TAO Blocking System

Before you read this, I strongly suggest that you play the game with the new system first, because I think this post might be a bit confusing otherwise... In reality, nothing drastic changed in the game, except that blocking percentages can now hold for smaller samples and all players can see and "predict" blocks based on this. If a Knight blocks 4 or 5 times in a row, and you predict that the system will force it to get hit on the next attack, I do not really consider that cheating. In fact, you do not need to "predict" at all now, because the game will now show you when it is true.

Blocking in Tactics Arena Online adds a random element to the game that traditional strategy board games, such as Chess, do not have. As some players already knew, blocking in TAO is not purely random. To help understand why, here are some guidelines for the design of TAO's blocking system, which was built within the constraints of Flash and Actionscript:

a) Each unit is treated individually; eg. EACH Knight should block 80% of the time. If you hit 5 different Knights once each, it is NOT true that only 4/5 should block. Although unlikely, it is even ok for none of them to block.

b) A unit will not generally get attacked hundreds of times during one game. Knowing that a Knight may block 80 out of 100 attacks is not enough; a Knight should be constrained to blocking 8 out of every 10 consecutive attacks, with some error of course.

c) Only contiguous streaks of attacks (attacks within a few turns of each other) should be governed by these "constraints"; eg. if a Knight is attacked once every 10 turns, blocking will just be purely random 80%, allowing the possibility for all hits or all blocks.

Since TAO is a Flash game and even the server is programmed in Actionscript, the random number generator cannot be seeded, and everyone on the same server shares the same generator. In the beginning, no "compensating" was done, and players witnessed improbable streaks quite often. One could only believe that they balanced out in the long, long run when taking ALL games played into consideration, which was an impossibility for any player to confirm.

But should someone else's game affect yours? Should your past games affect your future games? Should your lucky blocking in a game be balanced out by your opponent's unlucky blocking? Naturally the answer is no.

Now how about, should you have an invincible Pyro as long as it's balanced by your gimpy Knight? This isn't as definite, but still I've chosen the answer to be no. Each unit will be independent, and will reflect their blocking stat within the shortest term possible. Blocking may become more predictable, but a unit dies in too few hits for medium or long term balancing to ever kick in.

Based on all these guidelines, there are 3 main parts to how the latest TAO blocking system is programmed:

1) Each time a unit is attacked, there is a random chance to block frontal attacks, based on its stats, and half that chance to block side attacks.

2) After a unit blocks, its subsequent blocking chance is lowered, and if it did not block, its subsequent blocking chance is raised. The compensations to block percentages are now shown in game.

3) The effect of all block percentage "compensations" diminishes slightly each turn if the unit is not attacked, and eventually units will revert to their base blocking percentages.

In this system, blocking is still random in the sense that even if you know that a Knight should almost always block 8 out of 10 consecutive attacks, you can't know for certain which 8 it will be. Also, if a unit blocks too much and the system lowers its blocking chance to 0%, this does not mean that the unit must be hit once before it can block again. With the diminishing effect, eventually it will revert to its base blocking chance if it is not attacked.

So what's the "revision" from the previous version of the game?
The diminishing effect was added, and the calculations for blocking percentages were modified to remove a bug where sometimes the side blocking chance became higher than the front chance. Also, the actual compensation values for how much blocking chance is raised or lowered, is now displayed in game.