Back when I played the game on a semi-regular basis (when I was 8-10 or something) I didn’t put much thought into my strat, but since spotting it again on games.com I’ve become curious how to use mathmatics to give myself the greatest possible edge in both attacking my opponent and possibly hiding my own ships?
Sorry if this has been asked before but I do not have search capabilities.
I always guess in a checkerboard pattern. There are no 1-square ships, so if you don’t have to check a given square if you’ve already checked on all four orthogonal sides of it.
Also, I suppose you wouldn’t want to put your ships right next to each other, since a hit on one could easily lead to a hit on another.
It’s probably more about human nature than math, though. For example, if you discovered that, statistically, most people start guessing near the center, you would avoid putting ships there. I wonder if anyone has collected such statistics.
We only ever played on the old non-electronic pegboard version. Somewhere along the way it would occur to everyone that, as long as you had plenty of pegs, you could easily cheat by recording your opponents guesses on the lower pegboard as well as your’s on the upper one. If you took a hit you just moved your ships around!
I feel so dirty…
First, come join the Straight Dope.
Second… what a fun question.
I don’t have any scientific evidence, except experience.
My first advice on hiding your ships is to not let them touch each other. That way your opponent won’t find a second ship by missing a ship ‘by one’. (For example after four hits in a row, you sink a sub, which only has three holes)
Regarding how to attack… I think most people use the ‘every other one’ method, or go in diagonals. Personally, I like to select my moves like moving a knight in chess.
To each their own.
An older battleship thread here.
I like to group all of my ships together except for the destroyer. That I will put away somewhere else on the board.
See, what happens is that your average player will get four hits and expect the battleship to be sunk. However, it’s really only one hit on each of the four ships, so they’re confused (although sometimes it really is the battleship, and then they go elsewhere for a while because only an idiot would group all of their ships together). While they’re figuring it out you’re canvassing the board.
At the end, once they figure it out, they have the whole rest of the board to search (or they haven’t figured out that your ships are all grouped together), looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack, while you have wisely sought out the spread of his fleet and can methodically pick them off one by one while he frantically guesses to no avail.
I’d say it works for me 4 out of 5 times. The game is as much psychological as mathematical, because in the absence of knowledge numbers can lie, and it can be to your advantage.
Oh, and one other thing. This strategy is really effective when you’re playing “real” Battleship, not the house-rules “shoot 'til you miss” game. With that one you get had very quickly if you stack them all in one group.
The best strategy is to stagger the shots two across, one down (or vice versa). So, if your first shot was A1, the second should be C2 or B3, and so forth. This will (eventually) peg every ship other than the destroyer (as they are all three sections long) and gives you an even chance of hitting the destroyer with 1/3 of the grid filled.
Racking ships together (like a battleship and a cruiser) is good for faking out an opponent who thinks he’s sunk a ship (if you are playing where you don’t have to call out a sinking) but can backfire if you put them all together in one lump.
I haven’t played Battleship in years, but I remember my grandfather talking about playing it over the radio while they were waiting for the Japanese to sink their ships for real during the Second Bit of Global Nastiness. Very bizarre.
Stranger
Place your ships as randomly as you can, but never adjacent to each other, and less frequently near the edge of the board. If you place them on the edge, and your opponent gets a hit, he only has to check three directions instead of four to find out which way the ship is pointed.
When guessing: diagonals are good. In the worst case scenario, you will have to guess in a checker board pattern to find the destroyer. In the best case scenario, you will quickly kill the destroyer and then you can guess in diagonals spaced 2-apart. At the beginning of the game, you don’t know whether you will be doing diagonals 1-apart or 2-apart, so you should do diagonals 5-apart, so that if you hit the destroyer, you can go directly to diagonals 2-apart without any wasted guesses. So something like this:
.1.,3,.1.,
,.1.,3,.1.
3,.1.,3,.1
,3,.1.,3,.
.,32.1.,3,
1.2.2.1.,3
.1.2.2.1.,
,.1.23,.1.
.,.1.,3,.1
,.,.1.,3,.
Guess all the 1’s first. Then guess 2’s in that pattern until you kill the destroyer. Thereafter, guess in the 3 pattern.
This isn’t perfect because it ignores the slim chances that you’ll get the sub and the cruiser quickly. If you are lucky enough to do that early in the game, you can start doing diagonals spaced 3-apart.
My older brother did exactly this with me once and I was so baffled that he wouldn’t declare a sunken ship I was convinced he was lying (I was all of maybe 9 or 10) and we practically came to blows!
Felt really stupid when I saw how he had arranged them (glad I wasn’t cheating that time… :D)