On Thu, May 05, 2005 at 06:36:41PM -0500, David White wrote: > It seems that in 0.9.1, the Ulfserker is seen as underpowered in the > multiplayer community.
>From 0.9.0, we removed berserk-on-defence, which made the unit very powerful in the eyes of some people (though I am not completely convinced of this). We then lowered resistances to compensate, and now the unit appears underpowered. The way I understood the comments by active MP players, the main gripe with Ulfs right now are the lowered resistances. To consider a commonly cited example, it is claimed this will make an Ulf lose against a Thief in grassland, when attacking. As far as I can tell, the berserk-on-attack-only issue is relatively minor in comparison. If we raise resistances somewhat, the issue is likely to shift to berserk-on-defence again. While composing this message, I realised neither side really had any facts to back up their arguments, just general comments based on common sense. I therefore thought about how to calculate the exact probabilities of units killing each other in a single skirmish, and put these into a perl script "prkill" so that we would have some facts to inform this debate. See http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5867 for the first version of this script. I also attach it here for ease of reference. In light initial testing, the output of prkill for Ulfserkers attacking other units like Thieves and Drakes seems to confirm some of the concerns of people like Dragonking. In particular, the presence or absence of specific traits like strong and resilient can dramatically change the probabilities of which unit dies. Simply put, berserk amplifies the effect of traits and can lead to non-intuitive %-to-kill outcomes. Instead of talking in generalities, I think it would be useful to look at specific combinations of stats and see how they perform, especially in the presence of traits. I would also appreciate critical review of prkill, especially from those people here who are not intimidated by basic probability theory. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
<<attachment: prkill11.zip>>
