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Old February 16th, 2005, 08:57 PM
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Arralen Arralen is offline
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Default Re: Random Magic Paths - is it truly random?

You may be right, daddy, but you just quite don't hit the mark.

I'm 100% with Bummer here:
There are odd patterns in the randomly generated commanders skills.

But those patterns are so short, that they will not influence the overall result if you do several hundreds of test, e.g. 500 sages.
I estimate the sample size, where those patterns could be observed, is about 20.. 30. After that, the alghorithm produced the next pattern.

And the significance is not in the number of samples you get by buying sages in a test, but in how often this behaviour is observed in ongoing games. And I must state -again- that I have seen it way to often as to dismiss it as statistical oddities.

Hey, I have even got commanders which had the very same randomly drawn name, additionally to having the same magic skills.

And this behaviour is quite understandable, as we are not talking about a bunch of thown dice, but about complex programm code, whose behaviour isn't really suited to be discribed by statistical analysis but maybe by chaos theory

What if the RNG works great, but is -because of some flaw somewhere else- fed with exactly the same seeding value turn after turn, unless the numbers of orders in a turn is odd, in which case it uses the cross summ of all player 1 commmander names as seed for it's next sequence of random numbers?
You could buy sages for ages, and in the end you'll find perfect random skill distributions. But for 20 or 50 turns you may not get a single "blood" one, but alternating air and earth ones.
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As for AI the most effective work around to this problem so far is to simply use an American instead, they tend to put up a bit more of a fight than your average Artificial Idiot.
... James McGuigan on rec.games.computer.stars somewhen back in 1998 ...
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