Rookie Blackjack: how to manage RNG
Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2017 6:37 pm
A lot of times I read about people struggling to grasp how to succeed in a game like Long War that is full of punishing RNG. Being able to manage negative RNG and taking advantage of positive RNG is what makes for a more fun and less frustrating campaign. This requires an amount of learning through external sources as well as playing the game itself and making mistakes. First you learn to walk, then you learn to run!
I'm going to use early game rookie promotion to show how to mitigate negative outcomes and possibly create some quite positive ones. And what is a strat without a name, let's call it...
Rookie Blackjack.
The name comes from a similar idea to card counting used by casino swindlers around the world! As the dealer removes the cards from the deck a player can track them determine a bias of what is left. This gives a gambler a means of shifting the odds in their favor by adjusting their bet based on this bias. If the deck becomes biased toward the house, then they play more conservatively. When the bias in the deck shifts towards the player, then they bet more aggressively. Really good card counters can take a casino for a ride, and many a movie/documentary has been made on the subject. What they are doing is biasing their bets towards the current likelyness of a positive outcome. We have a close analogue to this in rookie promotion.
When you start a new campaign you have this wonderful moment after Gatecrasher where you get to rank up your new squad of rookies. Well, at least those that survived at least (Damnit stop asking when does 1.3 come out!). By the time your done, your left with a 58 aim sharpshooter and a 72 aim grenadier. Not so wonderful huh? Well, there is a strategy that some more experienced players use that can help to avoid this often disappointing scenario.
For those unaware of how the game selects random rookies, I'll explain. When you start the campaign, your game creates a bucket with eight tickets in it, one for each class. As you promote rookies to squaddies, the game removes a ticket at random and the soldier is assigned that class. When the bucket is empty, it gets refilled with eight more tickets and the process repeats. This is where the analogy to blackjack comes in.
Great, but how do you stop getting those 50 aim snipers? There is some tactics to how you go about picking that can push the odds in your favor. It won't completely prevent mismatched stats, but you can at least apply a little bias that can often lead to getting quite a bit better soldiers than you would otherwise get if you simply promoted at random. What we want to do here is to optimize against negative outcomes. So let's try and remove as much random from this as possible. Here's how I like to go about it.
For the sake of simplicity, I'm only going to consider aim stat as the deciding factor. In practice you often want to take other stats into account, but that gets a lot more complicated and I want to keep the examples simple, so we'll just stick to aim. If your new to this, it's probably best to stick with aim, it's a pretty dominant stat overall and optimizing for multiple stats requires some experience and is more difficult to analyze. It also requires knowing which stats matter more for which classes. Aim tends to be the easiest to understand the value of for any given class. The more they rely on shots, the more aim matters. For me, this list in order is Sharpshooter = Assault > Ranger = Gunner = Technical > Shinobi = Specialist = Grenadier. This breaks everything up into three categories to which I assign 3 values, 1 / 0 / -1. With these values I have a range of possibilities where the most extreme cases are 2 and -3. The closer to these extremes I get, the more I want to pick a rookie matching those extremes.
When I make my first pick, I've got a full bucket so the class could be anything. I don't want this pick to be at either extreme, rather I want someone closer to average. This is because the soldier can be anything. If I'm picking with someone close to average, I'm not going to be disappointed in what comes up because they will be useful no matter what they are. They won't be great, but they won't be trash either. We're basically hedging our bet for now and allowing the bias to show itself. Once that soldier is picked, I'll do it a couple of more times. I now have only five classes left and I'm starting to get away from average towards my extremes. At this point, the choice I make is largely dependent on what my bias is and if I simply want to hold on for a bit until I get more rookies to promote.
Let's go with a simple example. Your down to three classes left. Assault, Technical and Sharpshooter, giving us a bias of 2. You have three rookies with 58, 64 and 73 aim. My personal preference here would want those to be Technical, Assault and Sharpshooter. I like aim on my assaults, and I would not be disappointed in the least if the Assault got 73 aim. I would be very disappointed if I landed a 58 aim Sharpshooter though. So I'm mostly trying to avoid that as much as possible. We know a limited number of possibilities exist. There are 6 combinations of classes, and 6 orders that I can pick my rookies in. This gives us 36 possible outcomes. I'm mostly concerned with getting a 58 aim Sharpshooter, so I want to remove those possibilities as much as possible. As long as the Sharpshooter is in the bucket, I'm not touching the 58 aim rookie.
