Tobold's Blog

Sunday, June 19, 2022

Saltmarsh - Session 2

While preparing session 3 for later today I noticed that I completely forgot to blog the events of session 2. In session 1 the group was introduced as junior pirates, who fled the pirate realm Hold of the Sea Princes after finding out that the other pirates wanted to sacrifice them to a Krakolich to appease him. The group arrived at the small fishing town of Saltmarsh, and from there went to explore a "haunted house".

Session 2 starts back in Saltmarsh, where the group has spent the night at The Wicker Goat (La chèvre d'osier) inn, after returning from a first expedition into the haunted house. At breakfast they are visited by a delegation from the town council, led by a young man, Counsellor Anders Solmor, followed by his butler Skerrin Wavechaser and captain of the guard Eliander Fireborn. An Insight check reveals that Anders is clearly the one leading this delegation, with Eliander visibly much more reluctant to trust the group.

Anders tells the group that he is aware that they are adventurers who have been to the haunted house and came back wounded. He wants the group to go back in the name of the town council (and specifically himself), and clear the house of any ghosts or other menaces scaring the citizens of Saltmarsh. He can provide the group with an old building plan of the "Alchemist's House", suggesting that there are three floors of identical size: Upper floor, ground floor, and cellar. As previous visits by the town guard have found only a small cellar, he is willing to lend the group a Wand of Secrets, and promises them that wand and 100 gold pieces as reward for clearing out the house including all of the cellar. As part of the deal, on their presumably successful return, the group should also publicly praise Anders for the initiative to clear the haunted house (not mentioning that they went there on their own the first time). Realizing that this is quite a good deal, the group agrees.

The second trip to the haunted house is concentrated on the cellar. At first the dangers there seem mostly fake: Spells producing scary sounds and frightening people entering the cellar, a "death knight" built out of pots and pans (which turns out to be some sort of primitive alarm system). But some secret doors later the group has identified and beaten the real dangers: A group of smugglers using the caves under the house as a smuggling base, and, independently from that, a skeletal alchemist with some skeleton minions. Besides some treasure the group also finds the lantern which the smugglers use to signal their ship that the coast is clear. They could make use of that in the next session ...

Labels: Dungeons & Dragons

- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link (0) comments

Saturday, June 18, 2022

PrUn Alternative Start - Changing your mind

I am running a second account in Prosperous Universe, with permission from the devs, which I regularly restart and try out different starting packages to write about on this blog. Prosperous Universe has a generous restart mechanic with the COLIQ command, which allows you to completely start over from scratch. The only limitation is that after every restart the delay before you can restart again goes up. But you can do the first restart directly, and the second restart 3 days later, so hopefully by the third time you figured out what you want to do and how to do it. This enables you to make choices you aren't sure of on your first start, and wipe the slate clean if those choices didn't work out. A lot of players COLIQ'd at least once. But there might be scenarios in which that isn't your best option when you change your mind.

So as an example, I am taking my current setup on that blog account. I started out as a Metallurgist with an extractor and a smelter, and expanded that into making prefabs. And then I tried out something completely different and started making fuels in a refinery. So what if I now decide that I really like making fuels, and find the whole extracting, smelting, and making prefabs business boring? I could COLIQ, but a complete reset would also wipe out any profits I made up to now; the big advantage of a COLIQ is the ability to change planet, but there aren't really any great fuel planets in the Moria space.

Thus, I am now running an experiment: I demolished my extractors, smelters, and prefab plants. On demolishing a building, you get some of the building materials back. If that building is only a few weeks old, you get most, but not all materials back. In this case I had enough materials to build a third refinery immediately. And then I still have a lot of excess prefabs, just that the mix is wrong and I will have to sell some of one type and buy of another to build a fourth refinery.

I did, of course, have some losses from demolishing my existing buildings. And I now have to do some inventory management, sell the stuff I needed for the old buildings, and buy more materials for the refineries instead. But in a few days I will have a fully operational base with 4 refineries, which is a lot faster than what I could have achieved if I had done a COLIQ and restarted as fuel engineer.

