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Somer summoning trouble & Lenny's aura


Guildenstern

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Thank you very much for detailed explanation. :D

SHAPING: Statistically speaking (and rounding a bit for convenience) you are going to increase your success on duels by 1,9% for each card you are going to discard (assuming they start always from 1 going up) so, in fact, it's more likely you add a 1,7% of win to duels for each card you throw away. I've never played somer so I don't know how hardly you can draw but I don't think you can do more than 6-8 cards? (Unless you build crew strategy for it but I don't think it worths?) This gives you probably a couple of cards you wanna hold for next turn and +8,5% chance to win duel next round and couple of high cards. This is roughly what you can get from Mah Tucket :ram in Initiative for melee (+7,7%).

This is undoubtedly relevant but at what price? I mean, if you have to play hardly to achieve that I think doesn't worth the price. If it's something it comes from your play-style...is surely a good things that help you next turn (on first deck cycle).

The problem - however - is that this game thanks to your cheating capabilities is made by things YOU MUST DO and the rest. For the first, you want make them happen no matter what...so you are going to throw your 13 from hands like it rains and often only the black joker can stop you. Having a +8-10% of doing this things to me is not relevant, what is relevant is the 100% (excluding joker) to do it because I have 13 in hand (or whatever value makes certain the action success) so I find more valuable drawing cards to keep high cards in hand the next turn than shaping deck to discard crap.

CYCLING: I probably don't understand this at all. I mean, if you cycle your deck many times you get no advantage of it? 

Assuming you have drawn cards equally spread between 1 and 13, the only real benefit is that you can find multiple jokers? Surely a red jokers is often better than a black jokers if you speak of many little bites...but at this point I do believe that also the red joker on the better case (damage of bayou gremlin) gives you just couple of more dmg? And considering you have shooting 4, it's very unlikely to cycle that many cards unless you are shooting a Desolation Engine or a Ashen core :D

If you shoot Sh4 vs Df6 ~40% to win or Sh4 vs Df5 ~46% to win - I believe - you get much more benefit from focus than from cycling hoping in a joker on the dmg. With focus you'll get respectively ~63% and ~71% to win...with the Bayou two card on the dmg most of the time.

Definitively better in my opinion.

BLACK JOKER: Do you always keep it in your hand? I always discard it the turn I went all in.

And for all in, I mean the turn where I go and try to make happens things that MUST happens, like blowing up Quick murder or important objectives for the game.

I think the % of getting it in a game-changer situation is much, much less unlikely than the advantage it gives you an extra card in the control hand. This, of course, if you already don't hold a couple of high cards in your hand...this case you could effectively keep the joker one more round.

This - of course - is just my opinion :P

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9 hours ago, Dogmantra said:

Hm, if you were to play summoning Som'er, take just bayou gremlins and keep only enough around to summon three a turn, killing all the others within 6" of Som'er, you could theoretically do that by turn 3 provided you always succeeded your summons without cheating... but you would also have literally just Som'er left over. Can two turns with 100% RJ flips win you a game? Maybe, depending on how well you did scheming with your doomed bayou gremlins...

 

I kind of want to try this now because it's ridiculous.

That would be fun!

I want to be there, if you can do it :D

But....how can you do it 2 turns? The first, ok...no worry. But then you have to discard card to only hold 6 in hands so you have the first joker on the first duel, the shuffle?

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3 hours ago, Blacks85 said:

Thank you very much for detailed explanation. :D

SHAPING: Statistically speaking (and rounding a bit for convenience) you are going to increase your success on duels by 1,9% for each card you are going to discard (assuming they start always from 1 going up) so, in fact, it's more likely you add a 1,7% of win to duels for each card you throw away. I've never played somer so I don't know how hardly you can draw but I don't think you can do more than 6-8 cards? (Unless you build crew strategy for it but I don't think it worths?) This gives you probably a couple of cards you wanna hold for next turn and +8,5% chance to win duel next round and couple of high cards. This is roughly what you can get from Mah Tucket :ram in Initiative for melee (+7,7%).