Since we don't want to pick the 58 while the Sharpshooter is in the bucket, we have to go with one of the other two. My first pick has a 1 in 3 chance of being the Sharpshooter, if it's not I then have a 1 in 2 chance of getting him. If I start with the 73 aim, I'm giving myself a 33% chance of my preferred outcome, followed by a 50% chance of him being average. If I start with the 64 aim, I have a 33% chance of him being average, followed by a 50% chance of him being great. So which do I go with? Does it matter? Don't I have a 33% chance of getting a 73 aim sharpshooter either way? Sort of.
The thing is, you don't have to make all the picks right away. In this situation I would roll the 73 aim to see what I get. If I get the sharpshooter great, If I don't, then I stop rolling altogether. At this point I'll go detect my first couple of missions, load up squads of 5-6 with 3 rookies each, and send them on their way. Because you can only have 2 GOPs in your starting region, there's nothing more you can do until they get back anyway. Once they are back, I can pick something high aim and have a 50% chance of getting the Sharpshooter. If that fails I now have a 100% chance and I can pick exactly the rookie I want.
Now of course when dealing with probabilities like this, there are so many variations that it can be hard to optimize for more than a couple of classes. And you can really only optimize the last 3-4 in the bucket. That's mostly why I start with the most average soldiers I have for my first 4-5 picks. If I get most of my aim dependent classes first, lowering my bias, then I may switch it up and save the high aim rookies from gatecrasher, until the bucket is refilled. If I had Technical, Grenadier, Shinobi left to pick with those same aim stats, I might roll the 58 and 64 aim, saving the 73 for the next round.
This might sound like a lot of work, but once you get the hang of it, it's actually not that hard. Your mostly using the fact that when you start scanning for missions, you can only get two, and at this point your probably fine sending 2 squaddies with 3 rookies. For my next two missions, I'll take one rookie with each squad, getting me to my full 16 and the end of the bucket. This gives me two opportunities to try to optimize my stats on at least a few of my soldiers. Sometimes it works out really well, sometimes it doesn't. The point is that it often works out better than if you had simply chosen disregarding the stats of your choices. Played correctly you can at least greatly eliminate getting low aim on classes that need it the most and maybe even manage to pick up a couple of really great squaddies.
Another part of why I do this is because it often decides whether I build the GTS or AWC first. If I end up with getting some really great picks out of my first bucket, I'm more inclined to go AWC first as I have less need to mitigate bad rookie match ups. The GTS is kind of slow, taking up to 24 days before the first pair of rookies comes out. Getting the AWC, especially on higher difficulty, can be really good mitigation against early wounds, which can often be high due to the low HP. What I'm doing here is using a positive RNG outcome to mitigate a possibly very negative RNG outcome. If your first four missions land you with six wounded soldiers, that's a large chunk of available soldiers for future missions that is unavailable. Having the AWC up and running when those wounds come in can really help mitigate this. It also gives you some opportunity to pick up some early 4 day perks. Even though the early game is busy, it's often not that hard to have one guy in the tube. And the earlier you get started the more advantage those soldiers will have. If you can end up with some good squaddies combined with early AWC perks, and not a lot of wounds, this can turn into a strong starting advantage. The more advantage you keep on your side the easier it becomes to deal with negative RNG when it happens.
Although this may seem like a lot of work overall, this sort of exercise is valuable for more than just picking starting rookies. In fact this is how you generally mitigate getting really screwed by probability. This game is really not about getting all the best possible outcomes. It's much more about avoiding as many of the worst possible outcomes. Many of my campaigns have been lost simply because I got hit by a bad streak of negative RNG when I wasn't prepare for it. If you can learn to optimize the starting roster, then you can apply these same principles to many other choices you have to make. Should you buy an early scientist? If you build the AWC and don't get one in an early mission, and have a bunch of wounds, it's not going to help you if you can't staff it! Building the GTS first may seem like the logical choice to most players, but if you get 6 wounds in your first 4 missions, that GTS isn't helping you negate this situation and quickly leave you unable to deal with a follow-up streak of negative RNG. It's not so bad when this happens in March, but when it starts happening in mid to late game, you can easily end up tossing 50+ hours and having to start over. Learning how to optimize the RNG that you have control over can help you mitigate the RNG that does not go your way. On top of that when the RNG goes your way, you're in a better place to actually make use of it and can magnify how helpful that positive streak of RNG is.
I'm writing this for two reasons, as a resource for players to learn from and hopefully get more enjoyment out of the game instead of getting frustrated, and as a medium for more experienced players to share their thoughts and maybe even pick up some new tricks from someone else. A game like this only gets better when it's backed with a strong community. There are often many complaints of there not being enough info in the game, and some of them are valid. More often though, there is only so much the devs can do and rest is really up to us. We are the players, it's our game too!
