Incline Battle Brothers + Beasts & Exploration, Warriors of the North and Blazing Deserts DLC Thread

[Tigranes]

People cannot into probability, ever

 

[Ezeekiel]

Btw, have you guys read the official steam discussion for this game?

People are cooking up conspiracy stories about the RNG. It's pretty amusing. Some people there just can't believe you can miss 95% shots two times in a row, and the devs is somehow doing this on purpose to fuck with us

Happens every time a game has RNG of any kind pretty much. They (complainers) even do it if the RNG is totally stacked in their favor.

 

[Teut Busnet]

This is precisely why many developers "fudge" their RNG numbers.

Wich makes it even worse for developers who don't.

Nu-XCom devs deserve a slapping.

 

[Ezeekiel]

This is precisely why many developers "fudge" their RNG numbers.

Wich makes it even worse for developers who don't.

Nu-XCom devs deserve a slapping.

For so many more crimes than just that...

 

[Explorerbc]

I am 45 hours into my campaign and starting to get some heavy fatigue.

I really want to see some new enemies because everything looks the same at this point and battles feel like they take forever. Necromancers with 30 zombies and Goblin ambushers all over. All the contracts are usually the same and not worth my time either.

I defeated the orc invasion some time ago, and now some dude on the road told me there's war coming so I hope the noble feud will make things interesting.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

nope, didn't work, the game still loads and saves like a snail on glue, despite the dev saying it's been fixed on avast's side.

 

[Sarissofoi]

Problem with this game is that it not utilize its possibilities.
>random map
But still no random CUSTOM map with sliders about terrin, number of factions, human settlements, enemy factions, presence of enemies, starting company, etc.
Why you can just put swamps and mountains on minimum with only orcs as enemies and become orc hunter?
Various starting options also would be nice. Even unlock able starting options.
Why even bother with random maps if you can not customize them on the start?
Other is extremely limited enemy troops selection.
Its like 4 orcs types and one tactic.
Why not add some more mid tiers or even specific clans that prefer fighting with specific weapons - Spear Chuckers field plenty of spear throwers when bloody axes go with plenty of axes?
You do not even need new assets for that.
I am not sure why there is even global map in current form. It would be actually working better if they put something like FFT or TO type map.
4:44 time go sleep

 

[Andnjord]

ts like 4 orcs types and one tactic.
Why not add some more mid tiers or even specific clans that prefer fighting with specific weapons - Spear Chuckers field plenty of spear throwers when bloody axes go with plenty of axes?
You do not even need new assets for that.

There is a little bit of that already in to be fair to the devs. Like the Brigand Hunter groups that have wardogs and loads of marksmen. Or in my game there are two orc town taunting me: one has 12 orc warriors, 12 younglings and the warlords, the other has 6 warriors, 20 younglings and 6-7 berserkers on top of the warlord. Both fights are veeery different. But it is definitely a concept that should be expanded upon.

 

[Prime Junta]

RNG giveth and RNG taketh away.

Doth it ever. I just had a run that was a perfect illustration of this. Started out sweet, winning every battle with nary a scratch, all my beggars and cripples have fabulous stats, it's really really sweet. Then, early mid-game, I get into a one-skull fight with some bandit raiders + marksmen. I. Just. Keep. Whiffing. Despite quite decent hit chances, say 50 +/- 20. First two rounds I made, at a rough estimate, 20 attacks, of which maybe 3 or 4 hit, and all those were superficial. They, OTOH, made one crit after another. Fuckers wiped me out although I didn't make any major tactical mistakes that I'm aware of, and easily won similar battles before.

 

[Chris Avelltwo]

Btw, have you guys read the official steam discussion for this game?

People are cooking up conspiracy stories about the RNG. It's pretty amusing. Some people there just can't believe you can miss 95% shots two times in a row, and the devs is somehow doing this on purpose to fuck with us

Nah, it's just confirmation bias. Missing twice in a row at 95% chance doesn't happen very often, but in the very rare times when it does happen people are very likely to remember and forgot the other hundreds of times when it didn't happen. People also tend to forget the times when the rolls went exceptionally well in their favor and they one-shot popamoled an enemy even when they had a poor chance of doing so. Many people have a tendency to only remember the bad rolls and forget everything else.

That being said though, from what I understand computers are unable to properly generate numbers completely randomly. They follow some sort of algorithm that might be very complicated, but it isn't truly random.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_number_generation#Computational_methods

 

[Darth Roxor]

The RNG seems fairly fair to me. I don't remember it ever doing any shenanigans.

 

[Prime Junta]

Yeah it's fair. With so many coin-tosses, runs of bad and good luck are inevitable.

