[Ryo]

Alright, I have put a lot more effort into this than I should have, and wrote a Python script to simulate a situation where an attacking Decker dataspikes every turn, and a defender just sits there on Full Defense. The script ignores things like initiative and just repeats the attack test until somebody dies, running until one of them has a full matrix damage track.  After a few glitches where it gave me numbers that started to look too good to be true, I fixed the code and have edited this post with the correct results.

The defender has Willpower 5, Firewall 5, and Intuition 6, for a total dicepool of 16. His device rating is 3, so he soaks with 8 dice.

The attacker has Cybercombat 6, Logic 6 in hot-sim with an Attack rating of 7. His dice pool is 14.

In 100 tests, the attacker won 62 of them, the defender 38.

So I figure, fuck it, let's stack the deck. Defender has Willpower 5, Firewall 8, Intuition 6, for 19 dice, the highest you can get at creation, and he's running a device rating 4, so he soaks with 12 dice. The attacker adds a Data Spike specialization, rolling 16 dice with Attack rating 7.

In 100 tests, the attacker won 36 matches, defender won 64.

The tide turned in the defender's favor as the dice go up, and the limits start mattering. So lets see what happens if the decker loads Decryption, increasing his Attack to 8.

Attacker: 54, Defender: 46

That one simple change and it's back in the attacker's favor. With three extra dice, the defender is still losing, but only about half the time. But the SONY CIY-750 both are using can run 4 programs, and the attacker only has Decryption loaded. What happens when he loads Hammer?

Attacker: 54, Defender: 46

Surprisingly, nothing. I kind of suspect this was a fluke due to 100 being a small sample size, but lets move on by giving him one mark.

Attacker: 72, Defender: 28

Now it's starting to sting. The Attacker is easily able to one-shot the defender at this point with 12 base damage, so things have massively swung in his favor. And you can't Full Matrix Defense against Hack on the Fly, so that mark is more likely than you think. But the Defender has some programs as well. He's already running Encryption to get Firewall 8, so lets give him Shell and Armor for +3 more soak dice, giving him 15.

Attacker: 62 Defender: 38

Helped a little, but not a lot. Attacker still wins most of the time if he's got a mark on you. Just for shits and giggles, I'm gonna check 3 marks plus Mugger, which is a base damage of 17.

Attacker: 73 Defender: 27


My Conclusion:

As it turns out, this all comes down to the Attack limit. If you can push your Full Matrix Defense pool high enough that your average hits exceeds the opponent's limit, you can actually use it as an effective offensive strategy, assuming your opponent is stupid enough to attack you until he bricks himself. If the attacker's limit is higher than the average hits you get, he wins by a landslide.

However, even with your average hits exceeding his limit, he can still pretty easily boost his damage so high that he can fail 6 attacks in a row, almost die, and on the 7th he one-shots you.

And this is definitely a decker-only strategy. Never try this against IC on a host. A local corporate host is rating 7-8, meaning the IC has dice pools of 16-18, and can have an Attack rating of 10-11. At those numbers, you're toast, especially since there are 4 different types of IC that can deal Matrix damage to you that can all be running at the same time.

[Lobo]

Thank you, Ryo.

I appreciate the time and effort - hopefully this will clear things up for the OP.

[FasterN8]

Ditto.   

Nothing like a solid Monte Carlo simulation to put some meat on an argument.  Well done sir!

I think I know why Hammer wasn't making the numbers budge.  It was probably a case where the extra 2 damage put the defender right at the edge of his condition monitor, but wasn't ever enough to put him over, always requiring 2 successful attacks vice 1.  So without Hammer, the attacker may have been doing 6-7 damage, and the +2 didn't do anything to reduce the need for a second successful attack.

[Xenon]

full matrix defense most of the time only add some 3-4 dice. maybe 5. +6 only if the target really really focus on willpower (riggers probably focus more on reaction and logic and deckers probably focus more on logic and intuition... only roles that tend to focus a lot on willpower are magicians and technomancers).

it is also really really hard to shoot a physical adept that got a lot of reflexes, intuition, combat sense and add willpower with full defense as well. same game mechanic really.

[Ryo]

It's also worth noting that in all the tests I did, I assumed the defender would have a higher dice pool, which would not at all be the norm. Not only because the majority of players aren't going to max out their willpower, but because in the arms race between attacker and defender, attacker leaves the defender in the dust.


Absolute highest possible Full Defense pool available in the rules as currently written:

Dwarf Hacker with Willpower 7(11) (using the Increase Attribute spell), Intuition 7(11) (with Exceptional attribute and Increase Attribute spell), Firewall 10 (Fairlight Excalibur with highest number in Firewall, plus Encryption program.)

