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I'm tooling around with a small mod for Mount & Blade, and I was wondering if some of the more experienced coders could help me out.

I want to be able to compare two teams of arena fighters, to provide an odds thing for gambling. However, simple stuff like comparing the sum of levels is doomed to sploits, so I'll need something more complex but I don't have the imagination.

The game has levels, stats, skills and equipment. Levels just add to hp and skills/stats, and stats only unlock skills, so skills and equipment are really the most important bits. However, there are horses, ranged weapons, etc, and it seems pretty damn complex to come up with somethat that gets a ratio out of all that data.

Any ideas out there?

Yes, that is pretty damn complex. I guess you could squash all the data together, create some sort of average based on some standard (I don't know what that would be, given I've never touched the game), and compare the two averages. Assign arbitrary values to advantages like horses or bows or whatever.

But then, I've been bashing my head against a wall of Java for the past hour or so so maybe it's best not to listen to me.

Yeah, it's just my gamer-nous talking. Horses, armour and weapons are important, but averaging armour coverage and charge/melee/shooting damage is probably enough. I just *know* there'll be an easy way to inflate one side of the ratio without actually being 'better' though.

Ha ha! I think I will steal an idea from Oblivion, and force arena fighters to use specific arena equipment. Thus it's only skills etc that make a difference. Something from Oblivion that makes sense?

I could allow free equip for non-gambling games, I guess.

Are the sizes of the teams equal? Otherwise you might find this article somewhat useful (you might anyway).

Do you know the inner mechanics of the game? So that you easily can put numbers into the damage-doing formulas etc.? If so, it would be fairly easy to see what factors contribute to the chance of winning the battle. If you don't, and you want it exact, you'll have to do a lot of analysing to find the formulas...

But if you can find out how much damage a certain unit would do to another, you could add all the stats and stuff of all the units in the teams, and then compare them as two huge "super units". You can then calculate the number of hits it would take for either side to defeat the other, then divide that number by the total number of hits and you'll have an estimate of the chance of victory or defeat, or at least which side is the stronger.

Of course, how accurate this is depends very much upon how the game works. If there's a lot of random numbers everywhere (and there tends to be in RPGs), then you'll also have to compensate for that. And if it's not turn-based then everything would be very random so a "strength rating" might be better than a "victory chance rating"...

Just give the odds to which ever side has the most swordsmen. Pound for pound, they're the best, mounted or otherwise.

How many people do you anticipate betting on each bout? If the number is fairly large, why not just have market odds?