This is undoubtedly relevant but at what price? I mean, if you have to play hardly to achieve that I think doesn't worth the price. If it's something it comes from your play-style...is surely a good things that help you next turn (on first deck cycle).

The problem - however - is that this game thanks to your cheating capabilities is made by things YOU MUST DO and the rest. For the first, you want make them happen no matter what...so you are going to throw your 13 from hands like it rains and often only the black joker can stop you. Having a +8-10% of doing this things to me is not relevant, what is relevant is the 100% (excluding joker) to do it because I have 13 in hand (or whatever value makes certain the action success) so I find more valuable drawing cards to keep high cards in hand the next turn than shaping deck to discard crap.

For the record, my simulation was that you get a random hand of six and then add twelve cards (which is probably in the very upper part of what you could hope to get to draw in a turn) to it and hold on to all the cards valued seven or less. Then you discard those at the start of the next turn in order to not encounter them. And in ten million simulations this resulted in about the same effect in winning duels as a +1 to a stat would give.

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4 hours ago, Blacks85 said:

But....how can you do it 2 turns? The first, ok...no worry. But then you have to discard card to only hold 6 in hands so you have the first joker on the first duel, the shuffle?

Um so... it turns out this entire time I have been under the impression that if you already have more than six cards you don't need to discard down... (not that it has ever come up as far as I remember - I cheat like it's going out of fashion)

It's still technically doable, but you'd need to keep all your gremlins alive until the start of turn 4 then. And then you'll only have 100% red joker flips for the little bit right at the end of the turn, probably after your opponent has fully activated. Turns out ridiculous weird gimmicks aren't actually that great.

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38 minutes ago, Dogmantra said:

Um so... it turns out this entire time I have been under the impression that if you already have more than six cards you don't need to discard down... (not that it has ever come up as far as I remember - I cheat like it's going out of fashion)

It's still technically doable, but you'd need to keep all your gremlins alive until the start of turn 4 then. And then you'll only have 100% red joker flips for the little bit right at the end of the turn, probably after your opponent has fully activated. Turns out ridiculous weird gimmicks aren't actually that great.

Unfortunately, you have to do it :D

I'm afraid we won't see the 250 bayou gremlin blowing up to give you a red joker turn then

:D 

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While I value your simulation Math, I still say the reality is very different than your results are stating. Probability also implies that you should almost always draw at least one high value card (11+) into your control hand, but there have been many, many times where nothing above a 7 has come up. For the record again though, I am not alone in seeing the potency of Som'er's Deck Shaping potential, a very competitive environment complained loudly about it last edition and the interaction is unchanged from then.

Theory is one thing, reality often another try them out for yourselves.

I am curious to see how you came up with this though:

19 hours ago, Blacks85 said:

With focus you'll get respectively ~63% and ~71% to win...with the Bayou two card on the dmg most of the time.

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3 hours ago, Omenbringer said:

I am curious to see how you came up with this though:

 

Eh...When I started Malifaux ~a couple of months ago, in the final of a tournament one of my opponent said me that shooting one time with focus is always better than shoot twice without it. Despite it was very false in my subconscious, I never though about it before and I wanted to get a statistical / true answer to the question.

So, I decided to lost a couple of evenings of my life :D and develop a small script to calculate the ODD of winning a duel and doing weak/moderate/severe for the same duel and where you can set ATTACK, DEFENSE, PLUS/MINUS to ATTACK and DAMAGE.

This doesn't take in consideration either joker and the control hand / cheating possibilities.

It gave me clear results...and, in my opinion, these are only circumstances where you get real benefit from focus:

  • You have jokers to cheat on DMG or you do want to make SEVERE cheating
  • You need to compensate the cover/various :-fate on attack action
  • You have a HUGE spread between min and max damage (Like montresor have 1/4/7)
  • You have bayou two cards (It's not sufficient, but it will increase the benefit)

In other cases, It's better to make multiples shoots imo. Even when there is a -2 (or more) difference between ATTACK and DEFENSE is better to don't focus.

