George's Random Battle Generator

[JMcGuire]

At some point in the distant past (in the Pre-Crash Era) George Platner received positive response to his QuickBasic Random Battle Generator. I volunteered to convert it to an ASP page, and luckily the forum went down so nobody noticed I dragged my butt actually doing said conversion.

I finally found a few minutes of spare time yesterday, so without further adieu, here is a rather sparse page which runs George's code and gives you a purely randomized battle.

http://www.mindmagma.com/combatmission/cmrandom.asp

I know a bunch of people asked for stuff like accounting for rarity or historical accuracy, and I say to you: talk to George, I just work here. FYI, I'm only on DSL, and I did throttle the bandwidth so as not to preclude my own surfing habits, so if it gets slow, be happy, that means it's popular.

Edit: George got a new e-mail address, so I added that link. Also it turns out the page seems to be popular, so I threw some simple graphics in there and tweaked the layout. Here is a reduced screen shot:

[ 05-24-2001: Message edited by: JMcGuire ]

[Madmatt]

By the way, I looked at it (as did the rest of us lunatics at Battlefront) and we think its pretty darn nifty!

Madmatt

[Panzer Leader]

I like it, and it will be a great boon to those of us doing random QBs. However, there are some things thar are imposible like an all armour Fallschirmjaeger force, for instance.

I would call for some toggle-able additions, perhaps one to only allow for historically (and mechanically) POSSIBLE forces.

Maybe assign the rarity of certain combinations, those impossible (like Armour and fallschirmjaeger) having a rating of 0% probability, while just rare factors (mechanized fallschirmjaeger, for instance) would have a low probability.

Also, perhaps low nad high quality forces could be a little lower, like 25% chance apiece, while regular has 50%. Maybe not be to perfectly accurate, but no one likes playing green troops anyway...

I also had one more idea for your page. How about before it creates the parameters, you input two email addresses: yours and your opponents. Then, when you hit "CREATE!" it displays the results AND emails the results to the listed email addresses! Voila! No cheating.

Just my two pfennigs.

[Mr. Johnson--]

why can't you have all StugIIIs and IVs?

[georgep]

First off a HUGE thanks to Jon McGuire. The page is great! I like how he set it up so all you have to do is hit 'refresh' to generate a new battle, excellent! And also thanks to Madmatt and Panzer Leader for the compliments and comments.

Panzer Leader, this is how the program chooses the type and type: First it chooses the type (Combined Arms, Infantry, Mechanized or Armor). Then it chooses the force. It will only choose a force that has units availible for that type. For example if the type is Combined Arms it will not choose American Airborne because they have no armor availible to purchase...etc. Fallschirmjaegers are included in the Armor catagory because they have Stug III's and Stug IV's availible. Granted not a much of a choice but they are tanks. If you guys think this is unrealistic I can drop them down to the Combined Arms catagory.

Force Quality: Panzer Leader, your idea is a good one. I think we should change it to 50% regular 25% high or low. I have noticed people really dont like those low quality troops. If anyone else has any Ideas let me know.

Email Addresses: Another great Idea from Panzer Leader. I love this one! You could set up a game in chat then enter each email address and what you get you get! I would also want to set up the program so it chooses which side you are going to play (axis or allies). I will contact Jon and we will work on this.

I NEED FEEDBACK ON THIS:

Lately I have played all my online games using the Random Generator and there is one problem I am having and Im not sure what the best solution is. The problem is 'lite trees' and 'open trees' terrain. Games with these 2 terrain settings are just not fun or challenging. There is so little terrain that the units have no where to manuever or hide - they just run to the nearist house (if there is one) and start shooting at each other. The games I have played with these settings have been short, bloody, and not much fun. My solution is to replace 'lite trees' and 'open trees' with 'moderate trees'. What this means is that 'moderate trees' will be selected 75% of the time and 'heavy trees' 25%. I have tested this out and it seems to work very well. The maps seem to be a lot more interesting with this change. Let me know what you think.

ps my displayed name and sig where lost in the crash.

[StugIII]

You know it's bad when you're sitting at work hitting -refresh- and going "hmm...that'd be neat" instead of maybe doing something i'm...I mean YOU'RE getting paid for.

