As part of the Catan Universe team, I do feel it is my duty to answer the here posted hypothesis despite the fact that we already answered a lot to the mentioned topics above.
Of course, most of the feasible RNG solutions for games are pseudo RNGs. We used to describe it as such in many many many posts in the past and tried to explain how they work and that it is perfectly normal to use such a pseudo RNG.
Well… that always backfired! Because our users thought that this was the smoking gun! That pseudo RNGs aren´t real RNGs and therefore the RNG is flawed.
Also please keep in mind not every user does have either programming experience nor a deeper understanding of statistics. By describing the inner works with more common terms we do have a bigger chance of more Catanians understanding what is going on.
There is a lot of unpack here but I´ll give it a try.
In your hypothesis you are trying to prove, you should be able to find one major flaw. If one player wins up to 3 players are losing and having a bad time. If there was such a thing as an advantaged player, 3 players would just have a bad time and they would be much more likely just to delete the game.
But without speculations, here is what we do:
The board:
The setup of the map is the so-called spiral method you´ll also find in the physical board game as well. Catan Universe had a more random approach in the past but Catanians asked for the spiral method because it produces more similar but more balanced board overall. So we implemented that.
Please look up the board game rules here: https://www.catan.com/service/game-rules. You´ll be able to find the random map method and you´ll be able to find that every base game board will be according to those setups. Please note: The ore for Wool scenario is excluded in this case because due to the “special task” a certain setup is needed.
The 7 /dice in general:
We just recently added a new feature to the game. It´s the “live dice statistics”. Now every player can track every player dice throws throughout the game. Why did we do that? Because Catanians wanted to know who rolled what. Is there any value in knowing that your opponent already rolled the 8 three times. Absolutely not ^^ But player wanted it and we gave it to them. If there was anything fishy with the RNG, why would we lay this info open like that?
Catan Universe doesn´t give any player an advantage when rolling the dice. The pseudo RNG isn´t influenced by anything happening on the board. It is a thing on its own. It works independently from any influence. The only thing that influences the pseudo RNG is the so-called seed. The seed is pre-determined before the game even starts. It’s a combination of different hard values we are in control off and that can´t be changed by any player for example server time and date. But the seed doesn’t involve any value connected to any Catanians profile.
Dev Cards:
The dev card stack is shuffled one time while the game gets initialized. It only includes a certain amount of cards. You can read up on the dev cards here as well: https://www.catan.com/service/game-rules.
After the first shuffle, the stack just sits there. There is no line of code in Catan Universe reorganizing the stack based on any event in the game.
AI:
The AI isn’t perfect but it doesn’t care about any Catanians overall stats nor does it have any “knowledge” about it. The AI that comes in after one player drops, isn´t the smartest one we offer in Catan Universe. So it will make mistakes by design. Those “mistakes” are solely based on not being super aggressive towards players in general and being more inclined to trade. If we had put in the strongest AI as a substitute, it might give players a challenge that is too big to overcome.
General statement:
Catan is a luck-based game where the portion of luck you need to win can be reduced by understanding how the game works … your skill. But skill alone won´t shield you from having bad luck from time to time.
But we can see that over the last years the same top players not only do well in international championships but also do well in-game events here in Catan Universe.
Our goal was to create a platform where you can play the game as true as possible to the board game. CATAN is such a great game, we do not need dirty tricks to get people hooked. We do not need voodoo magic to let people have a great time. The design of the board game is what makes this game special
