There are many online tools that we use to add to our experience playing Star Wars: Legion – the RRG, forums and Discord servers, list builders, wikis and many others. Feeling left out, I decided to add one more to the list: a dice simulator. If you haven’t seen it already, feel free to check it out at http://www.tellmetheodds.net or using the "Dice Simulator" link in the header above. Go ahead, I’ll wait. No, really… go take a look.
Back? Good. Let’s talk a little bit about what you just saw.
Let’s start with what the site is actually doing. If you put it in the context of a game of Legion, it simulates the possible outcomes of an attack, starting after the target and dice pool has been created through the point of needing to resolve the wounds on the defender. Once you create the dice pool – by selecting the dice, tokens and keywords for the attacker and select the same information for the defender – we run the simulation.
Running the simulation involves rolling the dice 10,000 times, applying the keywords and tokens and accumulating the results. Because of this, it’s not an exact mathematical analysis of the expected results and numbers may very slightly between simulations, but 10,000 simulations give fairly consistent results.
For those that have seen the site before, you may have noticed a couple of changes. First, it has a new location on the web. The old site will continue to work for a little while but please update your bookmarks. Second, you no longer need to remember or look up all the information about every unit’s attack and defense properties and set all the toggles yourself. You can now user the profile button to set up the attacker and defender values with ease.
If you were just looking for an overview of what the site does, thanks for stopping by. If you want some insights into my thoughts about building the site, I’ll expand on that below. Either way, thank you for taking the time to read this and I’ll have another article soon about how you can use the simulator to help improve your Legion game play.
It’s high… It’s very high.
I had three main priorities while building the website:
1) It had to work – if the number are inaccurate, nothing else about the site matters.
2) It had to work for users – it needs to work on the devices that people have and be performant.
3) I had to be receptive to feedback and be able to get it.
The first item is self-explanatory, so let’s run through the last two of these real quick, starting with making sure the website is works for people. It was designed from the beginning with different size devices in mind from mobile to 4k monitors. This means that you can use it at your desk while theory crafting in your list builder or pull out your phone while at the game store to see just how hard you got diced.
Regarding performance, on average about 90% of the 10,000 simulation runs complete in less than one second. This means that you can try combinations and get results quickly. I will be attempting to understand what is causing the longer running simulations, so hopefully this can be made even better.
The last – and possibly the most important priority – is getting feedback. Here are the best ways to contact me:
· Tag me (@Basylle) in either “The Legion Academy” Patreon Discord server or “The Legion Discord” server.
· Tag me (Michael Hammond) in the “Star Wars: Legion” Facebook group
· Visit the GitHub project: https://github.com/Michael-S-Hammond/legion-dice-sim
That last bullet leads me to one final point. This entire project is open source. If you want to go steal the code, you’re welcome to it. But I hope you will consider fixing bugs and adding new features if that is something that interests you. Find my mistakes and teach me something new about web development. It’s a win for everybody and those are odds that I can really get behind.
This is my small gift to the community. I hope you like it
