Discussion about Heroes I.

A little about how the Heroes of Might and Magic I's pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) differs from an "ideal uniform" one (answering one of the questions from VDV_forever)

We will consider the base damage of a single dragon, base_dmg(Dragon) = 1. As you know, 25 <= base_dmg(Dragon) <= 50. We can assume that all damage values in the range [25..50] are equally likely, and the probability of any damage value from this range is 1/(50 - 25 + 1) = 0.03846 (3.85%). But the game's PRNG is not ideal. The actual figures are shown in the picture (do not confuse this with the probabilities of damage occurring when there is more than one creature in the squad).

Due to the imperfection of the PRNG, the dragon is slightly skewed towards the lower half of the damage range (25-37): 50.2442% :). But in terms of the spread of damage probabilities, monsters with damage 1-2, 2-3, or 2-5 are ideal. Their damage is truly equally likely!

As the number of creatures in the squad increases, damage values from the center of the range become more likely, and those close to the boundaries become less likely. Try, for example, to get a base damage of 20 * 50 = 1000 with 20 dragons. I'm sure you're unlikely to succeed. You can read more about calculating the probability of a specific damage value occurring when the squad consists of more than one monster in the handbook, in the "Calculating Damage Dealt in Battle" section.