The main limitations to the demolishing method is that you can't change planet that way. If I had wanted to switch to, let's say, Victualler, the planet I am on, Montem, is rather unsuitable, and a COLIQ would have been the better option. But a lot of careers in Prosperous Universe are about transforming materials, not extracting them, and thus are somewhat independent of the planet you are doing them on. COLIQ is certainly the better option if you messed up your first attempt and didn't make much money, but if you did make good profit and just changed your mind, the demolish method sure is a viable alternative in some cases.

Labels: PrUn

- posted by Tobold @ 7:29 AM Permanent Link (0) comments

Friday, June 17, 2022

How responsible are children?

I am a centrist. As this post of mine is based on common sense, it will most likely trigger both left wing and right wing cultural warriors. You have been warned!

The Federal Uniform Drinking Age Act of 1984 sets the age at which you can buy or publicly consume alcohol in the USA to 21 years. This is based on a broader legal principle, which is that children are less responsible than adults, and thus a) should not be allowed to do certain things and b) are punished less harshly if they do something wrong. Now every single legislation pertaining to age is somewhat arbitrary. The drinking age in the USA changed over the course of history. It is different in other countries. The minimum age of the US president is 35, which seems like a completely random number. But while any individual number could be endlessly discussed, most people do agree that some sort of age restriction makes sense; both for the protection of children themselves, and for the protection of others from irresponsible acts by children.

Now if you were to design a legal system from scratch, how would you design age restrictions? Probably you would list everything you wanted an age restriction on, and then sort them by relative impact or risk level. For example the minimum age to drive an electric scooter is lower than the minimum age to drive a car, because the average outcome of a scooter accident is less harmful than the average outcome of a car accident.

Unfortunately, not every legislation is based on common sense. The culture wars resulted in each side pushing their agenda to a point where they reject any restrictions on whatever they define as "freedom", even age restrictions. Thus the story of the Uvalde shooter, who went out on his 18th birthday to legally buy some automatic rifles. Or the discussions on lowering age limits for sex change medications and procedures, including "puberty blockers", which due to the low age at which puberty begins always target young children below the minimum age of consent.

I am taking no stance here on the availability of guns or sex change procedures to responsible adults, that is a different discussion. But what we are saying here is that somebody who can't be trusted with a bottle of beer is responsible enough to handle weapons designed for mass killings or to make irreversible life-changing medical decisions. Both sides are sacrificing their children on the altar of culture wars, with a huge potential for self-harm and harm to others. Shouldn't there be a more consistent system of how much responsibility a child can have?

- posted by Tobold @ 11:46 AM Permanent Link (21) comments

Tuesday, June 14, 2022

PrUn Log - Stardate 2022-06-14

At a rapid pace I am approaching the point in time where my first base on Verdant uses up all of the 500 area I have. I already use 434 of that area, and with the 21k of net profit I make per day, I can fill up the rest rather quickly. Now in theory I have the choice between spending a base permit to add another 250 area on Verdant, or spending a base permit to add a second base with 500 area. Now if you remember my last post, I was talking about the incredible growth rate of my economy, 26 million % annualized. This growth rate takes a hit whenever I arrive at a cap that prevents me from further expanding my bases. At some point I will need to acquire more base permits, and that requires upgrading my HQ, which is basically a money sink. Expanding my base by 250 is the "quick fix", but I will more quickly hit the area cap again, and then base permits are the ultimate obstacle to further growth. So, building a new base is probably the better option. I will just need to decide where and what.

When I first looked at the profitability of my Verdant base with all 500 area used, I thought I would end up with a base that made over 30k net profit per day. Today that looks a bit too optimistic, 25k is more like it. The main reason for this is that my main product is drinking water, and the price of drinking water dropped from over 80 NCC to under 60 NCC. Thus the interest of making a range of products instead of concentrating on just one. Besides drinking water I am selling basic rations, carbon, oxygen, raw water, and occasionally prefabs, when I don't need them for my own buildings.

That brings me to my side project, the second account on which I am testing different starting packages and options in which way to grow a base. That second base on Montem is currently my test case for a base that is producing in different production lines that don't have synergy. I have 2 extractors, 1 smelter (need another one), 2 refineries, and 2 prefab plants. The extractors, smelter, and prefab plant are in one part of the tech tree of the game, while the refinery is in a completely different part of that tech tree. And the refinery needs settlers, which need different consumables. The result is that on my Verdant base I only need 5 goods which I import regularly; on the Montem base I need to import 16 different goods regularly. That is interesting, but it turns out that it isn't actually more profitable, and the logistics are a lot more complicated. For a beginner, a start that concentrates on just one part of the economy, and is partially self-sufficient (like my Victualler start on Verdant) is a lot easier.

