Don't you always mark the opponent's shots?
Entertainmeonly 17 points 7 days ago
They didn't come with enough markers originally to do that. The only way i was able to as a kid was because we had the peices from a second game set.
agamemnonymous 11 points 7 days ago
I suppose strictly speaking you only need to mark the hits. If you're not cheating, your opponent's misses don't really matter much.
henfredemars 4 points 7 days ago
I must be not that bright because I played many games of battleship in my childhood and never even considered the possibility.
red_bull_of_juarez 9 points 7 days ago
Please. We are simply introducing an element of realism.
ColeSloth 27 points 7 days ago
That has zero strategic advantage. it only hurts your odds of winning.
*Edit: Since this has gotten a fair amount of debate, let me end it for the couple of youl who think I'm incorrect.
When played normally, the odds of finding the 5 spot ship are much higher than finding the 2 spot ship (duh).
You have essentially made a single 5 spot ship by stacking.
When your opponent lands a hit, they are required to state what ship was struck. This means that once there's a hit made on those ships, you have to name off ALL the ships under the peg.
You transformed a game where you had to find a 5 peg ship, 4 peg, 3 peg, and a 2 peg ship into a game where all you have to do is find the easiest ship to locate (5 peg) and you win the game.
This is a no brainer.
Also, just for the record, it is against the rules to stack ships.
restingOface 8 points 7 days ago
The grid is 10x10, so 100 spaces. Placed legally, 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 21 points 7 days 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 -9 points 7 days 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.
Yeah, because the challenge in Battleship is primarily the locating of the battleships. Having a 100% chance of being hit would indeed be bad.
racemaniac 3 points 6 days 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.
Kacarott 10 points 7 days ago
What you calculated are not the chances of the opponent not beating you, you calculated the chance of getting the first hit. But it is the last ship being hit that will make you lose.
Imagine player A using a regular strategy, and B using this stacking strategy. Now imagine that B gets insanely lucky and sinks all of A's ships except their largest one, without missing any at all (while A keeps missing all their shots). So now, even after all that insane luck from player B, who has a better chance of winning? At this point, they both have only 5 spaces which can be hit, and any hit will quickly end the game, so they both have 50% chance to win right?
This means that clearly if B doesn't get insanely lucky in the first turns of the game, then A will have much better chances to win. A's chance to win reduces to it's absolute minimum at 50% when it has only one single 5-length ship left.
DrSteveBrule 5 points 7 days 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 5 points 7 days ago
According 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 hit. 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 1 point 6 days ago
According to the rules (which also state you can't stack ships. Lol) you're supposed to state which ship was hit.
TIL I’ve never played by the rules.
EndlessNightmare 5 points 7 days 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 11 points 7 days ago
Depends on how hard you want to cheat/ragebait your opponent
ColeSloth 2 points 7 days 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.
iusemybrain 1 point 7 days 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 sandwitched 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.
Allero 3 points 7 days ago
Most iterations of the game assume you cannot place ships right next to each other. So, when you down a ship in a normal configuration, you immediately know the surroundings are free of ships.
In this placement, all but these 4 cells will not give you such an advantage. Therefore, the tactic is advantageous as it keeps the opponent with less intel.
Correction: digging deeper, it seems like many people know Battleship by the Hasbro/Milton Bradley edition, which doesn't have this rule. But the game itself is much older, and many of its editions do include the rule. At the very least, this rule is highly popular in Russia, Germany and Spain.
restingOface 7 points 7 days ago
Most iterations of the game assume you cannot place ships right next to each other.
I have never heard that rule. I cannot see that anywhere, even as a variation
Allero 9 points 7 days ago
Huh, I dug down and apparently it's a regional quirk?
Even the Wikipedia article about the game doesn't mention it in English, but does mention it in Russian.
English:
Before play begins, each player secretly arranges their ships on their primary grid. Each ship occupies a number of consecutive squares on the grid, arranged either horizontally or vertically. The number of squares for each ship is determined by the type of ship. The ships cannot overlap (i.e., only one ship can occupy any given square in the grid) or be placed diagonally.
Russian (translated by yours truly):
The playing field is typically a 10x10 square, on which the fleet is placed. <...> When placed, ships should not touch each other by sides or corners. Some variations may lack this rule.
Also, apparently it is common for the game to have 5-long ships, which don't appear in the Russian versions.
Uebercomplicated 3 points 7 days ago
This is also the case for the German version I player, funny.
binarytobis 2 points 7 days ago
How odd that they would bother changing the rules regionally.
Allero 2 points 6 days ago
Certainly not just a house rule, I've met it everywhere.
And, as it seems from further down the thread, it seems to be the difference because large parts of the world rely on Hasbro's Battleship as the rule source, while the other seems to play by older rules (by the time Hasbro/Milton Bradley released the game, it was already almost a century old).