 

[Kayerts]

Some applications, a few of them games, use a pseudorandom distribution to smooth out streaks of improbable sequential events. The general method is that the event initially has a lower-than-rated chance of firing. If it doesn't fire, successive attempts increment a counter that increase the per-attempt probability of firing, eventually reaching 1.0. The counter is reset upon the event firing. A properly tuned pseudorandom distribution will see the same number of successful attempts as a true random function over time, but they seem intuitively fairer to us. It's not a bad system, I think.

I don't know of a case of game programmers using this outside of competitive multiplayer games, where people don't want the rare case of a 10%-chance effect proccing 5 times in a row to determine the outcome of a high profile tournament. I'd be surprised if BB implemented it.

 

[Prime Junta]

I for one much prefer a RNG which produces a similar distribution of events as genuine randomness. Streaks are all part of the fun.

 

[Kuattro]

People complaining about getting tired of the game after 40 hours, and I have god knows how many hours in between betas and release, and still having a blast.

Yesterday I had the, without a doubt, best combat experience I've ever had in BB. Three skulls contract to defend a village from raiders, the second group was 20+ thugs with a generous serving of poachers/marksmen. I immediately dismissed the idea of charging in because their numbers superiority would probably bog me down as their ranged units murdered me. Boy does seeing just one or two crossbows change your perspective on things.

So what followed was ten or twelve turns of archery duel, my archers trying to pick their archers from behind the shield wall (their crossbows didn't have range :D) and killing some thugs in the process, as their archers did the same, followed by, once I had thinned their ranks to an acceptable size, a glorious charge and a massacre with crossbow bolts flying around the heads of my brothers.

The third group though made me a bit disappointed with the AI. They had half a dozen raiders, one archer and two crossbow. Apparently the AI decided that they had ranged superiority even though their crossbows couldn't reach my line while my three archers could reach theirs. When they managed to kill one of their archers, one of their crossbowmen, a raider, and make the last crossbowman run, I thought the rest would charge, I've seen the AI change it's battleplan when it loses range superiority. Nada. They just stood there as I pelted them with arrows and bolts, and finally charged them to finish the damn thing.

A couple of them had throwing weapons, maybe the AI added them to consider it's ranged superiority.

It was still interesting because we were in a forest and their line was divided so a lot of one on one combats.

And then a couple of combats later two of my glorious archers died against fucking wendengahwhatthefuck because they couldn't hit the necromancer even with seven or eight 70%+ shots. That'll teach them.

Now I have to train two new archers, and my first candidate was turned into a pincushion by marksmen in his first combat.

 

[*-*/\--/\~]

These RNG issues come up with any game that works like BB, that is having low number of attacks resolved in all or nothing fashion. There are no degrees of success and there is a big psychological difference between scoring even a weak glancing hit and doing big fat nothing. So people will complain.

 

[Zetor]

Players are really bad at understanding probability, especially when they have a 90% or 95% chance to hit (or conversely, an enemy has a 5% chance to hit). It's extra amusing when you consider that rolling a 1 (always miss) or 20 (always critical hit) in d&d is a 5% chance, and I haven't heard any d&d players bitch about that.

Some applications, a few of them games, use a pseudorandom distribution to smooth out streaks of improbable sequential events. The general method is that the event initially has a lower-than-rated chance of firing. If it doesn't fire, successive attempts increment a counter that increase the per-attempt probability of firing, eventually reaching 1.0. The counter is reset upon the event firing. A properly tuned pseudorandom distribution will see the same number of successful attempts as a true random function over time, but they seem intuitively fairer to us. It's not a bad system, I think.

I don't know of a case of game programmers using this outside of competitive multiplayer games, where people don't want the rare case of a 10%-chance effect proccing 5 times in a row to determine the outcome of a high profile tournament. I'd be surprised if BB implemented it.

City of Heroes had it (it was called the 'streakbreaker'), and it was actually displayed on the UI when you scored a hit due to the streakbreaker fudging a roll -- there were also some edge-case builds that could exploit it to force a hit on a high-damage attack that had a high natural miss rate. I wouldn't be surprised if other MMOs had it, too.

 

[RK47]

50% hit chance is shit.

 

[thesheeep]

Players are really bad at understanding probability.

Meh. I definitely understand probability, but still prefer approaches that "fudge" the rolls to prevent absurd streaks (though I prefer this both applied to my faction as well as enemies).
If getting wrecked by 4 extremely unlikely hits by the enemy in a row or not managing to finish off that enemy despite 4 70+% rolls is your definition of fun, then so be it.
It is definitely not my definition of fun.

