Bio Engineer Archive

If SOE would only USE the intelligence and creativity of their player base, instead of seeing it as an adversarial relationship that they have to stay one step ahead of, or nerf if the players get too far ahead, they could have far and away the best games on the market. All the potential is here, even if the scope is beyond the technical limits of implementation, but they seem to act as if it did not come from "in-house", it's cheating. I know they are big, but I did not realize they had hired the supreme being to assure that they were always right.

I am constantly amazed and impressed by the intelligence and cleverness of the BE community. We've got probably the most complex and difficult to master (I'm not talking about the skill box that says you can wear the title, but knowing WTH you're doing once you have it!!) profession, and the creativity and insightful approach of some of the players here are the one thing about BE that has kept me from closing my account on numerous occaisions when faced with the "undocumented features" we encounter all too often.

ZardoZap, Gothar, Mirrl, Talth, Arthur, and so many others I have neglected to mention but have both instructed and inspired my own researches: a long overdue /salute.

LLan

I think it is significant. Tal-N speculated a long time back about this, and about the differences in calculation of the two types of resists.

One really odd thing you'll see in combines is that the resist values for "effective" resists can change during experimentation. Dasher dna will gain those 20% resists only when you experiment on physique. And on the other side of it, if you use for example merek harvester which is armored and has a bunch of 10% effective resists, if you don't experiment on physique, those will turn into 40% resists.

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ZardoZap wrote:

Two things occur to me your clones have blast resist mine did as well but very small numbers. Also are you using the voritor dasher and huurton pup combo? If so the kinetic is not a "special resist" I wonder if that alters things.

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ZardoZap,

I worked a good bit with the formula last night while making different combines, as well as further refining my numbers for HAM, Speed, to-hit and damage formulas, and it is either wonderfully accurate, or dramaticly off. I think one of the factors I was not considering that makes a large difference seems to be the presence of a ranged special attack.

For those interested, after a little work on them, the equations for HAM and Damage related stats are as follows.

Health: Hardiness x 17.405 (round to a whole number)

Action: Dexterity x 17.975 (round to a whole number)

Mind: Intelligence x 18.87 (round to a whole number)

To-Hit: (Cleverness x .18) / 150 (round to 2 decimal places)

Speed: 2.5 - (( Int (Courage/10)*10)/1000) (round to 2 decimal places)

Damage : Power x .8, round to next 5 if below 75, next 10 if above 75 for minimum damage, add 10 for maximum

examples: 395 power x .8 = 316, round to 320, damage range is 320-330

89 power x .8 = 71, round to 75, damage range is 75 - 85

All of these figures seem to scale up slightly as overall CL increases, but for pets in the 10 - 40 range, they are quite close.

Combining ZardoZap's formula with these, I was able to pretty accurately predict the CL of a number of pets, when they had a ranged special. Dropping the ranged special seemed to lower the final CL by 6 in one case, but I did not repeat that often enough to get a good picture of the effect.

BTW, I used -25 for a score for energy vulnerability, -10 for any other vulnerability other than Kinetic (I did not make any pets that were vulnerable to kinetics last night in testing.)

It looks like great progress so far, and well worth refining to see how close we can get; as of now it is quite workable as a good guide to making a pet of the desired level.

LLan

Wow. Nice! I would argue the ranged point though, as it sticking or not has never had any effect on the creatures I create. These would be creatures that I have made mulitples of using the same DNA types and experimentation points, just sometimes ranged stuck and sometimes it didn't. Of course those are the level 10 Monsters and there sub-component creatures, so they could easily fall outside the norm I suppose......

One sample does not a statistical database ensure, hehe. The only one that I lost the ranged on did come out -6 levels from the prediction, but that is only anecdotal evidence without the repetition and testing, so it's just a line to investigate at this point, not a fixed prediction.

I'm encouraged that we are getting this close, the formula was quite good in most cases.

I also found similar results with the energy vulnerability, and ended up using -25 for it, so that compares to the results you had, Gothar. I found that any vulnerability in the "other resists" was pretty much the same as all of them being vulnerable, and a single -10 into the formula and 0's for any other seemed to work as well as -10 for each one.

I'll be doing a lot more experimenting this weekend, I'm sure.

LLan

Akelan,

I am glad you are getting positive results with it - I agree there is still a long way to go!

Two things: elsewhere posted on the forum was a different way to calculate HAM (I wish I could remember who so as to attribute properly) anyway it went like this:

Health = 15*Hardiness + 3*Dex
Action = 15*Dex + 3*Int
Mental = 15*Int + 3*Hardiness

I think you will find (well I find ) that this give better results.

Finally, I have spent a lot of time sampling voritor dashers, pups, picket plain walkers and bols in an attempt to sort out the problem. I haven't sorted it out yet but I have the following observations:

I haven't got resists right and I think that "normal resists" are treated quite differently (by this I mean the resists that increase when fortitude increase and are often higher on the final skin than they appear on the dna template). They seem to count for more (I hate normal resists - give me easy to predict special resists any day). The other thing is normal resists are completely wiped out by a vulnerability or a special resist (of that type e.g. blast) in any slot - they are easy to get rid of.

However, the formula on the "dna" part predicts quite well variations for creatures with the same resists. So for instance if you do a combine and get a cl of say 12. I think you can use the formula to work out (with a margin of error) what alterations to the dna you need to drop the cl down (or if you experiment what the likely increase to the cl) - well thats something

Back to these resists!

Zardo