Andromeda's Conquest MP game
I didn't read any BASIC until after Dayyalu reported the crash, and then only to try to figure out what went wrong.
Porkbelly's clarification on combat rules changes a lot, though. I was under the impression that damage distribution was random.
Yeah, I only looked at the code after the crash. Unfortunately, there's no easy fix with a game in-situ to increase an array size. I thought about hacking together a quick instruction to merge two fleets but I'm reluctant to break into an ongoing game. it looks like we're already getting back on track.
Not sure why the developer didn't just set it to a safe value. The theoretical limit is 36 so a big scrap with multiple fleets from multiple players will lead to another crash. Or maybe he just expected players to join most fleets on arrival.
I also took a look at the damage point calculation, which looks as follows:
IF WarValue < = 1 THEN RETURN
Damage = INT ( RND (1) * (WarValue / 2)) + 1
[note that INT always rounds down, the random number falls BETWEEN the extremes 0 and n]
Calculating in my head (and my math could be off) this means.
1 x Rama (WarValue 1) == no damage [the first line stops you]
2 x Rama (WarValue 2) = (0 < 1) + 1 == always 1 [0 < 1, rounded down will always be 0]
3 x Rama == (0 < 1.5) +1 == 67% chance of 1, 33% chance of 2
4 x Rama == (0 < 2) +1 == 50% chance of 1, 50% chance of 2
5 x Rama or 1 x Nova (0 < 2.5) +1 === 40% chance of 1, 40% chance of 2, 20% chance of 3
6 x Rama (0 < 3) +1 == 33% chance of 1, 33% chance of 2, 33% chance of 3
So, 6 Rama seems way better than 1 Nova at the same price. Better hitting, much better defensible.
But only the Nova can bust planets and it gets destroyed last like in Ender's Game.
But see how 2 fleets of 2 Rama, is better than 1 fleet of 4 Rama... so I think DO consider your stacking.
This is extremely enlightening, at last I understand how the interaction work.
So, can I ask how's possible that a fleet of mine (12 ships in 6 stacks of 2) gets halved by a fleet of 6 ships?
Fleets can't attack-move as far as I can see. Six Ramas in fleets of two should cause three losses, not six. Can I ask what exactly are the mechanics behind that? Do attacks "run through" the stacks even if it goes beyond all my personal experience and testing?
EDIT 2: Goddammit, I forgot that fleets that don't move can attack twice!
EDIT: Also, no crashes! Turn is playable.
Porbelly and Ahab : Read the BASIC code before launching the game - leading
Dayyalu and Scribe : "Meh, I ll learn playing" - not leading.
Imagine playing a PBEM and not thinking that your opponents will abuse each and every mechanic to get a win
You never played Dominions, I'm right
Quote from Dayyalu on 3 March 2022, 19h32Imagine playing a PBEM and not thinking that your opponents will abuse each and every mechanic to get a win
You never played Dominions, I'm right
Between spending 1 000 hours to play one wargame or 10 hours on 100 wargames, I made my choice.
Quote from The Wargaming Scribe on 4 March 2022, 13h23
Between spending 1 000 hours to play one wargame or 10 hours on 100 wargames, I made my choice.
And it's an excellent one! But I also kinda walked into this expecting a more relaxed approach. Then I remembered that the friendly and fun games I had in Dominions are less than the fingers in one of my hands. PBEMs are murderous.
Chin up, my fish-fingered friend! Help is on the way.
- Using intelligence captured from the enemy on optimal fleet composition and why it is 2 Ramas except if you already have 9 fleets, the Ants have pushed back the proteines (except those brought to the storage rooms). They also look at envy at the Scallops and the Anteater : with these, the colony will have the energy for many winters !
The Great and Wise Council of Fishies has approved The Greatest of Defensive Plans, and vast amounts of resources have been spent in planetary defenses against the Robotic Foe.
One of their aggressor fleets has suffered significant casualties in Our Most Just and Glorious Peacekeeping, however many more skulk around.
(Holy fuck, I expect half of my fleet to disappear every turn. How the hell no one attacked me and I had to dump my ENTIRE production in Defenses!?!?! Call it wasted production MASTERFUL DEFENSIVE PLANNING! I'd like to see someone trying to get my Capitol now tho)
Report to the Colony : The pheromone track from planet #26 to planet #32 ends suddenly where planet #32 should have been. Planet #32 seems to have been mislocated. Please look for planet #32.
(ooc) Actually : How are planet anniliation calculated ? Do defense do anything, or are they only useful against colonisation ? (/ooc)
NOVA directive listing queried:
IF TARGET(DEFENSES) > 0 THEN RETURN
IF NOVAS <= 0 THEN RETURN
PRINT : PRINT "DESTROY?": INPUT KEYPRESS: IF KEYPRESS < > "Y" THEN RETURN
BOOM
Quote from Dayyalu on 6 March 2022, 11h17The Great and Wise Council of Fishies has approved The Greatest of Defensive Plans, and vast amounts of resources have been spent in planetary defenses against the Robotic Foe.
One of their aggressor fleets has suffered significant casualties in Our Most Just and Glorious Peacekeeping, however many more skulk around.
This shall forever after be remembered as "The Great Fish and Chips War."
Damnit. That was a good pun.
I guess the southward molluscan resettlement campaign will be called The Snail Trail.
Quote from Porkbelly on 12 March 2022, 13h52
This shall forever after be remembered as "The Great Fish and Chips War."
That was a good pun indeed.
