Adventure 4: Yosh's Report.

[Arkadash]

It warms my heart that you handed Izzy a hieroglyphically tattooed nuke! Great game; a win like this sure helps to put the Azteskimo debacle to bed. I wish you had included more of your middle game, but I certainly understand how you can get caught up in playing and forget about reporting. I'm interested in knowing the most lop-sided trade that you made and what wonders you were able to snag.

I agree that there is nothing more frusterating than having your city raider 3 tank lose to a rifleman with a 95% chance of winning. Period. Yet, as any poker player will tell you, playing the odds does not guarantee a victory. There are lottery winners every day and none of those people have a statistically significant chance of winning. I don't have an opinion on whether there is a glitch in the game, but in dealing with with these unfortunate occurances I have found it helpful to remember all the times I came out on top when the numbers were stacked against me. Wise man once said, sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. That being said, you killed the competition in this game, so the unfortunate rolls didn't seem to cripple your campaign. Same wise man once said, sometimes it's better to be good than lucky.

[Yosh]

I'm interested in knowing the most lop-sided trade that you made and what wonders you were able to snag.

Well, I didn't do a lot of trading this game, because of the "Bee Larvae Syndrome" (or a lot of ) I mis-interpreted the rules of this game to be that you could not trade techs unless they came to you (as well as not researching Alphabet, of course!). So the only tech trades I really did in this game were the ones I documented in my report. As for wonders, I don't recall getting too many early wonders - I believe I got the GL, Kremlin, Space Elevator, Possibly Hanging Gardens, Statue of Liberty and Chicken Pizza; I late-game Wonder Yoinked out Rock n' Roll, Broadway, the aforementioned Space Elevator, but other than that, I can't recall which other wonders I got (I played the game and wrote the report in mid-January, so details are a bit fuzzy)

That being said, you killed the competition in this game, so the unfortunate rolls didn't seem to cripple your campaign. Same wise man once said, sometimes it's better to be good than lucky.

Truly said, truly said. In this particular game it didn't have a great impact on the outcome, but it was annoying. I think I've ranted on this particular issue long enough for now, so I'll stop ! Perhaps when the SDK comes out I will be able to conduct some empircal tests to see if my paranoia is justified

[Zeviz]

It's cool to see somebody using nukes. (Where is that :nuked: smiley?) I also liked that line of destroyers for a naval blocade.

...
That is VERY true, and I've taken that into account, however, I've gotten into a habit of taking a screenshot of combat logs when I do lose those 90%+ battles, and looking through them, I'm seeing that over the course of maybe 4 games or so (let's arbitrarily say 400 battles total), there have been more than *20* such incidents! Perhaps I am wrong and I'm just being a particularly good example of the non-randomness of human thinking, but to me it seems fishy.

IIRC from my college math course (don't ask how well I did in it... just don't!), the odds of an event happening x out of n times is x(!?) / n! - or somewhere thereabouts
...

In the case you've described, you are expected to lose about 20 battles. (40 at 90% odds, but I am assuming you've had a whole range of odds.) If you want the exact formula for a chance to lose at least 20 out of 400 battles, it's sum( nCx * p^x * (1-p)^(n-x) ) for all x from 20 to 400. nCx is that factor you've listed (x! * (n-x)! / n!). However, in this case you don't need this scary formula. The expected number of battles you'll loose at 95% odds is n * (1 - 95%) = 400 * 0.05 = 20. Which means that your data proves that listed odds are approximately correct.

[Yosh]

The expected number of battles you'll loose at 95% odds is n * (1 - 95%) = 400 * 0.05 = 20. Which means that your data proves that listed odds are approximately correct.

Really? Wow, ok so I guess that I'm just latching onto the more prominent losses and those are sticking out more than the wins... Hmmm maybe I should have paid more attention in my math classes!

It's cool to see somebody using nukes. (Where is that :nuked: smiley?) I also liked that line of destroyers for a naval blocade.

Yeah I knew that Izzie was going to come gunning for me again, and so I made sure that I was prepared

What surprised me though is how she ended up declaring on me to punch through the blockade to get to that specific spot (I don't think it was coincidence that it was the SAME spot she'd landed on twice before in centuries past -- funny thing is, the city was EXTEMELY well defended!); I was expecting her to divert somewhere else which would force me to declare on her first (which I didn't want, since I wanted to get my DP activated against her )