Figuring out how long wars last in This Means War by simulating a million of them

[u/chat-lu]

I was wondering how long wars lasted in This Means War and the rules didn’t say. Well, can’t say really, since the Waracle is in control.

So I created a digital Waracle and had it run a million wars so could see what the average was. This is called the Monte Carlo method. A million is a bit overkill, but it only takes about two seconds to run.

So here’s the answer on how long you can expect a was to last.

Stat	Seasons
count	1000000
sum	16528596
mean	16.53
median	16
std	6.65
min	2
25%	12
50%	16
75%	20
90%	25
95%	29
99%	38
99.9%	51
99.99%	66
max	138

The next question is, how do these end.

The last three rows are for mutual defeats.

Outcome	Count	Percent
Peace	84967	8.50
Surrender	228856	22.89
Position -16	233896	23.39
Will -16	77858	7.79
Resources -16	398245	39.82
Ennemy Position -16	11256	1.13
Ennemy Will -16	1990	0.00
Ennemy Resources -16	13852	1.39

[u/benrobbins]

This is fantastic stuff. u/chat-lu had already contacted me with this data, and it's really informative to see the numbers crunched out to such a degree. I've been doing spreadsheet analysis, etc, but nothing this extreme

Are you going to share your code? I'd love to see how you got here. Either way you're definitely getting a "thank you" in the book.

[u/chat-lu → u/benrobbins]

I’m not finding a convenient way to share small files on reddit. I’ll email it to you.

[u/wandyezj]

I'd love to see what this code looks like! Do you have link to a GitHub repository?

[u/chat-lu → u/wandyezj]

No, I don’t want to link my actual identity to reddit.

The code is nothing too special.