Very serious combat bug?

[Endoperez]

It's so unlikely that it could be said to be impossible. Being able to hit someone with thrice as much defense as you have attack is possible, given a lucky strike. Being able to deal damage through prot 34 is even less likely, for a total dam 13 (3 weapon + 10 str) or so attack. Dealing 34! points of damage is possible, but highly unlikely, and dealing it through 40 points of protection from armor and shield...twice in the same minor battle!

[sector24]

All I know is one time a Phalanx sunk my Battleship in Civ and I never trusted computers ever again...

[vfb]

I think as the Battleship prepared to fire its cannons at the Phalanx, Seaman 3rd Class Roscoe (recently demoted) was smoking down in the magazine.

Boom!

[MartialDoctor]

Well, in terms of using probability, you all are looking at this incorrectly.

How long has this game been out? How many games have been played in that time? In all of those games, how many battles have there been? In each battle, how many calculations how many calculations were made?

The fact that an incredibly rare event occurred (6^10 =~ 362 Million) is not unreasonable. Let's just say that there have been 1 Million calculations made (and that number is definitely very low), then that is a 1 / 362 chance that this rare event occurred in one of those instances...

So, it just happened that you had to be that one very unlucky one who gets this incredibly rare event. Now, if this started to occur on a more regular basis, then that would be different. If something were wrong with the random number generator, I think more people would be getting strange events like this.

[Lingchih]

I concur with MartialDoctor. This game has been played way too much with nothing like this ever being reported. If there were really a bug in the random engine, it would have been reported before now. Now... it could be a bug in the random engine that only occurs very rarely.

[archaeolept]

it's possibly a valid result - but I would bet a memory error, not a bug in the game per se. Although some random number generators are pretty iffy...

[Sombre]

I don't think it's fair to say "well the game has been played so much eventually something like this was bound to happen" because you have no idea how often this has happened. In this instance it didn't just 'happen', it happened to an SC, he saw it and also reported it. There could be a load of times results like this happened and weren't noticed, or weren't reported.

Once the odds of something happening go over 1 in 60 million or higher I'd say it's a bug, because you also have to factor in the odds of someone actually seeing it and reporting it on this forum, probably leaving you with some insane odds.

So imo it's a bug, but it seems it isn't very common. Usually SCs do work very well. I do remember killing one of llamas bane lord thugs with a small number of flaggies though - they did have a blood/fire bless, but they still shouldn't have been able to kill it, because it was rocking huge protection and had no enc.

[konming]

I think you all forgot one thing, flail ignores shield. So shield parry or protection will never come into play. So your actual defense is not as high as it seems (prot 40 so I am thinking barrier, that means your actual defense without shield is only 15, certainly not that difficult to hit). While protection of 35 is more difficult to goes through, you have to factor in bless (is there any?) and fatigue. On critical you get only 17 protection. Also remember flail strike twice on each swing.

[Sombre]

I think you forgot that flail doesn't ignore shield, it just gets +2 att vs shields to help get past the parry.

At least as far as I know.

[konming]

Page 75 of manual clearly states that flail ignores shield. I do not know where you got your idea.