Labels: PrUn

- posted by Tobold @ 10:58 AM Permanent Link (2) comments

Monday, June 13, 2022

Play2Win

This post has it's origin in thoughts I had on video games (Roguebook, Diablo Immortal) and on a board game (Return to Dark Tower), so it touches different aspects and genres of gaming. It started with me watching a video from the BoardGameGeek channel, their GameNight series, in which usually 4 players play through a recent board game, explain the rules, and give their thoughts after playing it at the end. This video was about Return to Dark Tower. The game really appealed to me, and I ended up ordering it. But the game session had a somewhat unsatisfying end, because after doing well for the whole game, the players lost at the end in a very unsatisfying manner: They had summoned the final boss, but that boss spawned rather far away from them, and did something at the end of each turn that resulted in the players losing before even getting to him.

Return to Dark Tower is a game with some random elements, controlled by an app and an electro-mechanical device, the Dark Tower. It is not a very difficult game in the sense that the rules aren't overly difficult to understand and turns aren't overly difficult to execute. But the "difficulty" in terms of whether you win or lose at the end seems to be all over the place, with some games being easy pushover wins, and some games being losses you can't do much about. I had a similar experience when I was playing the game I reviewed in my last post, Roguebook, where the randomness of the cards also made me win some games and lose some games, with the outcome not being strictly determined by skill.

The big question is: Does that matter? Do I play to win? Or do I play because I enjoy the time playing that leads up to the final result, win or loss? For me, it is mostly the latter. That is why I ordered Return to Dark Tower, because it looked really fun to play, even if you'd suffer the occasional weak ending. And especially for a board game that I would like to play on my own board game night with friends, it is important that the game is fun during play. That is why we are currently still playing Clank! Legacy, which is fun during playing, and it is not so important who wins at the end.

Regarding Diablo Immortal, after having looked into some more detailed reviews from different sides of the love it - hate it divide, it looks as if it is a game that is very good fun to play until about level 30. Somewhere in the mid-30s it becomes less fun because of grind, with the promise of you spending money making it less grindy. But if you play to win in the PvP part, your success will be much influenced by how much you have spent compared to how much your opponent did spend. Thus the people calculating that it takes between $40k and $100k (often just cited as "$100k") to get a maximum equipped character. For somebody who plays to win, that number is relevant. For somebody who plays to have a fun experience, that number is not relevant.

In other words, in the discussion that has been ongoing over years about Pay2Win games, we have talked too much about the problems of "Pay", when probably the main problem is the "2Win" part. Whether you Pay2Win or Play2Win, if your enjoyment comes solely from the final moment of the game, it will make the process of getting there less pleasant. Which is why people usually have less problems with a Pay2Play model, even if like me they spent hundreds on a World of Warcraft subscription running for years. I don't even regret the thousands I spent in the decade or so that I played Magic the Gathering, because I didn't spend them to win, I spent them to play with all those cards.

The game industry appears currently to be focused very much on the people who want to win, because these people tend to be extremely passionate, and you can manipulate that passion into making them spend far more than the $60 of a pay-to-own game. However, that passion also easily generates a lot of hate, so that Diablo Immortal is currently both one of the most financially successful and one of the most hated games around. In the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, there are charm spells that persuade somebody to do what they want, but after the spell wears off, that person realizes he has been manipulated and is more likely to react negatively towards you. Many current games work exactly like that: People spend a bundle of money on them, regret that later, and will be wary before touching the next game from that company. It used to be that a game being announced by Blizzard would automatically be looked forward to positively. But now Blizzard announced Overwatch 2, and some people already complain about it.

