Find What Online Gaming Players Can Predict and What Stays Random

A quantity surveyor can tell you, within a few percent, how many bricks a two-storey extension will need. She cannot tell you whether it will rain on the day the roof comes off. That gap between what can be calculated and what simply happens is at the centre of every building programme, and learning to tell the two apart is one of the most useful skills in construction.

It is also one of the most useful skills in online games. City builders, colony simulators and survival games mix fixed rules with random events, and players spend a surprising amount of energy trying to predict things that cannot be predicted. Our cost consultant, who plays an online colony game with a regular group, used to see guildmates poring over number-forecast threads and prediction pages like ankertoto, convinced there was a pattern in events that were generated by pure chance. She started explaining to them how she separates the predictable from the random on real projects, and the conversation turned into this article.

Two Kinds of Uncertainty

Construction professionals talk about two broad kinds of uncertainty. The first comes from incomplete information: we do not yet know exactly what is behind that wall, but a survey would tell us. The second comes from genuine randomness: nobody can know whether next Tuesday will be dry, however much they study.

The first kind can be reduced by effort. Surveys, trial pits, samples and careful measurement turn unknowns into knowns. The second kind cannot be reduced at all. It can only be planned for, with contingencies, buffers and flexible sequencing.

Games have the same two layers. Some things look random but follow rules that can be learned, such as how a resource deposit regenerates or how traffic chooses its route. Others are generated by a random number system and are, for all practical purposes, impossible to forecast.

Sorting the Predictable From the Random

The pattern is clear. Things set by rules or physics can be calculated. Things set by chance can only be described as frequencies. A storm might hit roughly once every twenty in-game days, or rain might fall on roughly twelve days in a typical November, but neither number tells you about a specific day.

Why People See Patterns in Chance

Humans are pattern-finding animals. Give us a sequence of random outcomes and we will find a story in it. Three raids in a row on the eastern wall feel like a pattern, even if the game picks a direction at random each time. Two wet Mondays feel like a sign about the next one.

Our consultant's guildmates kept spreadsheets of disaster timings and were sure they had found a cycle. She asked them to log 200 events instead of 30. The supposed cycle vanished. The gaps between events were scattered in the way you would expect from a random process with a fixed average rate. Our piece on what procedural generation is in games explains how much of what players experience is generated on the fly, which is exactly why hunting for hidden schedules rarely pays off.

The Common Advice to Plan for the Worst Case

Cautious builders and cautious players are often told to plan for the worst case. It sounds responsible. In practice, planning for the absolute worst case on every variable produces programmes so long and budgets so large that nothing gets built.

Imagine a twelve-week extension where each of twelve stages has a worst-case delay of one week. Planning for all twelve delays at once gives a 24-week programme. But those delays rarely all happen together. A more realistic approach, used by most experienced planners, adds a shared buffer of perhaps two or three weeks, based on how often delays actually occur. The project gets a fair chance of finishing on time without assuming disaster at every step.

Players can do the same. Rather than walling every side of a colony to the maximum, a sensible player builds solid defences on the most exposed approaches, keeps a reserve of materials for repairs, and accepts that the occasional raid will do some damage. That reserve is the game's version of a construction contingency.

A Worked Example From a Real Programme

On a recent kitchen and rear extension, our consultant built the programme in three steps:

1. Fixed durations from data. Groundworks, brickwork, roofing and first fix were estimated from records of similar jobs. These totalled 13 weeks.
2. Known unknowns investigated. A trial pit before pricing showed clay soil, which meant deeper foundations. That added four days, but they were now known rather than a surprise.
3. Random risks buffered. Weather and supplier delays were covered by a shared buffer of 12 working days, sized from how often such delays had happened on past winter projects.

The job ran 8 days over the fixed estimate, comfortably inside the buffer. The investigation was what made that possible. Our article on why every building starts with the ground covers why spending money early on site investigation turns random-feeling risk into planned work.

What Players Can Usefully Predict

For online building game players, the lesson is to spend effort where it pays. Learn the fixed rules thoroughly: costs, build times, production chains, how traffic and workers move. These are fully predictable and reward study. Explore the map early to turn unknown terrain into known terrain. For genuine random events, track rough frequencies and keep reserves, but stop looking for a hidden timetable.

Our guide to tips for playing city management games leans heavily on this idea, encouraging players to master the systems they control and build resilience against the ones they do not.

Calm Planning Beats Clever Guessing

The guildmates eventually dropped their disaster spreadsheets. Their colonies became steadier, not because they predicted raids better, but because they stopped trying to and built sensible reserves instead. That is how good construction programmes work too. Calculate what can be calculated, investigate what can be investigated, and give honest room to what is left. It is less exciting than a secret forecast. It is also the approach that actually gets buildings finished.