SMG Studio

Game does not use true dice roll probabilities. Many, many times I've had 97-99% chance to win and dont.

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I'd love to know the difference of true odds vs their algorithm for these larger armies, mostly concerning average troops lost. How much worse does it look for the attacker as more and more troops exist? 

Do you play Powerball?  Nah I don't, either, I figure the odds are so stacked against me that it's a poor investment.  Why, in fact, I recently read a Time article that they are 1 in 292 million, That's what I thought, it just can't possibly happen, no one could win with those odds.  ;}

I'm disappointed that some of us have taken an opportunity to flame at the developers about all kinds of things unrelated to dice throw.  Somewhere I recall hearing they were working on new algorithms.  So why are they getting beat on after they've already agreed?

My extended family and I love the game.  We play weekly from 3 locations around the country with a phone conference on the side.  Keep up the good work developers!  I like what you have done with a game I loved back in highschool.  And all that for free.  Thank you.

Well of course everyone gets the same "advantage" or "disadvantage" but if the dice aren't rolling as expected, strategies may need to be changed. In this case, the slight variances in 1's wouldn't change gameplay much. It just means that in small battles that defender has slightly better edge than if the dice were exactly as they should be. It's not enough to sway me from playing, obviously.

Actually, the greatest flaw in my opinion is how long it takes to roll. Your choice is either roll and run out of time or take a risk with a Blitz. In desperate measures, Blitz is fine but sometimes I only want to attack if I can continue to advance. And it's not often I'm willing to attack with only 2 or 1 left when the defender may still have say, 8 or more. They need rapid rolling for these circumstances which happen to me a lot in gameplay. Sometimes, I'm just beating down armies so the next turn can't be offensive. Odds are in favor of the attacker. I always take the offense when I know there's going to be lashback (typically only when it's 1v1)

 

Well said, Mark. It is true that the mind only remembers significant things. And of course the people coming to the forums are ones who were pissed that something they didn't expect happened. It doesn't mean the algorithm is off. However, there does seem to be some issue with 1's being rolled less often, as the recorded dice rolls on all 6 of my accounts show less % in 1's than others. This wasn't the case prior to the implementation of the new algorithm, which was over a year ago now. But I do remember my dice rolls way back in the day were 16% across the board. Now it's like 14% for 1's and 17% for all others evenly. Perhaps SMG did something to give defenders a little bit more boost. As slightly less 1's would give more favor ability to the tie winner (defender) but clearly not enough to offset the actual advantage to the attacker, which can be seen in every game you play. It is also possible that coincidence has happened to me but there have been others making the claim and I've made other test accounts to check it. It's still such a slight variation that it isn't enough to notice.

Now, when they did their last update there was a flaw in the blitz. Every blitz move made against a territory with 1 was always a loss of 1 to the attacker before taking the territory. It didn't take me long to figure that out. I complained and it was fixed within a day.That flaw was obvious. No clue how the dice could possibly be flawed like that but I'm sure this game is a mess of code anyway.

 

For anyone who actually wants to check whether the dice algorithm is off, there is a fair amount of data out there in the form of recorded games on youtube.  For example https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBsz1fgsud-bWjuf4PRr1KA.

I play risk just about every day and I don't think the algorithm is off.  I also record and review my games (but don't typically post to youtube).  I haven't noticed anything strange about the dice.  Sure, I lose battles I'm statistically favored to win, but that's how probability works.  What would truly be strange and questionable is if we didn't ever lose battles we were favored to win.  Humans are very good at noticing out of the ordinary things but not so good at noticing things that are as we would expect.  It's like how everyone has this idea that most drivers are idiots because they see a few dumb drivers each day.  But they don't remember all of the the good drivers, who are actually the vast majority.  The bad drivers stick out in our memory, but the good ones don't even though they're far more common.

My guess is all this complaining about "bad dice" is unintentional selective memory.  I bet if everyone complaining about bad dice would actually do some real number crunching and calculate the probabilities of their rolls using data from their games, they would discover that what happens in the game is very close to what would be expected from fair dice.

In future games try to pay specific attention to how often the dice behave more or less as you would expect.  In my experience it's the vast majority of the time.

There's one way to find out if it's offensive and defensive together. Make 2 accounts. Make one single roll on each, record the rolls for offensive/defensive, then check your dice stats to confirm. Anyone got time to confirm this? I'm curious if your stats are only what you roll (yours + defender), only your offense, your offense + your defense.

 

I completely agree this request for creating an actual dice roll algorithm.  The current faulty dice wreck games when people get positively screwed and then leave the game.

The faulty dice mechanics are especially damaging to Risk games with Fixed card trade in rather than Progressive due to recovery time.