jack

Stellaris - lessons on economy and geopolitics

2018-06-18T14:56:00Z

So, stellaris is clearly not an accurate model of reality, but it can still generate interesting observations.

Balancing the economy is a pain. You need energy and minerals to build anything else. But the more buildings you have, the more energy they use, the more population you have, the more food and consumer goods (made of minerals) you need. And you need to build surface mines/power plants or mining stations to get *more* energy and minerals, but they themselves cost minerals to build and energy upkeep. I think I am actually generating a surplus which is going on technological improvement and so on, but it's also possible I've just expanded a bit much and am only treading water, despite originally having a reasonable energy and mineral surplus.

And you need a military at least defensively, but that also sucks up a lot of upkeep. It is sadly easy to resent everything that costs...

I'm not sure what the right balance was, between researching technology first before expanding much (often recommended online), just sitting in place accumulating a surplus of energy and minerals whenever you run short, vs ploughing everything you can into expansion and hoping for the best.

I guess if I actually sprawl out into all the currently unclaimed systems around, I would outrace the other empires in size. But that would mean, I'd need to spend everything on expansion first, fall behind in tech, and maybe be easy pickings militarily. Ideally I'd establish some bulwarks to block off future territory. But how many bulwarks can I afford, would I be able to hold them?

Geopolitics

The relations with other empires are very abstract, an opinion (and a few related metrics) measuring how they react to you. A positive opinion means they're more willing to agree things, including things that improve opinion over time.

But if there's a really valuable choke point or something... I feel the urge to claim it for myself to just be on the safe side. Or to grab the uninhabited systems between me and Furry Napoleon, even if it temporarily increases tensions. After all, if I have a superior strategic position, I can be nice, but if they do, I don't *know* they'll be nice.

If we had a high trust already maybe we could play nice together. Especially for things like choke points if we trust each other to keep the borders open. I can trust their high opinion is not going to suddenly vanish, just like a trust actual people in the real world if they show themselves trustworthy. But there's no easy way of enforcing "this is my space even if I haven't built anything here" and the ethical thing of letting them have some and trusting them to be future allies not enemies is scary when you have no way of enforcing that.

Multiculturalism

What I *can* do is seek reciprocal free-movement-of-people with other friendly empires, giving me more varied population, and hopefully fewer xenophobes. I'm excited to see who turns up! And my empire is set to accept refugees -- I'm not sure when that happens, but I'm welcoming ready. More population is usually good.

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Freeways (cpatain games)

2017-09-24T08:47:26Z

https://captaingames.itch.io/freeways

Yesterday andrew ducker's links got me addicted to this little game. Each level is a screen with some roads coming in and some going out, and you need to join them up so the traffic can flow freely. Some connections need high traffic and need direct connections. Sometimes there's small or medium levels of traffic but lots of connections.

It's really cute how the separate screens join together to make a city with coast and mountains and houses and industrial areas. When you do all the levels in the initial 3x3 grid it expands to 5x5, then 7x7. And maybe further, I don't know.

I don't really understand the score, it clearly correlates with how good the network is, but I don't know exactly what contributes to it.

It makes some real-world motorway engineering make more sense. There's lots of situations where roundabouts work really well. Sometimes there's a couple of really busy routes which need direct connections, but then everything else just needs to be connected *at all* so you can use normal cross-roads with no flyovers at all.

Some things are bizarre. Who designed this city so SOME roads drive on the left and some on the right?

A few of the screens have a menu item to open an aerial picture of a real-world junction with similar connections and see if you came to the same sort of solution. One was a diamond interchange, with a moderate traffic road crossing a high traffic road. Another was two low-traffic roads crossing, in the middle of some fields somewhere.

There doesn't seem to be an "undo" button, am I missing something? That's realistic for working with concrete, but with the interface so clunky it would be really nice.

Edit: Also, there's a directory called save but I can't find any option to save which disinclines me to play again. Anyone know where it's hidden?

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Pokemon Go vs Ingress

2016-08-24T11:02:13Z

What I like about Ingress

You can make plans and follow them. You can say, "I have ten minutes, let me see if I can grab keys for these four many portals" or "Can I fill this hole in fielding". In pokemon, you can't really set out to *do* something most of the time.

There's a big incentive to visit different and out-of-the-way portals which is really interesting. Getting keys for them, or linking to them, mean the portals are *different*, not just "go to whichever ones are closest".

You can look up where's an interesting place to go to.

What I like about Pokemon Go

Filling the pokedex and collecting high-level pokemon gives you a form of progress which you can always increase. In Ingress, the only form of permanent progress was levelling-up, which was fun at low levels, but it was about conquering territory which was always transitory.