It seems to me that the previous model, where a company like Blizzard simply made a game that was enjoyable to play, and built up goodwill over many years with the player base, is the more sustainable one. Concentrating on making the players happy that enjoy playing seems to result in better games, and better long-term profitability for the game company.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:53 AM Permanent Link (9) comments

Saturday, June 11, 2022

Roguebook short review

I have been playing Roguebook for about 15 hours recently. Roguebook is a "deckbuilding roguelite" game, comparable to Slay the Spire. But it adds an interesting twist to the genre by having you explore the pages of a book using inks and brushes. Basically you play through three hex maps, but you need to "paint in" most of the map using ink/brush rewards you get from battles. Both the exploration part and the combat part are good fun.

What I like less in this game, and that is true for the whole genre, not just Roguebook, is the "rogue" part of the game loop. If you would draw a curve of your power over time, you get a sort of a sawtooth curve: Your power goes up during a run, until you either fail or complete the run, and then your power drops to only slightly above where you started the game at. You are expected to fail your first X runs, until the small permanent power boost you earn for each run is enough to make you succeed. Even worse, once you succeed, you can only play by adding additional challenges to the game, making it less likely you succeed again next time. On top of all that, there is much randomness in every aspect of the game, and the best strategy doesn't help when you need defensive cards but just happened to draw only a hand of offensive ones.

As a deckbuilder, Roguebook is on the easy side of the scale. It isn't terribly clever, and doesn't have any deck-thinning mechanics. You basically just collect cards, mostly drafting one of 3 possible random cards, and add them to your deck until it is terribly bloated. The more you explore the map, the bigger your deck becomes. Some cards get bonuses based on the size of your deck, and that can become pretty unbalanced. It is very hard to go for some sort of concise strategy in deckbuilding.

As an experience of discovery, Roguebook is pretty fun for the first ten or so hours. There are 4 different characters (5 with DLC), and you will bring 2 of them on each run, which makes for some interesting combinations. Each characters has a lot of cards to discover over time, and there are also gems to boost cards with and treasures to give other sorts of bonuses to your hero or the whole party. However, there are only the same 3 maps to go through, even if each time the things to find on each map are distributed randomly that gets old pretty fast.

What pushed the game beyond 10 hours for me was discovering that the save game file is in .json format, or human readable text. Which means you can open it with a simple text editor and change your save game. Frustrated by your heroes having too little health? Add some more! You can modify any one of the currencies (gold, brushes), and even modify the cards and treasures you have to whatever you want. Playing the game in this alternate easily modded way added another 5 hours of fun for me. But in the end I don't really like the "run after run" overall structure, and will uninstall the game now.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:10 AM Permanent Link (4) comments

Friday, June 10, 2022

PrUn Log - Stardate 2022-06-10

A base in Prosperous Universe uses some goods every day, some as consumables for the workforce, some as materials of input for the production buildings. If any of these materials aren’t available, production stops, or at least slows down. Thus a large part of the game consists of shipping your products to market, selling them, buying the goods that your base needs, and shipping those back to your base,

I currently have over two weeks worth of input materials on my base on Verdant. Since I also increased storage space, I could easily not log on for a week or more, and my base would keep on running. Great, isn’t it? Well, maybe not. After looking at it closer, this amount of inventory might actually be already too much.

The “problem” is the incredible growth rate of the economy. My Verdant base has a payback period of under 20 days, which is to say that the value of my base doubles every 20 days, or 18 times in a year, to 2^18 times or 26,214,400%. 26 million percent annual growth is incredibly fast, and not comparable to anything in real world economics. As a consequence, any capital held in inventory is basically dead capital that isn’t growing. I would be considerably better off if I had a much smaller inventory, and used the money on constructing more production buildings instead. Note that this growth rate is just my current rate, annualized. Exponential growth like that isn’t sustainable over long periods, and growth will slow down when I hit certain limits, like number of base permits and area per base.

Now if I ever ran out of anything, it would take at least 3 days to make the trip from Verdant to Moria and back to restock. Running on less than 3 days of inventory is dangerous, and with some safety margin a week’s worth of inventory is probably a good compromise, but not more. So the plan for the coming weeks is to draw down my inventory and work on a slimmer “just-in-time” model for faster growth.

Having said that, this is just a game, and while growth is certainly a good goal for the first months of playing, it isn’t everything. Different players spend different amounts of time in the game, and a somewhat more relaxed and slower pace of growth can be fun too. Especially if a player wants to spend less time optimizing, and to log on only once every one or two days. During my 3 weeks of summer holiday for example, I will not have access to a PC, and the PrUn user interface on a tablet is limited; so I might want to stock up on materials for that.

