Ares engine lacks randomization of targets

[Scott-TT]

Hello, I'm unsure if this is intended but the combat engine currently uses a fully predictable combat resolution, essentially taking each target in ascending value of total juice. In short the smallest targets are consistently shot first, while the strongest ones are never considered.

Quick testing showed this is solved by looping over shuffled targets during the "Calculate Regular Fire!" parts of
both attacks and defenses
foreach(shuffle_forces($DefShipsForce_Copy) as $TKey => $TForce)

With any acceptable shuffle (i.e. key-preserving), for instance

function shuffle_forces($list) { 
    if (!is_array($list)) return $list; 
    $keys = array_keys($list); 
    shuffle($keys); 
    $random = array(); 
    foreach ($keys as $key) { 
        $random[$key] = $list[$key]; 
    }
    return $random; 
}

[mdziekon]

Hi @Scott-TT, thanks for reaching out.

Long story short - yes, total lack of randomisation in Ares is an intentional design choice, as I wanted to make the engine's result stable and predictable (and therefore, reduce the need to use simulators multiple times, and cut down on execution time - the original OGame engine randomises almost everything, which makes it quite badly suited for custom servers with eg. x1000 game speeds).

However, that was long time ago, and I definitely see the shortcomings of such approach. I'm not oposed to the idea of some sort of randomness in the engine, as long as there's an option to choose which variant of the engine should be used (so that every admin of their server can make a choice). I suppose this could be introduced as a simple parameter in Ares, and a new configuration entry (provided at install).

Feel free to open up a Pull Request if this is something you would like to work on, community contributions are always welcome. Since this is not a bug, I'll retag this issue to "Feature request".