reaper beating the odds

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tcampbel1965
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reaper beating the odds

Post by tcampbel1965 » Sat May 03, 2008 8:35 pm

Just wonder how come reaper, botofdoom, etc manage to beat the odds of chance? Seems they are just incredible at rolling the dice. My understanding is that the Lux is played same as Risk in which we roll dice and everyone has equal chance. Clearly these bots have "special" dice (perhaps only with 4,5,6 on them). What gives?? I don't mind an aggressive "personality" but I'm not sure how 200 reaper soldiers can beat 500 human soldiers repeatedly and still have 100 left to take over a castle or continent.

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Enokrad
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Re: reaper beating the odds

Post by Enokrad » Sat May 03, 2008 9:30 pm

tcampbel1965 wrote:Just wonder how come reaper, botofdoom, etc manage to beat the odds of chance? Seems they are just incredible at rolling the dice. My understanding is that the Lux is played same as Risk in which we roll dice and everyone has equal chance. Clearly these bots have "special" dice (perhaps only with 4,5,6 on them). What gives?? I don't mind an aggressive "personality" but I'm not sure how 200 reaper soldiers can beat 500 human soldiers repeatedly and still have 100 left to take over a castle or continent.
as you mentioned reaper is aggressive at times. he likes to take other peoples cards cash and continue his path of devastation. you might think he just beat 500 with just 200 but in reality he had an army to match that number. he's just goes to fast to see what he really did.

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dustin
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Post by dustin » Mon May 05, 2008 9:52 pm

All bots have the same dice odds as humans.

Reaper is just really good at calculating the odds and only attacking battles he will likely win.

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Bertrand
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Post by Bertrand » Tue May 06, 2008 1:19 pm

Reaper would never attack 500 with 200. If it looks like he did, then there must have been an intermediary kill where he cashed his cards and increased his armies to more than 500.

Letting him play at maximum speed hides everything. If you want to observe the gory details then you should slow him down: set the "computer player speed" to slow in the preferences.

tcampbel1965
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Post by tcampbel1965 » Mon Jun 16, 2008 8:23 pm

OK, one more question. Does reaper not have to play by the timer, even when all other players do. For example, reaper will almost always use up all his allotted time (currently set at 30 seconds) "thinking" but when the timer runs out it says "waiting for host" then he completes his turn when he is ready. Sometimes he has taken over a minute calculating his moves.

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Bertrand
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Post by Bertrand » Tue Jun 17, 2008 8:44 am

tcampbel1965 wrote:Does reaper not have to play by the timer, even when all other players do.
Reaper is not designed to interrupt his train of thought when the timer runs out. He has to go on, because stopping would corrupt his internal state, causing him to crash - hang up Lux, loop, or make stupid moves.

tcampbel1965 wrote: Sometimes he has taken over a minute calculating his moves.
If you want him to play as fast as possible, set the computer player speed to fast in the preferences. He should then complete his moves in a few seconds max.

There is an exception to this: if you are playing him on a very large map, then the huge number of combinations involved will take some time to go through, especially on a slow machine.

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Sir Holo
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Post by Sir Holo » Thu Jul 03, 2008 12:34 am

And anyway, don't the dice odds favor attackers? Isn't it three rolls for the attacker, two rolls for the defender (per army)?

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nimrod7
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Post by nimrod7 » Fri Jul 04, 2008 7:49 pm

Sure is.

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