I'm going to use early game rookie promotion to show how to mitigate negative outcomes and possibly create some quite positive ones. And what is a strat without a name, let's call it...
Rookie Blackjack.
The name comes from a similar idea to card counting used by casino swindlers around the world! As the dealer removes the cards from the deck a player can track them determine a bias of what is left. This gives a gambler a means of shifting the odds in their favor by adjusting their bet based on this bias. If the deck becomes biased toward the house, then they play more conservatively. When the bias in the deck shifts towards the player, then they bet more aggressively. Really good card counters can take a casino for a ride, and many a movie/documentary has been made on the subject. What they are doing is biasing their bets towards the current likelyness of a positive outcome. We have a close analogue to this in rookie promotion.
When you start a new campaign you have this wonderful moment after Gatecrasher where you get to rank up your new squad of rookies. Well, at least those that survived at least (Damnit stop asking when does 1.3 come out!). By the time your done, your left with a 58 aim sharpshooter and a 72 aim grenadier. Not so wonderful huh? Well, there is a strategy that some more experienced players use that can help to avoid this often disappointing scenario.
For those unaware of how the game selects random rookies, I'll explain. When you start the campaign, your game creates a bucket with eight tickets in it, one for each class. As you promote rookies to squaddies, the game removes a ticket at random and the soldier is assigned that class. When the bucket is empty, it gets refilled with eight more tickets and the process repeats. This is where the analogy to blackjack comes in.
Great, but how do you stop getting those 50 aim snipers? There is some tactics to how you go about picking that can push the odds in your favor. It won't completely prevent mismatched stats, but you can at least apply a little bias that can often lead to getting quite a bit better soldiers than you would otherwise get if you simply promoted at random. What we want to do here is to optimize against negative outcomes. So let's try and remove as much random from this as possible. Here's how I like to go about it.
For the sake of simplicity, I'm only going to consider aim stat as the deciding factor. In practice you often want to take other stats into account, but that gets a lot more complicated and I want to keep the examples simple, so we'll just stick to aim. If your new to this, it's probably best to stick with aim, it's a pretty dominant stat overall and optimizing for multiple stats requires some experience and is more difficult to analyze. It also requires knowing which stats matter more for which classes. Aim tends to be the easiest to understand the value of for any given class. The more they rely on shots, the more aim matters. For me, this list in order is Sharpshooter = Assault > Ranger = Gunner = Technical > Shinobi = Specialist = Grenadier. This breaks everything up into three categories to which I assign 3 values, 1 / 0 / -1. With these values I have a range of possibilities where the most extreme cases are 2 and -3. The closer to these extremes I get, the more I want to pick a rookie matching those extremes.
When I make my first pick, I've got a full bucket so the class could be anything. I don't want this pick to be at either extreme, rather I want someone closer to average. This is because the soldier can be anything. If I'm picking with someone close to average, I'm not going to be disappointed in what comes up because they will be useful no matter what they are. They won't be great, but they won't be trash either. We're basically hedging our bet for now and allowing the bias to show itself. Once that soldier is picked, I'll do it a couple of more times. I now have only five classes left and I'm starting to get away from average towards my extremes. At this point, the choice I make is largely dependent on what my bias is and if I simply want to hold on for a bit until I get more rookies to promote.
Let's go with a simple example. Your down to three classes left. Assault, Technical and Sharpshooter, giving us a bias of 2. You have three rookies with 58, 64 and 73 aim. My personal preference here would want those to be Technical, Assault and Sharpshooter. I like aim on my assaults, and I would not be disappointed in the least if the Assault got 73 aim. I would be very disappointed if I landed a 58 aim Sharpshooter though. So I'm mostly trying to avoid that as much as possible. We know a limited number of possibilities exist. There are 6 combinations of classes, and 6 orders that I can pick my rookies in. This gives us 36 possible outcomes. I'm mostly concerned with getting a 58 aim Sharpshooter, so I want to remove those possibilities as much as possible. As long as the Sharpshooter is in the bucket, I'm not touching the 58 aim rookie.
Since we don't want to pick the 58 while the Sharpshooter is in the bucket, we have to go with one of the other two. My first pick has a 1 in 3 chance of being the Sharpshooter, if it's not I then have a 1 in 2 chance of getting him. If I start with the 73 aim, I'm giving myself a 33% chance of my preferred outcome, followed by a 50% chance of him being average. If I start with the 64 aim, I have a 33% chance of him being average, followed by a 50% chance of him being great. So which do I go with? Does it matter? Don't I have a 33% chance of getting a 73 aim sharpshooter either way? Sort of.
