hold on there, it actually does have strategic advantage from a statistical perspective.
the basic notion is that for a probability of event A to occur it is proportional to the area of the event; so if larger area, larger probability, smaller area, smaller probability.
if we take that idea and apply the same basis to battleship you could roughly approximate the probability as the sum of each probability of each point which is 0℅ if we span the area to infinity.
of course this is not true for any game as you can’t span to an infinite scale, but you could say that the probability of hitting a point is 1℅ since battleship is a 10 x 10 grid so the probability is just 1/(10 * 10) = 0.01. Then the probability gets more complicated since you are being asked what is the probability of the second, third, fourth, etc… point being hit given that initial probability. the probability grows dependent on the first point being hit.
restingOface@quokk.au 3 weeks ago
The grid is 10x10, so 100 spaces. Your five ships take up 17 spaces. That means if your opponent picks a space at random, there is a 17% chance they will get a hit.
It you cheat like this, your five ships only take up 5 spaces. That means if your opponent picks a space at random, there is a 5% chance they will get a hit.
So, purely based on chance, this increases the odds of your opponent not beating you. You just have to make sure to also be on the offensive and sink all their battleships quickly, because if they happen to hit your battlestack just once, that means they are going to sink it all within the next 4-7 turns.
binarytobis@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
If you had a ship on every possible space, they would have a 100% chance of landing a hit, so by your logic this would be worse. But it would take 100 turns to sink you, which is the best possible outcome.
Having only one 5 space ship is objectively worse than having one five space ship and all the others. Unless of course you also created a new rule that they have to hit the same spot multiple times, once for each ship.
At that point you’re just playing Calvin Ball, though, and you might as well put the ships under your chair and claim “You never said floor!”
restingOface@quokk.au 2 weeks ago
Yeah, because the challenge in Battleship is primarily the locating of the battleships. Having a 100% chance of being hit would indeed be bad.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
Lol. I’m starting to wonder if you ever really played Battleship. You sound like you’d be terrible at the game.
racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
You know what, i’m in :) On my field, i’ll have a ship on every single square, so no matter where you aim, you score a hit :) And on your field, you just have 1 ship of 5 long, so i have only a 5% chance to hit :).
Do remember though, the game ends when all our ships are sunk.
So you will have to do 100 shots every round to win (covering every single square) While i just have to find your ship (with some basic strategies, i’d estimate not even needing 20 shot to do that), and then i win :).
… starting to get it? XD
you’re focusing so hard on how easy it is to hit a ship, that you forget the goal of the game: sink every ship.
If my entire playfield is ships, you’ll indeed hit with every single shots, but you’ll also need the maximum of 100 shots every game to ‘win’ XD.
EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 3 weeks ago
Does 1 hit cause damage to all the ships in the stack that occupy the hit space? Or does only the top-most ship take the damage such that the top ships shield the bottom ones?
ThunderQueen@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Depends on how hard you want to cheat/ragebait your opponent
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
By marking design only allowing one peg to mark places you’ve called out, it would strongly be implied that it would only make sense for the hit to happen on all the ships under the spot.
DrSteveBrule@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
When the smallest ship (can’t remember what its called) is destroyed, you would then tell your opponent that they sunk it. It would be unlikely that they would continue to strike the next space in that row/column.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
YlAccirding to the rules (which also state you can’t stack ships. Lol) you’re supposed to state which ship was hit.
This means that you would have to say the names of all the ships that just got his. Also, if you were trying to skirt that rule by not saying the names of all the ships underneath, and only saying the name of the top ship, the odds that both if your opponents first guesses that struck would hit the 2 spot ship are pretty low.
binarytobis@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
TIL I’ve never played by the rules.
iusemybrain@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I’ll add to this, it’s not just about finding the initial probability since the probability for event B given A, or event C given A and B, these would increase the liklihood of being found. I couldn’t tell you exactly what the probability is but say for example event B given A, it would be 1/n for n being the number of legal spaces around A. So if the ship was in the middle of the board it would have the smallest probability of being found but if you’re along a wall, there’s only 3 possible legal spaces so the probability increases to 33.3℅, and if A was aandwitched between two walls, the probability of B is 50℅.
so if there’s a moral to this story, assert dominance and put all your pieces in the center.