[Brian Rock]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>

I NEED FEEDBACK ON THIS:

Lately I have played all my online games using the Random Generator and there is one problem I am having and Im not sure what the best solution is. The problem is 'lite trees' and 'open trees' terrain. Games with these 2 terrain settings are just not fun or challenging. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Maybe have the program select light trees and open trees only in hilly terrain and/or on village maps?

[JMcGuire]

George, any anybody else who's interested -- it appears the ASP version is fairly popular. In the past two days it has received several hundred unique hits, and roughly 75% of those people using IE saved it as a Favorite (IE requests a shortcut icon called favicon.ico when it's bookmarked, so I can see that in the logs).

Heh, most people who hit the page refreshed it at least five times, and the average looks more like 10 times.

--j.

[JMcGuire]

The e-mail option is now available. The page at the URL shown below lists other preferences but they aren't functional yet (and as I write this the HTML e-mail option isn't functional either, you'll just get plain-text mail). If you prefer to do so, you can still hit the cmrandom.asp page directly to generate a battle using the defaults.

Enjoy.

http://www.mindmagma.com/combatmission/

[Panzer Leader]

That is great! Good lookni' page and the perfect way to set up a fair and totally random game! Good show old chap!

[JMcGuire]

Thank you.

The HTML e-mail option is functional now. So's yer options kin look purty (as the neighbors say here in the woods in North Florida).

I want to get with George (since the actual generator code is still his) to decide how to implement the prefs for stuff like historical accuracy. If anybody else has detailed, programmer-geek-style, detailed suggestions about how to do this up right, please feel free to post 'em or e-mail 'em.

I had a momentary brain fever in which I envisioned streaming out random scenario files on the fly (not terribly different from some stuff I'm doing at work right now), but alas, BTS won't release their grip on the scenario file format. Can't blame them, but...

[Lempereur]

Would there be any way to have the site pick a radom map that could be stored online somewhere? I could upload 100 home made QBs for random play.

[Panzer Leader]

Related to Napoleon here, you could upload a hundred maps, then have a program that randomly picked the map and (after randomly picking them) could print out what forces would be used on it. THen one of the players could place the forces on the map and you would have a totally random game.

Of course, one of the players would know the other guys force, so you would really need a third person. Damn if only we could unlock the game!

[JMcGuire]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Napoleon1944:

Would there be any way to have the site pick a radom map that could be stored online somewhere?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

That's a very cool idea, but there are a couple of real-world issues that regrettably force me to say "no".

1) Reliability. If I did it, I would have to keep everything on my system. I wouldn't feel comfortable doing that much work which relied on somebody else's site. Web sites come and go without warning, and even small and simple changes could easily break things in my app. Too much risk for my tastes, relative to how much of my personal time would be required. I'd only consider it if BTS or maybe Madmatt was willing to host the files.

2) Disk space. This is a minor concern, but since it would have to reside on my system, I would be committing lots of disk space to available maps. However, this wouldn't be a deal-killer for me.

3) Bandwidth. This is definitely a deal-killer for me. I'm on DSL which is only 256K outbound. I use it for work all day long.

4) Database. The app would need to know file details -- map sizes, engagement types, terrain category, all sorts of things. Database maintenance would be a seriously time-consuming affair. I would either have to come up with an elaborate and secure way for volunteers to lend a hand, or I would have to commit significant time to reviewing probably hundreds of maps.

5)

I think Panzer Leader was thinking of an automated solution, which would be even cooler -- ignoring the difficulty of accurate categorization for subjective descriptions like terrain type. Unfortunately others have pinged BTS about getting the file format, and I did so just a couple days ago, and they are "adamantly opposed" to letting that out. Which also kills the other idea I wanted to tackle, using a facility like this to generate QB scenario files on the fly.

[ducking and running] Then again Back In The Old Days, cracking undocumented file formats was sort of a hobby of mine...

Perhaps the popularity of the randomizer site (even BTS said they liked it) will convince BTS to add a similar facility to CM2 or CM3? Hmm... I'd be more than willing to have mine & George's work "obsoleted" for that.

[Subvet]

I can't find this random battle generator. When going to the mindmagma/CM site I only see a txt file called find the hacker. Is this no longer around? I'd like to try it if it is still available.