The thing is, you don't have to make all the picks right away. In this situation I would roll the 73 aim to see what I get. If I get the sharpshooter great, If I don't, then I stop rolling altogether. At this point I'll go detect my first couple of missions, load up squads of 5-6 with 3 rookies each, and send them on their way. Because you can only have 2 GOPs in your starting region, there's nothing more you can do until they get back anyway. Once they are back, I can pick something high aim and have a 50% chance of getting the Sharpshooter. If that fails I now have a 100% chance and I can pick exactly the rookie I want.
Now of course when dealing with probabilities like this, there are so many variations that it can be hard to optimize for more than a couple of classes. And you can really only optimize the last 3-4 in the bucket. That's mostly why I start with the most average soldiers I have for my first 4-5 picks. If I get most of my aim dependent classes first, lowering my bias, then I may switch it up and save the high aim rookies from gatecrasher, until the bucket is refilled. If I had Technical, Grenadier, Shinobi left to pick with those same aim stats, I might roll the 58 and 64 aim, saving the 73 for the next round.
This might sound like a lot of work, but once you get the hang of it, it's actually not that hard. Your mostly using the fact that when you start scanning for missions, you can only get two, and at this point your probably fine sending 2 squaddies with 3 rookies. For my next two missions, I'll take one rookie with each squad, getting me to my full 16 and the end of the bucket. This gives me two opportunities to try to optimize my stats on at least a few of my soldiers. Sometimes it works out really well, sometimes it doesn't. The point is that it often works out better than if you had simply chosen disregarding the stats of your choices. Played correctly you can at least greatly eliminate getting low aim on classes that need it the most and maybe even manage to pick up a couple of really great squaddies.
Another part of why I do this is because it often decides whether I build the GTS or AWC first. If I end up with getting some really great picks out of my first bucket, I'm more inclined to go AWC first as I have less need to mitigate bad rookie match ups. The GTS is kind of slow, taking up to 24 days before the first pair of rookies comes out. Getting the AWC, especially on higher difficulty, can be really good mitigation against early wounds, which can often be high due to the low HP. What I'm doing here is using a positive RNG outcome to mitigate a possibly very negative RNG outcome. If your first four missions land you with six wounded soldiers, that's a large chunk of available soldiers for future missions that is unavailable. Having the AWC up and running when those wounds come in can really help mitigate this. It also gives you some opportunity to pick up some early 4 day perks. Even though the early game is busy, it's often not that hard to have one guy in the tube. And the earlier you get started the more advantage those soldiers will have. If you can end up with some good squaddies combined with early AWC perks, and not a lot of wounds, this can turn into a strong starting advantage. The more advantage you keep on your side the easier it becomes to deal with negative RNG when it happens.
Although this may seem like a lot of work overall, this sort of exercise is valuable for more than just picking starting rookies. In fact this is how you generally mitigate getting really screwed by probability. This game is really not about getting all the best possible outcomes. It's much more about avoiding as many of the worst possible outcomes. Many of my campaigns have been lost simply because I got hit by a bad streak of negative RNG when I wasn't prepare for it. If you can learn to optimize the starting roster, then you can apply these same principles to many other choices you have to make. Should you buy an early scientist? If you build the AWC and don't get one in an early mission, and have a bunch of wounds, it's not going to help you if you can't staff it! Building the GTS first may seem like the logical choice to most players, but if you get 6 wounds in your first 4 missions, that GTS isn't helping you negate this situation and quickly leave you unable to deal with a follow-up streak of negative RNG. It's not so bad when this happens in March, but when it starts happening in mid to late game, you can easily end up tossing 50+ hours and having to start over. Learning how to optimize the RNG that you have control over can help you mitigate the RNG that does not go your way. On top of that when the RNG goes your way, you're in a better place to actually make use of it and can magnify how helpful that positive streak of RNG is.
I'm writing this for two reasons, as a resource for players to learn from and hopefully get more enjoyment out of the game instead of getting frustrated, and as a medium for more experienced players to share their thoughts and maybe even pick up some new tricks from someone else. A game like this only gets better when it's backed with a strong community. There are often many complaints of there not being enough info in the game, and some of them are valid. More often though, there is only so much the devs can do and rest is really up to us. We are the players, it's our game too!