Multi-sided dice

[Coxey]

it would be interesting if players could choose to customise the dice in their game - they could choose the "dice" to have 5-8 sides (or more) to skew the game play either more in favor of defense (fewer sided "dice") or attack (larger variables on the "dice").

The actual combat mechanics would remain the same, attacker gets 3 dice defender 2, defender wins on a draw.

You'd need to feature the sides of the dice prominently in the "join game" menu so that players knew what they were getting into when signing up.

This wouldn't take that much coding to implement and it would be something significantly new for people to experiment with. I think it would work well with the nuclear games.

[drunkmonkey]

This wouldn't take that much coding to implement

Programmers just love to see this line when reading feature requests.

[Doc_Brown]

So I threw together a quick Monte Carlo simulation in Matlab to see what the approximate odds become if you change the number of sides on the dice. In the following table, the left-hand edge gives the number of "sides" on the simulated intensity cubes. Then there are three numbers. The first is the probability of the attacker killing two armies. The second is the probability of both losing 1 army each. The last is the probability of the defender winning. Obviously this is for the attacker rolling 3 intensity cubes and the defender rolling two.

First, the standard case:
6 37.285 33.628 29.087

Now for all cases from 2 sides up to 15:
2 12.439 34.262 53.299
3 24.244 35.407 40.349
4 30.49 34.899 34.611
5 34.51 34.125 31.365
6 37.22 33.499 29.281
7 39.008 33.225 27.767
8 40.488 32.795 26.717
9 41.591 32.395 26.014
10 42.582 31.905 25.513
11 43.161 31.92 24.919
12 43.885 31.98 24.135
13 43.917 31.967 24.116
14 44.503 31.834 23.663
15 44.733 31.744 23.523

I'd say that 4-sided cubes should be the low end. Above 10 sides the probabilities change very little. If this were really to be implemented, I'd say it should just have 3 options. There would be the standard 6-sides. Then maybe strong defensive cubes with 4 sides and strong attacker cubes with 10 sides.