by NateStraight
As others have noted, your approach to the game of battening down all the hatches a priori to figure out what combos would give you the best odds of success and then seeing whether you can piece them together is negatively impacting your perception of the game, and the groupthink of having a whole set of gamers playing this way is leading to exactly the scenario you describe in which the random events will necessarily determine whose strategy was successful.I suspect that you would lose consistently (way more than randomness would allow) to a really good DL player who appreciated that the central goal of the game was to maintain tactical flexibility / maneuverability / leverage. The game is just way more tactical than your particular modelling approach can address. Forget the Poker / Roulette metaphor; your error has more to do with a Backgammon / Chess metaphor. The ideal strategy isn't the one that would certainly win if everything worked out exactly right, but the one that would win in the majority and probabilistically most frequent cases. The types of strategies you're talking about are the former.