_expl...

1: https://www.klei.com/games/invisible-inc

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7692332

“Humans are bad at understanding probability, so lets make it impossible for them to get better by lying to them and reinforcing their poor internal model.”

(I know games are ostensibly about fun rather than betterment, but they originate from the opportunities for betterment that they provide and breaking that connection does a disservice to ... mankind. Not to put too fine a point on it. If you want your game to be fun and the numbers aren’t fun, don’t lie about the numbers, change how you present them.)

I agree. If 85% is not fun, make it 90%. Don’t try to change what 85% means. If as a game designer, you’re finding that random isn’t fun, maybe you ought to consider dropping the randomness and coming up with something better.

It’s not that 85% isn’t fun. It’s that when someone misses an 85% chance 5 times in a row they go on the review boards screaming about how the game cheats.

Any idea what's a better system then? Over 80% is guaranteed? After the first attempt your chance of success doubles?

For example, you'd want it to be pretty much guaranteed a trooper can beat an alien at close quarters with a chain gun and an archer can't beat a helicopter. You want some degree of randomness but you want the rules to be easily understood as well.

I’d prefer documenting the actual behavior/rules. In the Civ example, if the 3rd try always succeeds, display 100%. If the archer vs helicopter attack doesn’t make sense, show 0%. I’m a big boy, I can take the truth. If the monsters run slower when you’re not looking at them, find some sensible way in the story to explain it. Maybe your eyes feed their rage and give them powers when you look at them.

Giving the player an artificial boost when he’s behind is like giving 4 outs to the losing baseball team.

> If the monsters run slower when you’re not looking at them, find some sensible way in the story to explain it

Most games are suppose to feel like an experience though and make you feel a certain way. They're suppose to be scary monsters - less so in a Civ-style games but you're not suppose to be decomposing them into integers and algorithms.

I found that having an RNG leads to a more tense gameplay, the players actions are then a frenetic search to maximize the odds. I thought a purely deterministic system like in Invincible Inc, had less elements of surprise.

Chess is a very low luck game, but it's not zero luck.

There are a lot of ways to have luck without randomness. Simultaneous action selection which forces everyone to guess each other's moves is based on luck, and that goes from Rock Paper Scissors to Diplomacy to Street Fighter.

But for chess, although it is turn based and perfect information, the luck comes from guessing at complexity.

If you ask people to guess a specific digit of pi, say the 1,234,658th digit, they will have to guess. Although there is a method to calculate it, and although you can reduce the required luck by knowing some statistics about the digits of various areas of pi, it will come down to guessing.

Perfect information turn based games introduce luck by hiding a lot of information behind complexity and forcing us to make educated guesses. A perfect information turn based game without complexity is a solved game, for example tic tac toe.

The fact is that there is no interesting game with zero luck. Players just feel differently about different kinds of luck. Knowing that an answer is theoretically possible forces them to acknowledge their limitation rather than the game, even though in reality everyone is guessing and matches are won via luck.

Richard Garfield has an excellent talk about Luck vs Skill that can be found on Youtube.

> The anecdote about Sid Meier hard-coding a guaranteed "win on the third attempt" for a battle with a 1/3 victory probability was very interesting.

You might enjoy these videos as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ-auWfJTts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtzCLd93SyU

> Behind the scenes, we wanted to match the player’s psychological feeling about that number.

To me, finding out about this matched the psychological feeling of having unknowingly cheated all the time.

I enjoyed Invisible Inc. quite a bit. However, the deterministic hits only work because of the two-person team size, the small combat areas and (mostly) melee weapons, the use of stuns and hacks rather than kills, and the forgiving rewinds for players doing poorly. Guaranteed hits in X-Com with a six person team armed with guns would be too easy and would “flatten” the terrain rather than make it something to be navigated.

Speaking of chess like games, have you tried Enter the Breach yet? It has similar deterministic features.

Just started playing it since they recently ported it to Macs. Can't imagine a game by the FTL creators to be anything less than great.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com