So we’ve got a internal point costing model for Seven Days to the River Rhine main battle tanks, but knowing there’s some internal logic, the problem now is we have to get appropriate values to plug into said model.
Where do we get those?
Well…the easiest way is to steal that research from someone else. Namely, Battlefront, developers of Team Yankee, the other, more popular “Cold War Goes Hot” game out there. And life would be easy if we could just cross-walk between the two games like that.
But is that a good idea?
We can validate this by comparing known matches between 7DRR and Team Yankee (henceforth TY). If there’s a strong match between the two games, we can leverage a lot of what TY does to inform our values for 7DRR.
Matching by Points
First of all, can we just steal Team Yankee points and turn them into 7DRR points. This would make parts of this relatively easy. The bad news is…not really. Let’s look at them side by side. As a note here, there’s less data than we used in the previous post because 7DRR, being a tank-centric game, has a lot more tanks in it, both at the upper and lower ends of the spectrum (both occupied by the Soviets) but also in the many iterations of various tank designs, whereas the only really detailed information on different varieties of the same tank is for the M1 Abrams in TY. So some guesswork was needed here, assigning “T-72” to which version of the T-72, etc. But I did my best.
The fit here is fine. You can draw a line through it. If you’re willing to use quadratic terms, it might even be a decent line. The problem is that the fit sort of breaks down in the two to four point range for Team Yankee, which translates to anything from 30 to 50 points in 7DRR. There’s not a lot of information here. And the S Tank is 5 points in Team Yankee, which is perilously close to that zone of very little information. So this…might not do us much good.
What About Armor?
Armor is one of the tricker values to figure out, and one of the more important ones. It’s especially tricky for the S Tank, because of how wildly angled the armor actually is. So can we maybe use TY’s front armor values to cross-walk to an armor value for the S Tank?
Running high on yesterday’s success, this feels…so-so to me. The S Tank is going to be down at the lower range of the armor values presented here (again, TY is missing a lot of data for the weakest armored tanks in 7DRR), where there’s a lot of uncertainty. Primarily driven by TY and 7DRR disagreeing pretty seriously about the durability of a Leopard 1.
So no, we can’t really copy of Battlefront’s test to save us some time and research.
So What Do We Do?
We speculate.
And that, friends, will be our next and final post.
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