nealhunt wrote:
If you are facing an enemy with 3+ versus 4+ in an actual game what's more important? Do you care about the 16.67% or the fact that you have to put 50% more fire on the target to kill it? Obviously, the 50% more firepower is the important point - the only point, really.
We ran some simulations to get a handle on all this, with some interesting results...
(yes we went there!
seeing is believing after all)
We pitted 2 legions of 1000 tanks against each other in a series of bloody fights to the death. Each tank had 2 variables: armour - 'A' = % chance to save, and shooting - 'S' = % chance of hit. Each battle was fought in rounds until one side lost all their tanks; all surviving tanks got to fire once each round; hits were allocated randomly.
We varied A and S to see the effect, and found out the following:
Utility of A is exponential (as Neal said).
Utility of S is logarithmic.
(these were true regardless of the quality of the opposition)
Rules of thumb...
1. Improving armour by x% is more effective the closer you are to 100% to save.
2. Improving shooting by x% is more effective the closer you are to 0% to hit.
3. If you have the choice of improving armour or shooting by x% then choose the higher of A and 1-S.
Obviously a kabillion other variables come into play but it was fun to experiment
