This is a follow-up to last week's D&D.Sci scenario: if you intend to play that, and haven't done so yet, you should do so now before spoiling yourself.

There is a web interactive here you can use to test your answer, and generation code available here if you're interested, or you can read on for the ruleset and scores.

RULESET

A character has three stats, Attack, Defense and Range.

Congratulations to abstractapplic, who I think was the first person to identify range differences (albeit with a slight confusion that led to categorizing the 2-range characters as 'long-range' ones).

The most important element of underlying structure is that when playing the game your team will line up in order, with a 'front line', 'mid line' and 'back line' character.  Lower-range characters will go at the front, higher-ranged ones behind them.  If two characters have the same Range, the higher-Defense one will go in front.

For example, if a blue team of Duelist (A5-D0-R1), Samurai(A3-D2-R1), and Archer (A1-D1-R4) plays against a green team of Bandit(A4-D1-R1), Javelineer (A2-D2-R2) and Hurler (A1-D3-R2), the teams will line up like this:

with each team's frontline next to the opposing frontline, and the midlines and backlines further away.

The game is played as follows:

• An initiative order is determined (this is based on how skillfully players play, but in the dataset it was generated by ordering the six characters at random).
• Each round, in initiative order, each character attacks.
• A character does damage equal to their Attack minus their target's Defense, but not less than 1.
  • So if a defender has 2 Defense, attackers with 1, 2 or 3 Attack will all do 1 damage to it, Attack 4 will do 2 damage, Attack 5 will do 3 damage.
• A character can only attack an opposing character that is within its range, and will preferentially attack the furthest-back character it can.  So in the diagram above:
  • Silent Samurai can attack only Bludgeon Bandit, and will do 2 damage (3-1).
  • Daring Duelist cannot attack any enemy, and will skip its attack.
  • Amazon Archer can attack either Bludgeon Bandit or Hammer Hurler, but will choose to attack Hammer Hurler, dealing 1 damage (1-3, min 1).
  • Bludgeon Bandit can attack only Silent Samurai, and will do 2 damage (4-2).
  • Hammer Hurler can attack only Silent Samurai, and will do 1 damage (1-2, min 1).
  • Jaunty Javelineer cannot attack any enemy, and will skip its attack.
• Once a character has taken 6 damage, it is KOd.  At this point, any characters behind it immediately 'step forward' to fill the spot it vacated.
  • So if Silent Samurai in the diagram above is defeated, Daring Duelist will step forward into the front-line slot (from which it will now attack Bludgeon Bandit) and Amazon Archer will step forward into the mid-line slot (from which it will now attack Jaunty Javelineer).
• Characters keep attacking (repeating in the same initiative order) until all characters on one team have been KOd, at which point the other team wins.

STRATEGY

Broad general strategy was:

• Ensure that your characters were all able to attack by bringing sufficient range (at least 2 on your midline and at least 3 on your backline).
• Ensure that your characters would 'focus fire', targeting the same opponent to KO one enemy quickly.  This was accomplished by bringing sets of adjacent ranges, e.g. one 1-range, one 2-range and one 3-range character.
• Try to bring Defense/Attack values that worked well against what the opponent brought (for example, against a 2 Defense opponent you want either 4+ Attack to do >1 damage, or 1 Attack to free up points for other stats.

The strongest team types I'm aware of were:

• By far the most powerful strategy against the broad field was a '1-2-3' team composition, bringing one character from each of those three ranges to focus the front enemy character while having maximum possible Attack/Defense.
  • The most important aspect of a 1-2-3 for playing against other 1-2-3s was to bring a durable enough frontline to take at most 1 damage per hit, since both teams would be focusing the opposing frontline.
• You could also bring a '2-3-4' composition, sacrificing some amount of Attack/Defense to focus the middle rather than the front opposing character.
  • This was generally weaker than a 1-2-3 composition against the broader field.
  • However, it was very valuable against compositions where the front line was more durable than the midline, including many 1-2-3s.
• In theory you could bring a similar '3-4-5' composition, but in practice the lost Attack/Defense was too much for this to be good except as a niche counter to extremely specific opposing teams.
• There was also a somewhat-surprising set of 'Sneaky Duelist' team compositions,  with ranges of 1-1-2 or sometimes 1-1-3, that worked well to beat specifically 1-2-3 compositions.  
  • This team brought a disposable front-line character, e.g. Silent Samurai (to get focused down by the 1-2-3 team but do some damage to their frontline in the meantime) and then put a Duelist in the midline and a 2 or 3-range character (e.g. Jaunty Javelineer) in the backline.
  • The Duelist and possibly the backline as well could not attack until the front-line was KOd and they were able to step forward, but once that happened they could usually KO the enemy frontline before their own Duelist was KOd.
  • At that point, the 1-2-3 team's midline and backline would step forward and retarget away from the Duelist, and while they focused the character behind the Duelist it would KO them.
  • This team was awful against anything that wasn't specifically a 1-2-3 teamcomp (since if the opposing team didn't focus down your frontline you would be left with your midline Duelist unable to attack), but it was favored against most 1-2-3 teams.