Total pool: 32

Absolute highest possible Cybercombat pool available in the rules as currently written:

Hacker with Logic 7(11) (Exceptional Attribute and Increase Attribute Spell), Cybercombat 13(20) (Aptitude plus Improved Ability Adept Power), 2 from Hot-sim, 2 from dataspike specialization, 2 from data spike Codeslinger quality, Attack 10 (Fairlight Excalibur with highest number in Attack, plus Decryption program)

Total Pool: 37, Limit 10

Megacorporate Host IC, rating 12. Host rating*2 Attack rolls, +2 hotsim, Attack Rating 15.

Total Pool: 26, Limit 15.

[sideshow]

Ryo, as an aside: why did you only run each test 100 times? I can't imagine they took long to compute. Why not just stick a couple of extra 0's in there?

[Ryo]

Ryo, as an aside: why did you only run each test 100 times? I can't imagine they took long to compute. Why not just stick a couple of extra 0's in there?

Took about two minutes per run. I did one at 10,000 before I fixed all the glitches, and that took a good twenty minutes. I have an old, shitty laptop.

But I'll go ahead and run Lobo's numbers from a few pages ago 10,000 times and edit this post when it finishes.

Hacker
Cyber Combat 6 (Personas), Logic 6, attack 6 (increased by 1 with Decryption),  Hot-Sim 2.  Total dice 16, limit 7

Rigger
Firewall 5, Intuition 6, Willpower 5 - total 16 dice.

EDIT:

Two and a half hours later, the results are in.

Attacker: 8,072
Defender: 1,928

That means that at these numbers, Emeketos' strategy of using Full Matrix Defense offensively against a cyberattacking spider has a success rate of 19%. Significantly less than the 90% he was claiming. Only question left now is how many Initiative Passes/Combat Turns this strategy will actually buy you before you get bricked, which my code currently isn't set up to calculate.

But here's what the output looks like. A small sample, since the full text was 418,406 lines long.
[spoiler]10 10
[4, 1, 3, 2, 6, 5, 5, 2, 2, 1, 6, 5, 1, 2, 2, 4]
Attacker Successes 5
[4, 4, 2, 3, 2, 6, 1, 1, 2, 4, 5, 2, 2, 4, 3, 4]
Defender Successes 2
Attacker net hits= 3
[4, 4, 6, 2, 4, 3, 4, 2]
Defender soaks 1
Defender takes 9 damage
Attacker: 8070
Defender: 1928
10 1
[4, 2, 6, 2, 3, 6, 6, 6, 6, 1, 3, 6, 4, 5, 4, 2]
Attacker Successes 7
[1, 6, 6, 1, 2, 4, 4, 6, 2, 5, 4, 6, 1, 1, 3, 2]
Defender Successes 5
Attacker net hits= 2
[2, 3, 4, 5, 2, 5, 6, 5]
Defender soaks 4
Defender takes 5 damage
Attacker: 8071
Defender: 1928
10 10
[5, 3, 1, 5, 1, 5, 6, 4, 4, 1, 5, 4, 4, 6, 1, 6]
Attacker Successes 7
[5, 4, 4, 6, 5, 2, 2, 1, 2, 5, 6, 1, 2, 4, 2, 3]
Defender Successes 5
Attacker net hits= 2
[1, 1, 3, 5, 2, 5, 2, 3]
Defender soaks 2
Defender takes 7 damage
Attacker: 8071
Defender: 1928
10 3
[6, 5, 6, 2, 2, 5, 6, 3, 6, 4, 3, 5, 2, 4, 3, 6]
Attacker Successes 7
[1, 6, 4, 3, 1, 6, 2, 1, 4, 1, 4, 6, 6, 6, 4, 6]
Defender Successes 6
Attacker net hits= 1
[5, 3, 6, 3, 5, 4, 6, 1]
Defender soaks 4
Defender takes 4 damage
Attacker: 8072
Defender: 1928[/spoiler]

[FasterN8]

Awesome stuff Ryo.  I always loved the "Big Hammer" approach to problem solving.

[Redwulfe]

Remember spiders can help IC in cybercombat by marking target and swapping his attributes and programs out by spoofing commands with a free action and 1 mark. This usually will decrease the targets Defense by 5 for two free actions. One to swap his firewall to something less defensive (-3) and one to unload encryption(-2). From there I spend action keeping defenses low and trying to get more marks on target once i have three I format device so he can't come back quickly after he is booted. While this is happening the IC is attacking since the defenses are lowed by the spider the attacks are more effective.