Others from Spain and Germany also seem to know that rule, but it was not in the official Hasbro version of the game. This is what appears to make that difference.
ColeSloth 1 point 6 days ago
Lol at trying to cop out on being wrong by claiming you were basing your answer on the pre 1963 pencil and paper game of Battleship. What's worse is that you COULDN'T stack ships in the paper version and that the picture\meme for this post is using the boardgame.
You're a riot, man. People must love how right you always say you are.
StarvingMartist 2 points 7 days ago
False, they hit two and they think they've already sunk the ship
ColeSloth 1 point 7 days ago
Double false. That implies that they happen to luck out and hit the 2 peg ship first with both guesses, when the odds are that at least one of their guesses would likely hit one of the other 3 spots with ships on it.
By the rules, you also have to state what ship is hit and state when a ship has been sunk.
RagingRobot 2 points 7 days ago
Art of the deal
iusemybrain -1 points 7 days ago
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 say the probability as the sum of each probability of each point which is 0℅ if we span the area to infinity.
practically speaking, this is not true 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.
I'm sure there is a way to find algorithmically an optimal method to finding in what location are the best positions in battleship, but generally speaking, no, there are worse conditions that have a higher probability of being guessed
binarytobis 5 points 7 days ago
There’s a lower chance of getting hit on turn 1, but it takes more turns to sink a five space ship and all of the others than just one five space ship. The goal is to last more turns with at least one boat, not avoid getting hit for the longest. I don’t see the advantage.
Unless you add an extra rule requiring you to shoot the same space multiple times.
iusemybrain 0 points 6 days ago
what are you going on about, that probability depends on the number of turns you get? last I checked it, no it does not depend on that.
the argument I'm trying to make is it's statistically less likely to hit that 5 point battleship (probability is 5%) compared to the 17 points in ships spread abitrarily (probability is 17℅). IT DOES NOT DEPEND ON THE NUMBER OF TURNS IT TAKES TO SINK ALL 5 BATTLESHIP'S. The probability does depend after the first event has occurred (where you've hit one of those pieces). Whether you get a hit on your first turn or the first hit in 30 turns, it does not matter. probability does not depend on the number of turns it takes.
technically speaking the probability calculated at the beginning is when the number of trials (theoretically) approach to infinity. The 1/6 probability to role a six sided die on a number (for example, lets say 6) is after doing trial and error of rolling a 6. Now whether you get the 6 on the first try or the 100th try these are approximations of the 1/6 th probability. As you do more and more trials it does eventually converge to the 1/6 th probability.
So yes, technically speaking someone could hit the standalone stacked battleship in one try, probability and statistics doesn't concern that. So if that concerns you, psychologically manipulate your openent by putting your battleship in the first row.
binarytobis 1 point 6 days ago
what are you going on about, that probability depends on the number of turns you get? last I checked it, no it does not depend on that.
I didn’t say this or anything like it. I suspect you didn’t read my comment at all.
The point you are making is that you are less likely to hit one 5 point ship than one of any among 17 points of ships. This, while true, has nothing to do with anything.
What the rest of us are talking about is whether stacking ships would help you win. The only factor in winning is if you sink all of your opponents ships before they sink all of yours. The % chance to hit the first shot is, frankly, irrelevant. Objectively, the more ships you have the longer you will last, and the higher your chance to win.
JackFrostNCola 21 points 7 days ago
...why is there a mirror on the ceiling?
Were you playing on grandmas bed?
rob_t_firefly 9 points 7 days ago
And a lot of pineapples in the decor?
restingOface 36 points 8 days ago
I am not seeing it. In this community?
EDIT: Oh, it's a user I have blocked. No wonder I didn't see that before posting this.
degenerate_neutron_matter 16 points 7 days ago path: 0 24270547 24272055 24272493, hotness: undefined, score: 16, children: 1
EggInDisguise 12 points 7 days ago
I'll pay top dollar for a stained, crumpled napkin doodle of the thing I'm interested in before I spend a cent on slop.
betterdeadthanreddit 8 points 8 days ago
Good artists copy, great artists steal.
-Me
nightwatch_admin 5 points 8 days ago
OpenAI friend request incoming
thespcicifcocean 6 points 8 days ago
We've got mountains of content, some better, some worse
CIA_chatbot 4 points 8 days ago
It was a different picture, but exactly same meme - I don’t know why people do shit like that
diabetic_porcupine 14 points 7 days ago
Don’t worry I’ve got backups
The backups:
BenevolentOne 5 points 7 days ago
The best part is, this dumb cheater has strictly reduced their odds of victory. This is bait.
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The real battleship cheat was marking the opponents shots as well as your own and moving ships accordingly. I mean, it's not like real ships don't move.
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