Labels: PrUn

- posted by Tobold @ 3:56 PM Permanent Link (2) comments

Wednesday, June 08, 2022

Thank you for the protection

People have the strange habit to complain about too much regulation when it prevents them from doing something, and then complain about not enough regulation when they get taken advantage of. So I would like to thank the government of Belgium for protecting me against Diablo Immortal. For all that I can see, this is a shitty game with exploitative monetization. People calculated that to max out your character you either need to grind for 10 years (play time, not calendar time) or pay $110,000 or a mix thereof. So it is probably for the best that, living in Belgium, I don't have access to this game.

Activision Blizzard apparently tried to disguise their lootboxes as something else. You don't pay for a box of loot, you pay for access to a dungeon that drops that loot. It is to the credit of officials in Belgium and the Netherlands that they weren't fooled by that. You still have to pay to get random loot in this system, which these countries rightfully consider as a form of gambling.

Now Diablo Immortal, iOS version on Metacritic, has a 7.5 out of 10 critics score, and 0.5 out of 10 user score. So some people in countries in which Diablo Immortal isn't banned have at least been warned by the community. But not everybody looks up user scores, and sadly the "professional" game critics give any piece of garbage from a large company a way too high score. Too bad the movement for "ethics in game journalism" aka Gamergate was too busy fighting for the alt right in a culture war and ended up discrediting the idea. Makes it very hard to ask for honest reviews these days. I have a faint suspicion that the journalists playing Diablo Immortal are not playing the free version, but get "press accounts" with generous amounts of virtual currency to make the game look better to them.

So some people probably got misled by the marketing, the reviews, and the brand name "Diablo" and will regret having spent too much time and/or money on this later. So living in Belgium isn't that bad, as at least it forces you to recognize that there is a potential exploitative monetization issue. I could still work around it with a VPN if I absolutely wanted to. But it speaks volumes that you can't even get a version without lootboxes here, and how Blizzard Activision PR spins some tale that "this is related to the current operating environment for games in those countries", instead of even admitting which rule their game ran afoul of.

The gaming industry would be a lot better if there was more regulation against exploitative monetization in bigger markets than Belgium and the Netherlands. At least an European Union rule to this effect would be great. Right now it is still far too easy for game companies to get away with all sorts of manipulative shit.

- posted by Tobold @ 2:03 PM Permanent Link (24) comments

Tuesday, June 07, 2022

Mortum: Medieval Detective

My wife and me like to play cooperative board games with a detective theme, so Mortum: Medieval Detective is one of the games I picked up at last year's Spiel in Essen. The selling point of this game is that there is no rulebook, there are only decks of cards. You go through a deck of cards, which does both explain the rules to you and play the game. That works okay, as the rules aren't overly complex, but it makes it hard to re-read a rule again later. It also makes this better played as a solo game, as with multiple players there is a lot of reading aloud involved.

Over the course of one deck/case, you will discover a map with several locations. The map evolves, as cards can get added or flipped over. You can visit each location and get information, and sometimes "choose your own adventure" style decisions to make. But your 3 characters (always 3, regardless of player count) also have certain action tokens to perform a raid, a search, or a surveillance. A regular location visit will usually advance the time, while to do a special action you put a marker on the time track for 3 hours later, and then get the result of that special action when the timer gets there. You will need a combination of regular visits and special actions to solve the case. At some point the time you get for the adventure runs out, and you will be presented with a list of whodunnit questions. You write down your answers, then get to check how right or wrong those answers were, which gives you a score.

On the positive side, Mortum: Medieval Detective is a relatively fast-flowing experience that is easy to start and play through. You get to do usual detective game stuff: Searching locations, questioning witnessess, plus the less usual violent "raid" option. While doing this, you puzzle together the overall story, which is fun. The system with the cards and tokens is clever enough, and different to other detective games.

On the negative side, Mortum: Medieval Detective doesn't give you enough time to do everything. In one location the most information would be acquired by searching it, in another location surveillance would be the best option, while other locations might require a raid, or just give you information with a regular visit. But it is nearly impossible to guess with the information that you are given which would be the best special action for each location. So the game ends up feeling a bit random, with the result of your detective work depending more on which action you did at what location rather than any clever deducting on your part.

