User talk:Zeracles

Balancing the prices of UQM's ships

Based on Shiver's forthcoming PvP guide, I think we could mathematically calculate new and perfectly balanced values for UQM's ships (using the data about how well each ship fares against each other ship).

I have uploaded a C++ version here, but it makes an ugly oversimplification and it's not exactly mathematically proven. The probability of each outcome of each match-up should be taken into account, I guess.

-With hope that you can sort things out, Valaggar 17:33, 15 January 2008 (CET)

Yes, I had this in mind as an application of the idea I put on that page, I guess the only thing at the moment is that my real life has been quite busy in recent times, resubmitting our paper (it's morning where I live and I only just saw this before heading out to face a busy day). I was actually thinking of running the simulations in matlab too, but we can do it every which way :)

There are all kinds of issues to consider here, but I may have some time coming up. I've been watching Shiver's guide with keen interest.

There are also other things we can look at with the approach I suggested. For example, I saw the talk in the dreadnought=banana boat thread on UQMF and actually I think one of the main reasons for the weakness of the dreadnought is that the limited number of directions is a disadvantage for any ship with long range weapons which do not track the enemy. This effect we could test by seeing what happens when we add more directions. There are many other interesting speculations like this too.

For instance, it was also mentioned that the dreadnought was not designed for retreat, it is for frontal assault. Now, I think that because one is never really concerned with holding a position in melee, ships against which this would be difficult are disadvantaged. Like the dreadnought, which is no banana boat, at least as I argue here, because melee doesn't do it justice.

I also think the dreadnought is better in numbers, and that there are some ships which would be terrible in numbers like the eluder.

All kinds of things we could test. But a lot of work. Anyway, thanks Val --Zeracles 21:46, 15 January 2008 (CET)

My apologies, for I was in a great hurry yesterday - I didn't have time to look at your program and misunderstood what you had in mind, Val. I see now that it's mainly an algorithm which deduces values assuming quantities which summarise the match-ups, and what those quantities are is a different but related question. I don't know when I'll have time, but this is really excellent, I will look more closely ASAP.

Oh and it was also mentioned in the dreadnought=banana boat thread that the marauder was better - just as an aside, I suspect this could change completely with numbers. Both of the marauder's weapons are more likely to cause friendly damage than the dreadnought's. --Zeracles 19:22, 16 January 2008 (CET)

Thank you very much, Zeracles. But what do you mean with the Marauder causing friendly damage? The Marauder doesn't collide with its own shurikens or F.R.I.E.D. jets. Valaggar 19:36, 16 January 2008 (CET)

If your algorithm is what I suspect it is (and if it isn't, this is because I don't know any of C's variants), I think it's clever. You'll correct me if I'm wrong, but here is what I understand it to be:

• The outlook for each match-up is summarised with a number between 0 and 1. It would seem natural to me to have this as probability of victory.
• The sum of these for each ship gives one a first guess at how effective it is, its x-value.
• The cleverness of the algorithm comes in here - a ship is not necessarily very useful if it is only really good against weak ships (which opponents may never choose). So, we reward it for being good against other ships which are strong, i.e., ships which have high x-values. This is achieved by weighting the sum of match-up values with the opposing ship's x-values.
• These weighted sums give us a new x-value for each ship, a ``second guess".
• These new x-values are used to again make weighted sums of the original match-up values for a third guess at the x-values.
• We continue iterating until these x-values converge.

If this is right, it sounds good to me. Well done! A possible worry is whether we can guarantee convergence (and related to this could be how you normalise the values between iterations, which I'm not clear on), but seeing as how it seems to work now, we can probably already be almost certain that this is sound.

If you go with interpreting the input as probabilities, then even if Shiver's values are not very precise for individual match-ups, I think this should work well when all of them are thrown together. It would be interesting to see what you get if you put the match-up values in assuming computer vs computer - I suspect this will deliver ship prices closer to the default ones than that guy's mod (I'd put a link but again I'm just posting quickly before another busy day!). Also, if we ever do get to doing melee simulations, the probabilities we get out of that would be refinement of Shiver's values.

You speak of an ugly oversimplification . . . you put the problem very well, so I'll just quote you :)

Also note that I used the rather gross oversimplification that ships merely have a certain chance of winning, not taking into account how damaged the victor's ship comes out of the combat (it's not necessarily directly proportional to the chance of winning, as, for instance: the Scout barely has a chance of winning, yet it still can deal considerable damage; the Drone barely has a chance of winning, yet it doesn't deal much damage generally; etc.). This is something that really needs improvement (and professional help ;)).

Maybe we'll think about that if I haven't embarrassed myself and completely missed the point of your algorithm. It may then be that probabilities as input are not the way to go. Then again, for the precision required to pin down how much damage ships will do, on average, it seems to me that simulations would be most valuable. But we can always guess and see what happens. Great work! I stand ready (well, apart from my real life interfering) to assist in any way I can. This could be worthy of a page - I think in the main body of pages, but a user page at least.

About the marauder, I was just assuming that while an individual marauder can't hurt itself, it would still be able to hurt its friends. I suppose because if melee was to be extended to third person, it would be natural to be consistent and allow friendly fire for all the ships (but obviously kzer-za fighters will have enough sense not to attack friends). Still, it could be argued that it would be equally consistent to retain all the settings of the first person melee, then again we know it wasn't designed with third person in mind.

Well, how's this for a tactic dreadnoughts could employ in numbers (which marauders couldn't!) - the fighters don't necessarily return to the ship from which they came. They return some friendly ship which is low on crew, to make it last a bit longer (or even be sent out only for the purpose of jumping into a friendly ship rather than attacking the enemy - with enough support, the front line dreadnoughts could be virtually indestructible!). These are the sorts of interesting tactics not reproduced in third person games I have seen. But then again the only third person games I've played are Dune II and StarCraft (terminators are the zealots of Star Control, are they not?). --Zeracles 19:53, 17 January 2008 (CET)