There's three teams, not two. I don't know why, but that seems to make it a lot more fun, both in how gyms change hands, and in meeting people.

The flavour is really nice, I love seeing different pokemon.

When you get to higher levels, there's not quite such a cliff of "now it's too hard to level up, and there's nothing else to do, there's no point".

Problems I'm starting to have with Pokemon

I've had a *lot* of fun with it. But I am starting to find some problems.

The new scanner sort-of works. It at least tells you what's within 200m. But it seems like that's not *totally* reliable. And it doesn't seem to tell you pokemon in order. But that means, I never have the satisfaction of tracking a pokemon methodically. It's either "walk along the river" or "rush backwards to establish the edge of the circle, then dash in one direction, and either frantically search around 200m from the first point, or reach another edge and triangulate". It's not a *fun* process, it's aggravating.

You don't play only at pokestops.

I mean, it's realistic that you don't get good intermediate indications of progress, you just have to try your best and then wait for success. But getting positive feedback is one of the things that makes games fun!

Now I have most of the pokemon which often spawn nearby, there's a lot less point going for a little walk and capturing some. I used to take a little wander, catch a few, come home. Now it's "go and see if there's a rare one, there isn't". Or, waste a bunch of pokeballs catching pidgeys I don't really need.

And it's hard to *work towards* filling my pokedex. ETA: Either someone tells you where a rare pokemon spawns, or you just wander around and hope. Either way, you get a random success for no reason, followed by a long period of failure.

So I may stop. But I wish it would become possible to start over, while being able to switch back to my original account occasionally. Like, in Ingress, having multiple accounts even if it took time to switch was a big advantage, because you could put multiple high-level resonators on a portal. But in pokemon, it seems like it wouldn't make that much difference. I'm sure I *can* start another account, but it would be nice if it was officially supported, "yes, that's what you're supposed to do, we won't ban you". Maybe with a built-in delay for switching or something.

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Where's My Water

2013-06-01T21:38:12Z

Also: The character of swampy is really cute. He doesn't really do much other than have a shower, but he's very expressive.

Also: It's really really good to see modern games hitting a common denominator higher than farmville but lower than AAA FPS games. There's good and bad about games having a $0.65 price point (you need lots of development values to reach a wide audience, as well as to reach an obsessed one), but in general it's nice to see something that can be enjoyed by so many people it's basically free, which gaming previously seemed to have given up on.

Although: I'm always scared by "buy this upgrade, buy that upgrade". I'm happy to buy several chunks when I can see what they are, but I'm extremely nervous of falling into the clutches of someone like zynga, and getting fleeced with "oh, just pay this then you can play the game as intended, no wait, ok, just pay THIS, ok, well, pay that a few more times..."

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Where's my water

2013-06-01T17:36:38Z

Yay, Where's My Water is great.

You start with a network of walls, dirt, water and pipes, and have to wipe away the dirt so the water ends up in the washtub, but it rings really true.

Simulated water physics has come a long way since I last played a physics puzzle game. It's maybe not quite realistic, but it works, it finds its lowest level, it squirts through narrow cracks, it spreads out on flat surfaces, and forms little drops, but doesn't get hung up on implausible bits of scenery.

And the puzzles are quite puzzly. They're not as hard as some puzzles, but they do the right thing in "here's a set of water, ice, steam, lasers, dirt, etc., here's the winning condition, can you put them together". There's normally one right solution, but it's not blatantly enforced like too many games, it arises from the components.

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Resonance

2012-09-04T13:10:26Z

I finished Resonance.

The plot is very interesting. I somewhat apologise for my previous review: what I said was probably still right, but it was somewhat unfair on the game, because the later plot is really interesting, but I happened to be annoyed by the bit in the demo because it was similar to too many other games and I'd got bored of it.

It avoids several cliches I feared were coming and does quite interesting things instead. It develops the relationships between the characters very well, with a number of scary developments that work surprisingly well. In a mostly-linear game where you play all the characters it's hard for the characters to have any meaningful developments other than "we work together", but it does it very well. I felt it could have taken it further, but honestly, it did a good job where basically no other games do anything at all, so it wins there :)

Several of the puzzles are pretty good, including comparatively free-form puzzles where you have to do things like "type in a PIN" or "choose a door to kick down" and the interface supports doing any one, but you have to work out for yourself what the correct one is.

