agent odds way off

**brapollo** · March 01, 2012, 06:23 PM

Does anyone know of a mod that calculates agent actions correctly? I haven't seen any. If you save your game and run your agent actions enough times, you'll find the odds that are given to you aren't remotely accurate. Example: I had an assassin who was supposed to have a 60% chance of success. I ran the mission 8 times. He failed 8 times. The odds of that being possible, if the number given to me was correct, are of course highly unlikely.

I haven't played vanilla Medieval 2 in years (who has?) so I don't know if that is a bug in the original game or if mods have, over time, messed up whatever is used to calculate the odds of a successful mission for you. Which is annoying because giving you wrong stats doesn't in any way improve the game.

**Nemesis_GR** · March 01, 2012, 07:00 PM

Afaik in order for the random chances of any kind to get re-calculated you have to move a character-save-reload-try again.If u just save-load the outcome will be the same even if u try 1 million times

**brapollo** · March 01, 2012, 07:15 PM

I didn't get the exact same outcome every time. Sometimes the agent died, sometime the agent lived. But he always failed.

**Nemesis_GR** · March 01, 2012, 08:32 PM

I dont know about assasins since i rarely used them.But thats the case with spies and most other random staff.I am telling this from experience-not 100% sure how it works.

**brasswire** · March 02, 2012, 12:49 AM

I wouldn't be surprised if it is designed that way on purpose to prevent "save-load-try again" type of "cheating".

**Mhaedros** · March 02, 2012, 01:07 AM

I'm pretty sure that'd be impossible

**brapollo** · March 02, 2012, 02:03 AM

I've run other agent tests where the odds in a different situation seemed to be much better than they were supposed to be. I mentioned an extreme example of the problem in the first post but I've regularly seen that the agent odds are out of whack in most situations.

**brasswire** · March 02, 2012, 07:22 AM

Originally Posted by Mhaedros

I'm pretty sure that'd be impossible

It's certainly not impossible. All it would take is to calculate some portion of the "random chance" number prior to the mission attempt (say at the beginning of the turn or something) and include it in the save file, then you would end up with the same result no matter how many times you save/reload. It certainly wouldn't be the first game to do this sort of thing.

**smoesville** · March 02, 2012, 02:36 AM

Many times i've saved and reloaded and the agent succeeds. Besides every time you do it the odds are calculated again so even if done 100 times at 60% it won't produce 60 positive results. It's to do with probability and how it works, test it 1000 times and you will get something approaching the stated percentage.

**brapollo** · March 02, 2012, 05:22 AM

Originally Posted by smoesville

Many times i've saved and reloaded and the agent succeeds. Besides every time you do it the odds are calculated again so even if done 100 times at 60% it won't produce 60 positive results. It's to do with probability and how it works, test it 1000 times and you will get something approaching the stated percentage.

I am aware of the fact that mathematical probability does not mean you are going to get exactly 60 positive results in a hundred tries. I also know that there is a less than 1% chance that I should get 0 successes in 8 tries with a 60% probability of success on each try. And all of the tests I've done, with a sufficient sample size, have been well off. Which means I am either extremely unlucky (and sometimes extremely lucky), or the odds are inaccurate.

**Dwarven Berserker** · March 02, 2012, 03:30 AM

The randomizing engine in this game are pretty weird, I can tell you that. I actually did quite some testing with it. For example I tried this:

I have one spy near Carn-Dûm and one near Moria. Both have abour 60% chance to infiltrate in the settlement. I send then both into the settlements, reload, do it again IMMEDIATELY and repeat this 20 times. Now, when I send the first spy in, no matter which of the two spies I use, the first spy I sent in ALWAYS dies, while the second one ALWAYS succeeds.

Now, after a couple of days, I try to load the same save, and do the same thing. But this time, both spies SUCCEED every single time.

I put the save as an attachment, try it out yourself and you'll see that if you send them in, reload immidiately, send them in again and repeat, you will have the same result over and over again.

So if you want to do the "reload and try again" thing, your best bet would be: Don't reload immediately, but do something else in the meanwhile (start another campaign or so) and reload it later

Bonus info: Assassins seem to be rather flawed in their succes rate. When you use your assassin to sabotage something, he will almost always succeed even though he has only 20% succes rate.

**Coxy** · March 02, 2012, 06:47 AM

I agree that the odds are stupid - either that or I'm being stupid. Very frustrating when it's say '78%' which in theory should mean your spy is pretty safe...not much chance of it going wrong....and yet then dies. You re-load just to test....and he still dies. Surely if it's 78% then eventually it should be ok...