Re: Re: Community Support funkiness

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_...>
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 18:43:46 +0100 (BST)

Nick some time ago (sorry, catch-up again), on the weirdnesses of the support table:

> Nope: meaning that if you get a *lower* bonus from your 10 fanatical
> friends & family than you would from your 1000 community supporters,
> you're actually better off (under "Hero Wars as she is spoke") if you
> send the fanatics off somewhere and get by with the higher bonus from
> the less enthusiastic supporters.
>
> For a presentation of this argument, see frex:
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hw-rules/message/2556

And the devil will quote scripture to suit his purposes... ;-) Needless to say, I entirely agree with you, agreeing with me: what really irked me about this one was the band-aid rule "rationalising" the obvious bug in the table. ("You can't abuse the table in the obvious way because... We're telling you not to! Please?")

> Under my approach, you'd add the fanatics (worth say four or six
> ordinary supporters each) to the base community, and look up the
> single resulting figure on the table. No separate columns for
> different levels of support or opposition -- that's just + or - to
> the single resulting bonus.

I'm surprised I didn't air my own solution to this on this list

• certainly I've bugged Rory and some long-suffering others with it. But without having the original table to hand, it's almost exactly what Nick has suggested -- more GMTA! Reduce the existing table to just a single column, expressed in "single body ordinary support equivalents". SBOSE, henceforth. <g> Get the number of SBOSEs available by multiplying each category by a multiple according to their degree of committment, _then add each to the running total_, and finally look up that single value in the (single) column. This both simplifies the table, and produces more logical results in the cases where the support is "mixed", for the reasons discussed. (And it preserves the existing behaviour almost exactly, where the support is of a single level.)

If working from the current table, with its assorted columns, one can get tricksy about it and convert everyone into the most prevalent type of support level, and look up the equivalents of those in the appropriate column... If re-writing the table, can smooth out the progression a little bit -- IIRC there were some odd discontinuities in it as printed for no especially clear reason.

If this isn't specific enough for anyone, I can try to dig out my old mail, and/or reverse engineer it when I have the correct book to hand, but reading between the posts, looks like Nick has ended up pretty much where I did.