Comment by alexpotato
2 days ago
This 100% has the "vibe" of the original game but should include that if you sail "into the wind" it slows you down.
Also, I've been trying to make a remix of SMP but with a princess theme for my daughters. Been experimenting with making other games to practice building out game mechanics and stumbled into making a game where you manage a Soviet Tractor Factory [0].
I'm interested to see if developing parts of Game A lead to Game B which in turn lead you back to interesting ideas for Game A (or maybe better Game C).
Is it even possible to win the game? I've played it 100 million times in a monte carlo simulation and even applied two heuristics to hit a winning strategy: 1. heavily over- or under-weighted choosing tractor production when paid tasks are available; 2. when a paid task was available in the previous round but not chosen, the weight for this round is reduced
The best result I've gotten is 998 tractors after round 120.
> Is it even possible to win the game?
Realized after I posted that it's probably really hard to actually win.
> I've played it 100 million times in a monte carlo simulation and even applied two heuristics to hit a winning strategy:
This is the MOST HackerNews comment ever (in the good sense) and it makes me immensely happy that this is the kind of feedback I received.
Btw, going to post a new version with some tweaks to the ruble payout etc.
> Is it even possible to win the game?
If it's a faithful simulator of soviet economy, then you should not be able to win :)
I was tweaking the game and realized that the win conditions are really hard if not impossible.
I did seriously consider if that is really the best example of the Soviet economy ;-)
Maybe the only way to win is to cheat.
So, I love this little game. I've been wanting to remake Scorched Earth for years, just for fun.
Decided to experiment with this repo today, adding multi player, islands that can sink the ships (that the ships cant shoot through), and a few other things to the game. Anyone who wants to join, ill be in here in a multi player room that supports up to 10 people at a time: https://ndroo.github.io/pirates/?join=BP4Q
I also added controls for mobile users, because that was the first issue I ran into. Probably buggy, maybe not secure...but i had some fun with a friend a few moments ago and it wasn't awful.
Thanks for sharing this OP!
If people have feedback on the game, would love to hear it on the below link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48503530
That link doesn't work, so I'll respond here: My impression is that my ship always has a better turn rate than the other ship, so if I ever manage to get into the enemy ship's e.g. 4'oclock position, I can keep turning towards it, it will (slowly) turn towards me while consistently shooting behind me, and I can consistently hit it.
I don’t see a way to succeed at this game. The issue is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to meet the first 5 year plan and it’s all downhill from there.
But this really points to a deeper problem: in a game like this you have to pick one of two philosophies. Either the idea is to find the one algorithm that makes it work because the game is doing the same thing every time, or the game has an RNG that makes some games winnable and some not. The in between path is difficult to balance. You could for example dynamically adjust the difficulty such that if the player gets hit with a bad string of choices generated by the RNG then the difficulty is temporarily dialed down and when the player is having good luck the difficulty is raised. But I think for this kind of turn based idle game it is more about discovering the player algorithm that works and I see no algorithm that could work here.
I do however absolutely love the vibe of the game. I think with a little more attention it could be absolutely amazing.
> I don’t see a way to succeed at this game. The issue is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to meet the first 5 year plan and it’s all downhill from there.
Yeah, some other folks have pointed this out so need to tweak the win conditions/balances.
> But this really points to a deeper problem: in a game like this you have to pick one of two philosophies.
You really hit the nail right on the head here. I haven't built many games before but this has taught me that it's really a rock/paper/scissor balance that is tough to get right.
> I do however absolutely love the vibe of the game. I think with a little more attention it could be absolutely amazing.
THANK YOU! I was totally going for a Soviet vibe and glad people like that part.
Well, have you dogfooded it and how many times?
I have hundreds of turns on it now, at least.
Getting the feedback in the other comments has taught me that some more dogfooding would have been rewarding.
Thanks for the suggestions.