I also like the way they handle dangerous situations. Most of the time, you just automatically don't walk of cliffs, etc, but if you're somewhere you might plausibly get killed or otherwise lose, if you get it wrong, the game rewinds to the beginning of the scene. I've seen this occasionally, but I like it a lot (it's like a restricted version of my "undo" adventure game) because it doesn't keep breaking immersion to make you reload from save every time you make a mistake, but nor does it break the suspense by making the dangerous thing infinitely postponed.

Several puzzles throughout the game did annoy me someone for being too "interfacey". After the first few scenes, I got the hang of the style so I didn't have any problems figuring out what to do, but I was still sometimes annoyed by knowing what to do, but not being sure how to communicate it, or having an interface element thrust on me for doing something I hadn't yet realised I might want to do. (I suspect some of the gratuitous dialog boxes were forced on the developer by the engine.)

But on balance, I enjoyed it.

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Solium Infernum

2010-12-18T13:59:16Z

Game three

I choose a fiend with very high deceit. This allows him to subsist to a large extent on stealing resources from the other players without them knowing who did it. In exchange all my legions have a low movement rate. But about half way through I buy one of the really expensive legions which (a) has flying 3 so movement rate doesn't matter and (b) is a beast. And manufacture some vendettas, use deceit to stop other legions from moving either, and capture most of the places of power by flying the beast about.

Eventually it gets loose and runs amok (due to an event someone else drew -- fortuitously for them), but by then I have an almost unstoppable lead. I can't quite manufacture a blood feud against any other players to defeat them directly, but the game ends and I'm ahead on prestige.

Game four

I follow the somewhat-degenerate resource strategy. This involves taking several disadvantages, but bumping up the resource gathering as much as possible, and then spending most of the game doing nothing but gathering resources and raising stats.

I start off in a little cul-de-sac, and am SO passive I get walled up into two hexes, which is a mistake because I can't buy any more legions as I don't have anywhere to put them until I raise my deceit all the way to level six and institute some back-room dealing to manipulate of the neighbouring hexes to my side without starting a vendetta.

But at that point I have maxed out all of my stats, have six orders a turn rather than two, and own a startling array of artefacts. I use rituals to prevent any of the AIs from acting, use a ritual attacking the parliament framing my neighbour so he is excommunicated but I am not, roll over his stronghold, buff my expensive giant legion, and roll right over parliament as well. The AI is locked down and doesn't do anything. I win.

I think I need to play against some actual humans :)

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Solium Infernum: Games 2 & 3

2010-12-17T01:00:20Z

Game 2

I try making a fiend centred around strong wrath attributes, meaning able to use rituals to destroy opposing legions directly without using a legion, and vendetta-focussed (able to declare blood feud with fewer vendettas), and a long game length. The AI is more aggressive than last time, but still not competitive enough.

I get a comparatively strong starting legion and buy some enhancements and slowly upgrade my resource-gathering stat. And carefully start only one war at once (this method is highly recommended). I manage to destroy my most annoying neighbour, despite him using some deceit rituals to steal stuff straight out of my vault and event cards to randomly destroy my only other legion. And then am closing in on my second neighbour while he desperately concedes to demands to avoid vendettas when the game ends.

But none of the AI players ever really compete, and I've conquered enough places of power and thrown enough insults at them that I'm at about 300 prestige to their 50, and if the game went on any longer I'd be able to roll my super-legion over them and destroy them all one-by-one.

Game 3

I test a starting build that dumps infernal rank and resource gathering and everything else in favour of the strongest possible martial rank, martial perks, and starting legion and attempt to blitzkreig in the first couple of turns of the game. I have no hope of catching up after that as my low infernal rank means I can demand very little of other players whilst they can insult me almost with impunity and my very very low resource gathering means it will be about 50 turns before I have better legions than I do now.

My starting legion is stronger than just about everything else on the map. If the AI had been properly scared and tried to capture my strong-hold it would probably have succeeded in taking me out in one shot, but it still scrambles after places of power.

I get lucky and capture a "+1 action per turn" place of power next to my stronghold, which is about the most insane advantage in the game. There's another "+1 action per turn" and some of the other strongest items in the bazaar, but I can't afford to bid on anything.

I excommunicated myself by playing a weak infernal ritual against the capital city. If I'd marched my legion over all to capture all the other players strongholds I probably would have won as soon as I did it, but I stick with my original plan and try to capture pandemonium and control the central parliament. But my starting legion, even buffed with the maximum one-off combat advantages my insane martial skill and anaemic resources can manage, is not quite strong enough to take the uber-strong building and my legion is destroyed.

(At this point I just quit, as I can't buy any more legions, don't get any events, get very very few resources, and can be attacked with impunity. I might be able to recover if the AI ignores me, but that would never work in a competitive game.)

I wonder how the "turn 2 attack" would work against human players?

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