I enjoy games despite that, of course (especially BB ), but I'd prefer if they added an option to enable/disable this evening out of extreme streaks. Another good example of how options in game mechanics would improve a game.

 

[Prime Junta]

50% hit chance is shit.

It's also what you get quite often in the opening rounds -- missile fire, thrown weapons, and enemies not yet surrounded, wounded, or in inferior terrain.

And it's those opening round which determine the course of the battle. Knock out an enemy and wound a couple more and it'll be easy sailing; if they do the same to you, ouch.

 

[Ezeekiel]

50% hit chance is shit.

It's also what you get quite often in the opening rounds -- missile fire, thrown weapons, and enemies not yet surrounded, wounded, or in inferior terrain.

And it's those opening round which determine the course of the battle. Knock out an enemy and wound a couple more and it'll be easy sailing; if they do the same to you, ouch.

Mh. I'm only worried about crossbow enemies moving in and then shooting tbh, except early on archers are also quite deadly.
Thrown weapons rarely hit me tbh. Enemies who use them seem to have fairly low ranged skill or something.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Guess Hard West had a decent system, where facing shots that missed would bring down your Luck levels, which increased your chances of being shot. So basically the streakbreaker, but sounds better.

 

[Ezeekiel]

I don't see much in the way of streaks tbh. A few 2-3 whiffs in a row kind of streaks yeah, but whatever.
I guess having a system which almost works out like a 2AP system elsewhere might be the problem. That way, every single attack matters so much.

Would have been nice if it was more JA2 like maybe, including targeted attacks just by pointing your mouse at that part of the enemies body, and right clicking for added accuracy at the cost of more AP. The more skilled you are, the higher the base accuracy requiring less right clicks to make the attack as accurate as you want, thus letting you attack more often.
Come to think of it, why does no one use that system? It was great for the most part. IMO the best overall for small squad action. Could have been an upgrade for xcom as well because it's very fast and makes your stats matter just right.

 

[Zetor]

Players are really bad at understanding probability.

Meh. I definitely understand probability, but still prefer approaches that "fudge" the rolls to prevent absurd streaks (though I prefer this both applied to my faction as well as enemies).
If getting wrecked by 4 extremely unlikely hits by the enemy in a row or not managing to finish off that enemy despite 4 70+% rolls is your definition of fun, then so be it.
It is definitely not my definition of fun.

I enjoy games despite that, of course (especially BB ), but I'd prefer if they added an option to enable/disable this evening out of extreme streaks. Another good example of how options in game mechanics would improve a game.

Ideally in a tactics game relying heavily on RNG you'd have ways to mitigate outcomes like that (at a resource cost, of course). F'rex, I don't think nuXCOM2 would be playable in ironman without grenadiers / gremlin attack protocol / advanced stocks / etc.

In BB you have a few ways to mitigate RNG on the tactical layer (mainly nets and war dogs), though you do need to build your strategy to include them, and they aren't as reliable as their nuXCOM analogues.

I personally prefer the Invisible Inc / Telepath Tactics approach to tactical combat, but that wouldn't really work in a game like this. It's the same idea with roguelikes: if they were predictable and you didn't have a chance of getting really lucky in the early game (or conversely, get completely screwed by the map generator), they'd be a lot less interesting.

 

[Ezeekiel]

Players are really bad at understanding probability.

Meh. I definitely understand probability, but still prefer approaches that "fudge" the rolls to prevent absurd streaks (though I prefer this both applied to my faction as well as enemies).
If getting wrecked by 4 extremely unlikely hits by the enemy in a row or not managing to finish off that enemy despite 4 70+% rolls is your definition of fun, then so be it.
It is definitely not my definition of fun.

I enjoy games despite that, of course (especially BB ), but I'd prefer if they added an option to enable/disable this evening out of extreme streaks. Another good example of how options in game mechanics would improve a game.

Ideally in a tactics game relying heavily on RNG you'd have ways to mitigate outcomes like that (at a resource cost, of course). F'rex, I don't think nuXCOM2 would be playable in ironman without grenadiers / gremlin attack protocol / advanced stocks / etc.

In BB you have a few ways to mitigate RNG on the tactical layer (mainly nets and war dogs), though you do need to build your strategy to include them, and they aren't as reliable as their nuXCOM analogues.

(I personally prefer the Invisible Inc / Telepath Tactics approach to tactical combat, but that wouldn't really work in a game like this)

Armor (+perk) does much of the mitigating for you tbh, especially over multiple battles. I keep forgetting to spam wardogs, but I don't like my dogs dying... It's your best option against endgame ranged unit spam though I guess.