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Originally Posted by Molon Labe
Just as an example of my frustrations, in one session I played about two months ago, the scenario was set up with forces far enough apart that the location of intercept, if it occured at all, was highly variable, but that also meant that the time was highly variable as well--no sooner than 1 hr. in if everyone was aggressive. Well, the closest Blue side platform dropped, and the closest red side player and the next closest Blue side player played conservatively. It's perfectly legitimate to play conservatively of course, but that will delay the time contact occurs. As the 2 hr mark approached the complaints about "nothing happening" started to build, and shortly thereafter a Blue player voluntarily dropped--and he was probably only 10 minutes from being engaged, too. The AI failed to take over his platform and the whole match was screwed.
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Yeah... that happens. Multiplayer scenarios are a special case, however, I'd argue that you can still pull it off by chosing appropriately sized areas. For example, in the Kara Sea scenario, I'm always fascinated by the game time it takes for people to play it because I designed it around a simple search model
Pd = 1 - exp(-wvt/A)
That's Koopman's random search equation. It gives the probability of detecting a target at a uniformly distributed random point in an area of size 'A.' If you guys want to get really geeky we can talk about what it really means because when you start thinking about it, it's actually quite pessimistic. By inverting that equation I can come up with the median time to detection, and other numbers too. It's not a bad idea to plan a scenario around that. By using only slightly more elaborate methods you can make some calculations for planning a search area so that you can play a scenario in a reasonable amount of time with say a P-3 and an SSN in two assigned areas for MP. I haven't done it yet, but lately I haven't been doing as much gaming as I've been doing. It's sun shiney out and my balcony called me.
There's another equation, called the Klingbeil magnet that's good for barrier searches. Although you can't get a time to detect from that, you can figure that out by the kinematics of the scenario.