Wednesday, November 12

NaGa DeMon 6: Something To Aim For

I've now played seven games of Codename: Dragon, four against Sam, two against Mal and one against Ian. I've drawn twice, once as the dragon and once as the knight both against Sam, and won every other game. Which is good, it makes me thing there's an element of skill in the game as the most experienced player wins more games.

Recently, Mal was wondering whether the dragon had too few hit points. I replied that I didn't have enough data, and here's the proof:

Dragon Chart

The blue bars represent the games I've played and the amount of life the winner had left at the end. The knight is on the left of zero, the dragon on the right. The orange line represents a target for the win distribution I'd like the final game to have. So very few ties, and a roughly Gaussian distribution on either side, but with the dragon as likely to win as the knight (assuming equally matched players).

It's going to be really difficult to achieve this considering the asymmetry in the game:

  • the knight has fewer hit points
  • the dragon has fewer dice, so needs to recuperate more often
  • the dragon's attacks and defence are stronger
  • the knight has the ability to attack and change range
  • the knight has the ability to prevent all damage once
  • the knight has the ability to combo attacks

But it gives me a target to aim for. Clearly what I need to begin with is a shed-load more data. That's where you come in - there's PIPs galore available for helping me to fill in those blanks!

2 comments:

Konrad said...

I hope that my Ferdinand can battle the Dragon tonight.
My copy is printed, cut, and ready to play.

Jackson Pope said...

Hiya Konrad,

Excellent, thanks very much for giving it a try, looking forward to hear how it went and what you thought.

Cheers,

Jack
P.S. Another PIP for you!