It might have some errors because it was a very hard brain exercise and I never deeply debugged it, but it gave me a realistic answer to my question so I was happy :D

Duel sample.png

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Appreciate the work.

I agree with this estimation:

7 hours ago, Blacks85 said:

these are only circumstances where you get real benefit from focus:

  • You have jokers to cheat on DMG or you do want to make SEVERE cheating
  • You need to compensate the cover/various :-fate on attack action
  • You have a HUGE spread between min and max damage (Like montresor have 1/4/7)

However I tend to agree with you that there are some errors in the calculations, not that I fault you for it, card math is very different (and significantly more difficult) than a simple die roll calculator (even before you consider cheating and the control hand).

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1 hour ago, Omenbringer said:

However I tend to agree with you that there are some errors in the calculations, not that I fault you for it, card math is very different (and significantly more difficult) than a simple die roll calculator (even before you consider cheating and the control hand).

Which is why I use a simulation - once you get to millions of runs, you get results just as accurate as hard math but a lot easier if you know how to do it.

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I agree that millions of simulations are better, but still subject to errors from designed parameters. While it is doubtful I could ever change your mind, Deck Shaping, even when done on a minor scale (the type available to every crew via the discard phase at the beginning of the turn) does have a measurable and significant impact on the game. For example simply removing the Black Joker from the decks run (by getting lucky and drawing it into the control hand) will skew the results of the deck. This is why the Red Joker is so often lamented (particularly on damage flips) while the Black is much less so (many players will safeguard that Black Joker in hand until the last guarantied turn). The advantage is felt more keenly by the attacker (who wins ties) than the defender, and when one side can effect the decks composition to a greater degree than the other, is also asymmetric between the two.

Though some may see these techniques as counter to one another, I see them as complimentary. Shaping the deck improves its potential prior to draw (even if only "minutely" it is still an advantage), while cycling it renews a depleted decks potential (by resetting the random generator to a near zero state).

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11 hours ago, Omenbringer said:

I agree that millions of simulations are better, but still subject to errors from designed parameters. While it is doubtful I could ever change your mind, Deck Shaping, even when done on a minor scale (the type available to every crew via the discard phase at the beginning of the turn) does have a measurable and significant impact on the game. For example simply removing the Black Joker from the decks run (by getting lucky and drawing it into the control hand) will skew the results of the deck. This is why the Red Joker is so often lamented (particularly on damage flips) while the Black is much less so (many players will safeguard that Black Joker in hand until the last guarantied turn). The advantage is felt more keenly by the attacker (who wins ties) than the defender, and when one side can effect the decks composition to a greater degree than the other, is also asymmetric between the two.

Though some may see these techniques as counter to one another, I see them as complimentary. Shaping the deck improves its potential prior to draw (even if only "minutely" it is still an advantage), while cycling it renews a depleted decks potential (by resetting the random generator to a near zero state).

I believe that - every of us - agree that shaping the deck will give you an advantage.

Trying to "measure" this advantage and see if it is worth, that's the challenge.

Personally, I believe that this is a concrete advantage when it comes on its own. I mean, if you don't have to bother too much or loose games interaction to draw cards and shape deck for next turn, this will certainly be worth. But if you can do something better for the next future of the game / schemes, I believe draw few extra cards won't worth its costs.

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Like most things in this game it is knowing when to apply which tool for best effect. Som'er just benefits from having more tools in his shed. None of those tools (Deck Shaping, Deck Cycling, Out Activation, Bigger Hat Than You, Bayou Two Card) are universally applicable, with the possible exception of Do It Like Dis! (if for no other reason than Som'er with an automatic :mask in his defense duels is one slippery fellow).

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