The NPC team had:

• Frontline Silent Samurai (A3-D2-R1)
• Midline Flamethrower Felon (A4-D0-R2)
• Backline Rugged Ranger (A1-D2-R3)

All three of the main strategies had some potential viability against the NPC team:

• The NPC team itself was a 1-2-3, but a somewhat-suboptimal one with e.g. a more fragile frontline than was optimal.  Making your own 1-2-3 team would usually get you a 50% winrate.  Optimizing your 1-2-3 team could improve this further.  The best possible 1-2-3 team was to:
  • Bring a frontline that can survive the enemies' attacks well, with 3 or more Defense (Lamellar Legionary or Granite Golem).
  • Bring a midline that can deal >1 damage in a hit to their Silent Samurai (Flamethrower Felon)
  • Bring a Range 3 backline (Professor Pyro, Matchlock Marauder, or Rugged Ranger would all work).
  • Any of these 6 potential combinations would get an 85% winrate (you deal 4 damage/round to their frontline while they do 3/round to yours, but occasionally you get unlucky and enough of their characters win initiative that they KO your frontline first anyway).
• A 2-3-4 team was the best possible strategy against the NPC team, capable of reaching a 100% winrate.  
  • The ideal team brought Hammer Hurler (A1-D3-R2) in the frontline, Professor Pyro (A3-D0-R3) in the midline, and Thunder Tyrant (A2-D0-R4) in the backline.
  • This team would deal 6 damage to the opposing midline Flamethrower Felon in the first round (KOing it) while taking at most 3 on its own frontline.
  • Other 2-3-4 teams also worked well, but not quite to the level of a 100% winrate.
• A 1-1-2 team could also successfully counter the NPC team.
  • The best possible 1-1-2 team brought a Samurai, Duelist,  and Felon.
  • This teamcomp behaved somewhat strangely, effectively sacrificing the Samurai to get the Duelist and Felon favorable initiative that they could use to rapidly cut through the medium-low durability on the NPC characters.
  • While somewhat vulnerable to initiative order, this managed an 89.2% winrate, and several other 1-1-2 teams could also work well (e.g. any team with a Legionary, Duelist and 2-range character was 65-75% favored).

PVE LEADERBOARD

Submissions were:

Two players submitted 1-2-3 teams: 

• gjm managed to correctly target the enemy team's weakness with a midline Felon, taking the lead overall in PVE with the best possible 1-2-3.  
• abstractapplic submitted a 1-2-3 team with exactly a 50% winrate (relatively fragile attackers meant that whoever's frontline fell first would basically always lose, and so those games ended up as pure coinflips on initiative rolls).

Two players boldly tried something different:

• simon actually discovered 1-1-2 comps at the last minute, and submitted a 1-1-2 comp that managed to be favored against the NPC team.
• Yonge came tantalizingly close to a 2-3-4 comp with Hammer Hurler in front that would have done extraordinarily well, but sadly had a 3-range backline that targeted differently from the other characters, for an overall 2-3-3 team that didn't quite work as well as the 1-2-3 approach.  

PVP LEADERBOARD

The below should be considered non-final for a few days so people can check and confirm that I've gotten it right.

Again, most players submitted 1-2-3 teams (and everyone included Professor Pyro):

*Note: gjm and yonge did not submit distinct PVP teams, I've used their PVE ones here, which may not have been intended for PVP.

with winrates:

The 1-2-3 teams all had similarly durable frontlines, and the same Professor backline, but performed very differently based on their midlines.

While gjm's midline Felon was an excellent pick against the PVE team (able to target their 2-defense frontline and do 2 damage a hit), it fared very poorly here, only able to do 1 damage per hit to the durable frontlines it encountered, and vulnerable to being KOd extremely fast (either once its frontline was defeated or to yonge's team targeting it directly.)  

simon and particularly abstractapplic submitted more durable midlines that performed better overall, and brought Legionary rather than Golem as their frontline (a slight improvement since no-one brought a Duelist).

Yonge's 2-3-3 team helped highlight the midline difference with two characters targeting the opposing midline, doing extremely differently based on how durable the opposing midline was (ranging from a 94% winrate against gjm to guaranteed defeat against abstractapplic).

Congratulations to abstractapplic for winning the PVP overall!  Now abstractapplic gets to specify two scenarios   I have to feel twice as guilty about not having finished abstractapplic's requested scenario yet  abstractapplic gets to feel twice as much pride in their Data Science Skills!

FEEDBACK REQUEST

As usual, I'm interested to hear feedback on what people thought of this scenario.  If you played it, what did you like and what did you not like?  If you might have played it but decided not to, what drove you away?  What would you like to see more of/less of in future?  Do you think the scenario was too complicated to decipher?  Or too simple to feel realistic?  Or both at once?  Do you have any other feedback?