Another negative point is that Mortum: Medieval Detective is relatively short, with not much replayability. There are only 3 cases in the box, and the first one is a shorter, kind of tutorial case. The scoring table at the end of each case spoils much of what you haven't found out yourself, so you probably won't play them twice.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 7:48 AM Permanent Link (0) comments

Monday, June 06, 2022

PrUn Log - Stardate 2022-06-06

In the previous entry of my Prosperous Universe adventures we finished with the open question on whether to build a hydroponic farm to grow coffee beans, which can then be transformed into "caffeinated infusion" aka coffee in a food processor. Lately coffee has been expensive and in short supply, and because this is one of the first luxury consumables many people use to make their pioneers more efficient, that might be both a good source of income and another step towards self-sufficiency.

After running the numbers through a spreadsheet, it appears that the profitable step in that operation is to make the coffee from the coffee beans. Growing the coffee beans, which needs settlers, and thus special habitation and consumables, is both rather more complex and much less profitable. The better solution would be buying the coffee beans, but they aren't always available, and prices are all over the place. Then, just as I had cashed in from a shipload full of the produced goods over the last days, I say a nice stack of coffee beans on the commodity exchange for a reasonable price. I went a bit overboard and bought 50 coffee beans, enough to make 150 coffee, while the daily consumption of my pioneers is 3.

On the plus side, I now have coffee for 50 days (or a bit less if I further grow my pioneer population). But what I realized maybe too late is that this purchase ties up a lot of my capital for a rather long time. And as coffee prices are already going down again, that was probably not such a good idea. If I had put the money into more production buildings instead, it would have been more profitable. Well, I'll slowly brew all that coffee, and then see where the coffee prices went. If they go up again, I can still make a nice profit selling that excess coffee. On the other hand, coffee is a *luxury* consumable, which means it increases efficiency, but isn't absolutely necessary to get pioneers working, so above a certain price people simply stop buying it.

As I mentioned in my series on starting packages of Prosperous Universe, I have permission to run a second account for blogging purposes. The idea is generally to frequently liquidate the company of that second account and try a different starting package. My latest restart was to make a metallurgist base on Montem, but I quickly realized that there isn't much money in just smelting iron, and Montem, in spite of being recommended, isn't actually all that great for the iron part. However, Montem does have limestone, and the combination of limestone and iron is great for making prefabs. So my "metallurgist" base pretty much immediately turned into a "metallurgist / constructor" base.

What I wanted to do was run that base as a regular player would for a couple of weeks, and see how good that starting package turns out to me. And then my plans got perturbated by strange events. You see, I did take a supporter package with 1 month of subscription for the second account; both as thanks to the devs for allowing me to run this for the blog, and to try out the "basic" license that you get after your "Pro" subscription runs out. As such I can take on shipping contracts, which I do, because that would be a typical secondary income of a new player. I am using the FIO Shipment Finder website to find profitable shipment contracts. And there I saw something unusual: Another player offering a whopping 110,000 AIC for a shipment in the Antares sector. Now Antares is pretty far from the Moria sector where the rest of my operation is. But the highest amount I ever got for shipping was 20k, so 110k is hard to resist. So I planned it properly (you need to take some extra FTL fuel for such long trips), accepted the shipping contract and set off. There was an obvious risk that this was some sort of error or hoax, so I admit it helped that I was on that secondary blog account.

In the end I did the shipment, and it did turn out to be an error on the part of the player who had posted it; he had simply added one zero too much at the end. But as he was very nice, and actually able to pay that much money, he paid me anyway. Which opened up a whole lot of opportunities for that account to try out some more things for the blog. First of all being what you do with a large pile of cash in a foreign currency with your ship far from home. Now there is a currency exchange market, but it is somewhat cumbersome, and you need a PRO license to access it. The easier solution is to buy goods in the foreign market with the foreign currency and ship those home. This also opens up possibilities for arbitrage, with for example aluminum being cheaper in the Antares sector than in Moria. However, I obviously wanted to spend most of my foreign cash without buying more goods than my single ship could transport. So in the end I took a mix of 100 aluminum and 4000 fuel, which is now on the long way back home. Well, at least I won't run out of fuel on the way back.