In our games the spider shares marks with the host as IC do so one IC can mark, one IC can attack and the spider can swap defenses, unload programs, format devices, force you to grid hop to the public grid, and trace if they feel inclined. We also believe that there is not just one spider working for most corps so the first comes quickly as he is "on duty" and the second or even third come a bit longer as they are "on call".

If you turtle up it doesn't matter to me as any IC destroyed will just relaunch on the next turn, fresh and ready to rumble also with your defenses being lowered it makes it harder to pull off an effective turtle plan unless the Host is small time.

[Ryo]

Remember spiders can help IC in cybercombat by marking target and swapping his attributes and programs out by spoofing commands with a free action and 1 mark. This usually will decrease the targets Defense by 5 for two free actions. One to swap his firewall to something less defensive (-3) and one to unload encryption(-2). From there I spend action keeping defenses low and trying to get more marks on target once i have three I format device so he can't come back quickly after he is booted. While this is happening the IC is attacking since the defenses are lowed by the spider the attacks are more effective.

Um, what? How? Reconfiguring your deck is not a Matrix Action. The book goes so far as to italicize that. "Doing this is a Free Action that you may only perform on your own Action Phase. This is not a Matrix action."

In our games the spider shares marks with the host as IC do so one IC can mark, one IC can attack and the spider can swap defenses, unload programs, format devices, force you to grid hop to the public grid, and trace if they feel inclined. We also believe that there is not just one spider working for most corps so the first comes quickly as he is "on duty" and the second or even third come a bit longer as they are "on call".

If you turtle up it doesn't matter to me as any IC destroyed will just relaunch on the next turn, fresh and ready to rumble also with your defenses being lowered it makes it harder to pull off an effective turtle plan unless the Host is small time.

I don't know if Spiders share marks, but if they do, they'd also be using the Host's attributes and unable to load programs, since Hosts don't run programs. But yes, much like on-site security stalling for the HTR team to show up, most places probably have an on-site spider and a much more capable on-call spider that acts as emergency backup for multiple facilities.

[Redwulfe]

I'm not sure I understand I wasn't trying to say it was a matrix action, and even if it is not the control device matrix action that you would use to perform this doesn't require the action the device performs to be a matrix action. As far as swapping attributes can only be something you can perform on your action phase it could be argued that I am switching the attributes on my action phase, as well as it could be read that a deck can only have it's attributes switched on its owners action phase. Though I don't think that's what the intension of the wording was. In my opinion it was to prevent you from swapping your attributes as a free action in a later phase that you don't have an action on to give yourself better defenses in response to different effects. That is of course my interpretation and opinion others can play it as they wish.

As for sharing marks that is something we do in our game regardless of the rules I should have elaborated on what I meant by the wording "in our games." My main point was that the spider can turn unload your programs and swap your attributes through the command device action with one mark and a few free actions to harass you while the IC can perform more effective cyber combat at that point.

[Ryo]

I'm not sure I understand I wasn't trying to say it was a matrix action, and even if it is not the control device matrix action that you would use to perform this doesn't require the action the device performs to be a matrix action. As far as swapping attributes can only be something you can perform on your action phase it could be argued that I am switching the attributes on my action phase, as well as it could be read that a deck can only have it's attributes switched on its owners action phase. Though I don't think that's what the intension of the wording was. In my opinion it was to prevent you from swapping your attributes as a free action in a later phase that you don't have an action on to give yourself better defenses in response to different effects. That is of course my interpretation and opinion others can play it as they wish.

As for sharing marks that is something we do in our game regardless of the rules I should have elaborated on what I meant by the wording "in our games." My main point was that the spider can turn unload your programs and swap your attributes through the command device action with one mark and a few free actions to harass you while the IC can perform more effective cyber combat at that point.

You can go ahead and put 'in our games' in front of that as well, because I can almost guarantee you that Control Device cannot be used to reconfigure an enemy's deck. Not only does that invalidate the Crash Program action, since your interpretation could disable a program as a free action, but it also invalidates Reboot Device, since you could just Control Device to turn their deck off.

Hell, if you want to go down that rabbit hole, you could Control Device to make them Dataspike themselves.

[Redwulfe]

I don't think it's a in my game thing. Though I can certainly see it not being allowed in other peoples games for the reasons you point out, but control device does cause the target device to perform an action. To command it to shut down the target device would need to perform the reboot action and that would at least require more marks and could not be done a s agree action, since control device requires you to spend the same action type as the action is on the device targeted.

I fully believe that control device and spoof command are very powerful matrix actions that should be looked at carefully as they can cause lots of havoc when used cleverly and I would fully accept if some said in my game decks are to sophisticated to have control device work on them.