As far as I can tell +/- 50% for numbers 4 or lower, doesn't act as advertised.

I've been experimenting with asteroids, tweaking what they break into and such.
I'm not quite sure how Nova rounds these numbers, but something is strange.

For values 3 and lower, it seem to be that number or lower, never higher.

+/- 50% for a value of 3 should produce a range of 1.5 - 4.5
Now I'm not sure how Nova handles fractions, but some possibilities are:
If Nova rounds the result, it would be 2 - 5
If Nova truncates the result, it would be 1 - 4
If Nova rounds the variation, it would be 1 - 5
If Nova truncates the variation, it would be 2 - 4

No matter what the method, I should always see results within 1 - 4.
This is not the case, however.

What happens is I get a range of 0 - 3
I have never seen 4

Similarly, for the value of 2, I never see a result of 3, and this doesn't deal with fractions.

For values of 4, so far I get a range of 1 - 5, where the expected is 2 - 6, but haven't worked with this number much.

Could it be that the actual formula is:
(truncate the result) - 1 ?

What version of Nova have you got? I remeber Nova used to have problems with how it handled the ą50% thing, but I'm pretty sure that's been fixed by now.

1.0.10

Nova basically always truncates its fractions.

Ok, but simply truncating gives a different result.

@desprez, on Mar 26 2008, 02:48 AM, said in +/- 50% for low numbers:

Ok, but simply truncating gives a different result.

Oh, I'm not suggesting that's what's causing it; I'm just stating that for the record.