So the next good question is what one would do if one gets a large cash injection into a starter base operation. The safe and boring option would have been to just multiply the operation I already have, but that wouldn't have been of any interest for the blog. So instead I thought it would be good to answer a question I had heard on a recent Twitch stream: If you choose a certain starting package, in how far does that determine your future options to grow your base? Are you stuck with the "career" you chose at the start? The answer is no, you can build production buildings of different careers on your starting base, although for some careers you are limited by the natural resources you can extract on that planet. Montem has little water and fertility, starting a farming operation there wouldn't make much sense.

So my plan now is to build up my base on Montem into a completely different direction, fuel production. That has absolutely nothing to do with what I already have on the planet. And because a refinery needs settlers, I will need settler habitations and consumables. It will be the most complex business venture I tried, and the idea is to use the blog account to show whether extreme diversification is a viable business strategy in Prosperous Universe, or whether the logistics are too much to handle. It is the polar opposite of the business strategy on my main account, which is very much vertically integrated and leaning towards self-sufficiency.

Labels: PrUn

- posted by Tobold @ 9:41 AM Permanent Link (2) comments

Sunday, June 05, 2022

Pay a subscription to avoid monetization?

While looking for something to watch on Netflix I noticed that Netflix now is offering games. Well, kind of. You can't just click on the game in your Netflix app and start playing, and many devices like smart TVs that can stream Netflix won't be able to play the games. But you can go to your Google Play or Apple Store and download one of apparently currently 23 games, and use your Netflix credentials to play it.

I saw only 2 games that had an obvious relation to Netflix, 2 different "Stranger Things" games. I saw at least one game, Moonlighter, which was available on mobile devices before, got removed from the stores, only to now reappear as "Netflix Moonlighter". In the case of Exploding Kittens they didn't even bother removing the original from the store, so you can now either buy the original for $1.99 or play the Netflix version for free. And then there are a bunch of other, rather generic games, for example Townsmen (a generic village builder) or Dungeon Dwarves (a generic idle game).

None of the games I saw or tested stand out. So why should anybody play them? Well, if you get another generic village building game or generic idle game from Google Play or the Apple Store, it is probably going to be "free", and will have relentless monetization constantly shoved into your face. By paying a subscription to Netflix, you can avoid the monetization of the games that don't need a subscription to play. Doesn't sound like much of an argument to me. Nor does it sound like a business venture likely to get Netflix out of the hole they are currently in. Well, you know what they say: If you are in a hole, you should stop using idle dwarves to continue digging!

- posted by Tobold @ 10:46 AM Permanent Link (2) comments

Saturday, June 04, 2022

Balance is cheating

So I was playing around with different map types in Old World, and tried the "Disjunction" map script. It produces a map with equally sized continents, one continent per player, and is balanced for multi-player games. Only I was playing it single-player against AI opponents, and ended up completely crushing them in a "double victory", victory by having twice as many points as the best AI opponent. It turns out that "balance" in these 4X games is equivalent to cheating, because the AI isn't good enough to achieve anything without an unbalanced advantage.

Digging a bit deeper with game starts and console commands to reveal the map, it turns out that the AI starts with two or sometimes even three cities already in place, compared to your one settler that still has to found a city. From that the AI can grow quicker, so by the time you meet the other nations, it is usual that they have a lot more cities than you do. The Disjunction map limited that ability to expand rapidly, and we all ended up with a "balanced" number of cities. At which point the AI had already lost, not being able to use cities as well as a player.

Note that this isn't a criticism of Old World. The AI in Civilization cheats just as much. And I don't know if they fixed it by now, but in Humankind there was a funny exploit where you could automate your scouts early on, and they would use the same algorithm as the AI scouts, but those were cheating like hell and always beelined to the next invisible point of interest.

So while cheating AI in single-player strategy games is totally industry standard, it is nevertheless a bit disappointing. One does get the impression that if you could see what development money was spent on, most of it goes into graphics, and very little of it into AI and gameplay improvements in general. There is a huge graphical difference between Civ 1 and Civ 6, but nearly no improvement in AI. These games are "balanced" by the AI cheating and having unfair advantages.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:43 AM Permanent Link (3) comments

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