Dice stats

[Andrew Davidson]

My first campaign has finished and there's a summary of the dice rolls:

1 rolled on a dice = 460
2 rolled on a dice = 451
3 rolled on a dice = 457
4 rolled on a dice = 454
5 rolled on a dice = 459
6 rolled on a dice = 456

This is flatter than I would expect but all values are evenly covered.

It'd be nice to have a more detailed breakdown by faction and type of dice roll: combat, weather, paratroops, strategic warfare, etc.

[Lunalol]

Sorry, but NO.
No time to spend for that.

Just take a piece of paper and write it.
Or best, make and Excel sheet.

[tarkalak]

My first campaign has finished and there's a summary of the dice rolls:

1 rolled on a dice = 460
2 rolled on a dice = 451
3 rolled on a dice = 457
4 rolled on a dice = 454
5 rolled on a dice = 459
6 rolled on a dice = 456

This is flatter than I would expect but all values are evenly covered.

It'd be nice to have a more detailed breakdown by faction and type of dice roll: combat, weather, paratroops, strategic warfare, etc.

Physical dice are actually worst. Here is a post from some guy who used students to test the statistics of Warhammer dice.
https://www.dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/That ... is_of_Dice

There are Casino dice that are fairer, i.e. their distribution is closer to 1/6 for each die roll. But they also degrade with use.

A random number generator, even the more basic ones, is enough for playing games. The people who complain about dice rolls are just sore for not getting it their way and have no understanding of how probabilities work.

[Lord Vasta]

For a game like USE, the many die rolls will even out. Complaints typically arise not so much from the overall distribution, but the timing of rolls and what is being rolled. When on the offense, the attacker getting a 6/1 spit on their first combat roll when their unit has only spent a few movement points is much more impactful than getting it on their last roll when it has spent all its MP.

For me, I particularly find it annoying when electronic die rolls seem stuck. That is, one or both sides roll the same result many times in a row. I understand that can happen with physical dice. It just feels (as I have no concrete data make a claim) like it happens more often with electronic games that display the die results and can look back to see the trend.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter to me whether it's electronic or physical. I'm still going to roll below the average distribution to win a game. It's not called Vasta Luck out of conceit.

[Andrew Davidson]

I'm not complaining about a bad break. I just won my first campaign which we've been playing for over a year and so am naturally curious about how it went. Was my success due to skill, strategy or a streak of good luck? One needs statistics to help answer such questions and that's why BGA provides them at the end of a game.

We've started a new campaign and I'm playing the Axis this time. The conquest of Poland seemed to go remarkably smoothly so I checked the numbers. There were 11 attacks and the Axis rolled 4 1 6 6 4 6 4 6 4 1 6 while the West rolled 4 4 2 1 1 3 5 6 1 3 3. It's interesting that the Axis rolled so many 6 and 4 with the sequence 6 4 6 4 6 4 but one should expect such oddities in a random sequence. Overall, the Axis got 48 pips to the West's 33 and so they clearly had better luck. The game consequence was that every battle was successful with 5 DR, 5 DD and 1 DE. The Poles were thus routed and the Axis didn't need to use their panzer armies which then moved off to the western front early.

Without looking at the detail and making notes, I wouldn't have appreciated quite how lucky I was and so might have gotten over-confident. But being lucky can seem like a thing (cf. Mazarin "Est-il heureux?") so it's nice to know when it's happening.

[RobertBr]

Unfortunately the raw dice rolls are not a good guide to whether or not you have been lucky as not all dice rolls are of equal value; weather rolls are more important than combat rolls, your opponent rolling a 1 is usually much more valuable than you rolling a 6, getting a DE from a 6-1 on a roll where you only need a DR doesn't really help, and so on. Likewise, getting a massive discrepancy in the invasion of Poland doesn't really matter - a completely average set of rolls will still conquer Poland. What matters in Poland is NOT getting the large discrepancy in favour of the Western forces, which would allow Poland to hold into bad weather and slow down Axis activities.
I'm not sure what you would measure to give a really good sense of how lucky you have been (I suspect number of fair weather turns up to Dec 42 and from Jan 43, would be a useful measure).