A couple of webapps to crush your Hero Academy enemies

It starts out like a bad joke. What do you get when you take four longtime friends and put one each in business school, law school, a math doctoral program, and Hogwarts for computer science?

Answer: Very intensely contentious debates about strategy, tactics and best practices in competitive environments of all imaginable varieties. When we’re not arguing about the best way to win a game or sell a product or defend the world from the doomsday flavor du jour, we’re creating analytic tools and finding new ways to prove ourselves right (…and each other wrong). They say the strongest steel is forged over fire, and that’s why we like working together. Our games of Risk get pretty stressful, but we think those sessions are compensated by the fruits of our collaborative efforts.

And that’s what gave rise to this Probability Calculator / Unit Tracker for Hero Academy. We recognize that a huge part of winning in Hero Academy is understanding the magnitude of the possible risks, and knowing everything that can be known about the game – from how likely it is that the opponent has a potion in his hand to where the most easily contested units lie on the map.Currently, the Probability Calculator / Unit Tracker provides an easy way to catalog the entirety of seen opponent’s cards and to assess the likelihood that a particularly ruinous ninja lurks, unseen, in your foe’s hand. The neatest feature of our calculator is that each possible permutation has a representative code that can be jotted down and then put back into the calculator to be updated when the opponent makes his next move.

The Damage Calculator is a pretty simple tool, but is useful for conceptualizing possible attacks and minimizes the necessity of trying each potential attack sequence by hand. For reference, “safely stomp” is a term of art we have developed to mean 1 AP used to stomp, and 1 AP used to move away. The Priestess damage debuff hasn’t been incorporated yet, but that’s also on our to do list.

The probability calculations have not yet been tweaked to include the effects of the opening hand, which guarantees at least three Heroes per player. This error is mostly negligible, and diminishes immediately after your opponent’s first turn. We are working to remedy this effect as soon as possible.

Moving forward, we intend to develop a few more tools that will help players assess their current positions and make informed decisions about future moves. Knowledge is power, and therein we believe lie stronger games. In the hopper for our immediate efforts is a parallel tool that will calculate the likelihood of drawing a desired card into the player’s own hand. We hope that you find these tools helpful in defeating your foes, and, more importantly, they give you another way to think about your games.

Just as we learn from each other, we recognize that we can learn from others. If you have any comments about our current contrivances, suggestions for future features, or questions about how anything works, please hit us up. We’ll read all comments here, but you can also email us, catch us on twitter, or leave word via our blog at blog.acg-solutions.com.