BaldAdonis wrote:It has been deliberately designed to be faster than other similar calculators and it will also handle larger numbers of armies.
How do you mean? Without parsing your code, I assume it's using the exact same algorithm as Gambit (or at least a very similar one which runs in the same time). Is it just because you drop all the intermediate steps where the attack fails, instead of counting up exactly how close it came to success?
Incorrect. This is dead easy to see by running both algorithms with the same set of numbers. As the numbers grow larger you can see a visible difference. Gambit also drops intermediate steps where attack fails, any algorithm is worthless unless you do this. The key difference is re-use of previously calculated odds. For example in order to calculate 10v4 you can see that the probability for 2v1 is calculated several times. So by eliminating this repetition, the algorithm is faster. Add to that there are at least 2 ways of recursing the answer (1 from top down and 1 from bottom up). Gambit in addition needs to calculate defensive odds which I don't, which is another saving. That also means I can terminate recursing failed attacks earlier than Gambit.If you do get round to examining the code you will see the algorithms are actually different in lots of ways. There are at least 3 algorithms that can calculate these numbers , all look very different. It is a fact that this algorithm is faster than Gambit, that was the whole point. You can spend your own time measuring this, but examining the code provides a watertight proof.
Is there any support for bombardment? This is the only thing that's difficult to estimate with Gambit.
I have put bombards in the pathfinder. Current support terminates the path after a bombard but I have been asked for a few variants.
Can you arrange to stop attacks after a certain point? That is, I'd want to know the odds of winning without dropping below 3 armies, as I would with an autoattack. Gambit will tell me this by giving a distribution of the number of surviving armies, but this script just spits out the victory odds.
I love the disdainful tone of your references to this script, especially since this is version 1.0.0. I find it unnecessary, especially from you. cicero has asked for this not a couple of posts before. Yes this is possible also.
Can you stage multiple attacks to the same territory? This comes up a lot in team games, and in some smaller multiplayer escalating games, where you'll want to use a smaller force to weaken your opponent, then conquer the territory with your majority. You can get reasonable estimates by adding the smaller force to the larger one (less 3), but this ends up way off when the enemies force is small in comparison to yours, or by counting the attack as two stages, and averaging the number of surviving armies the enemy has after your smaller force attacks (only works in Gambit obviously, because you need to know how many survive).
I cannot tell if you're asking for improvements to this script or attempting to point out where Gambit might be better. Gambit is an excellent algorithm, I have been studying it in depth. Assault Odds is a faster lightweight odds calculator at the moment and is open to genuine requests for improvements. It is supposed be tailored for CC (e.g. Pathfinder) in particular multiple attack paths (read this thread).
Yes it is possible to stage multiple attacks to the same territory and I fail to see any reason to estimate the odds when it is clearly possible to do it exactly.