Shoal Commander, why are you replying in person to the thread instead of directing the Defense of our Homeworld against the clearly crazed Robotic foe?
Because we were created as tokens for banter and the game appears to be already over before there's a good use for us. Pity! Our player should have memeposted more.
Shoal Commander! Shoal Commander! The biggest battlefleet we've ever seen has just jumped on Tolusefulu Laau's orbit and are bombarding the planetary defenses!
Are they engaging the Orbital Defense Fleet?
No, they're trying to clear the way for a Nova-Class planet killing weapon. By the Earth Quaker, they.... they can't destroy the defenses fast enough before they get blasted into pieces...
Have you doubted for a moment the wisdom of the High Council in building massive planetary defenses on our Homeland? The wisdom of the Gods themselves.
Also, Commander, we lost the game. Apparently while we were engaged in Bot cleansing the Molluscs, friendly as they may be, conquered the known galaxy and have declared themselves "winners". We are countering this in the Intergalactic Court of Law but the perspectiv...
WHAT
That said, closing thoughts.
I had fun. I went in without knowing how playing the game and having no idea about damage or expansion patterns, and I merely improvised and made enormous mistakes repeatedly. Being thrown into a war for survival from turn 2 didn't help.
From the gameplay perspective, AC is incredibly simple. Its simplicity works fine as a light PBEM game, with the caveat that the RNG decides if you live or die: I got a resources 9 colonization cost 3 planet early with my emergency secondary Echo fleet and that pretty much let me say in the game and keep pumping ships to oppose the robotic foe. I played some insanely risky gambits near the endgame - I stopped colonizing "safe" planets in my rear areas and threw my Echo near the front, and was punished for that- but the Hail Mary attempt to send a lone Nova against the new Bot expansion planet worked fine, destroying a 15 colony cost planet the turn after the Bots lost a colony ship to get it. There's strategic depth in the simplicity of the ruleset, and the interface works fine despite some quirks - production wasted if you have 9 fleets, impossible to know the situation before production, stacking weirdness and bugs. The most important thing is that I had fun, and it was a great dive into archeological multiplayer gaming. I'd be up for more oldass rulesets from this first experience.
I finished with 5 planets, 26 res and roughly 30 Ramas and Novas. Did I get second or third place?
Cool! Cthulhu wins!
In hindsight, I'm only victorious because I had a perfect cluster of planets around me, and only barely within Rama distance of the bot and ant colonies. I sent out scouts in the first turn and found 3 planets nearby with resource > 8. With scouts leading the way, my two Echo just headed out into safe areas picked up one planet after the next.
The Ants did scare me a bit at first, but it quickly became clear that I had the builds to turn that around. A combined effort could have set me back, but with the Fish & Chips war going strong it was really only the Ants I needed to worry about. I managed to blow up one of their colonies and their homeworld in the last two turns.
Colonized an NPC ant colony (they resisted), and some Amphibians (they didn't) , but most of the planets were empty.
Ended with 10 planets, 72 resources, about 75 Rama, 1 Nova, 3 Echos.
I'm also up to play more games like this... very cool to see what can be done in 10 kilobytes and 250 lines of code.
Question, for those who have peeked into the code... how exactly does the RNG for combat works? I have an ongoing test game and the combat results are peculiar - the order of attacks gives different end results. It's a pseudo-random numer table or something like that?
It's the stock AppleSoft RNG. I don't know how it works in detail, but the BASIC code probably seeds it at the start of the game with entropy bits, and after that, there is a fixed but infinite sequence of return values. A crude method of implementing this would be to calculate an irrational number to X decimal places (where X is the seed), and then every RNG call hereafter would calculate the next digit.
So for instance, let's say the next two return values are going to be 0.95 and 0.41, and you have a Nova and three Ramas. If the Nova attacks first, it will do INT ( 0.95* (5/ 2)) + 1 = 3 damage, and the Rama triplets will do INT ( 0.41 * (3/ 2)) + 1 = 1 damage. But if the Ramas attack first, they will do INT ( 0.95* (3/ 2)) + 1 = 2 damage, and the Nova will do INT ( 0.41 * (5/ 2)) + 1 = 2 damage.
I had a pretty good starting position, near a cluster of good planets and more good ones to my south, far away from any threats, and was able to capitalize on the fish's mistake on turn 2 by taking out the Echo parked in my space. But then I failed to realize that if I'm close enough to intercept their colony ships, then they are close enough to intercept mine, and made the exact same mistake, with the exact same results. And then I wasted a few turns trying to colonize a defended nearby planet worth 7 RP when there was a completely uninhabited 9-RP one just two turns to the south. The early expansion game is critical, and my errors meant I wasn't going to outpace the snails' rapid expansion, who I could watch expanding to the northwest and eventually west.
Ultimately I never made contact with the ants, and though I could watch the snails expand to the west and south and get a gauge for how much time was left in the game, they were inconsequential to my play. Except for the time they shielded a fish Nova.
I ended with 3 planets, 24 RPs, and 29 Ramas and 1 Nova minus any Dayyalu blew up. Though I dare say that had the robots been allowed to complete Turn 13, the fish would have been reduced to under that.
Quote from DDG Ahab on 13 March 2022, 17h57the fish would have been reduced to under that.
I doubt that: I could leisurely pump defense and ships right on my world and you lacked the means to outproduce and out-attack me. Your fleet was reduced to roughly 10 Ramas and one nova, even dumping all your production you could simply not compete. You had one chance with the stack and the Nova, but the 25 defense mistake I did saved my ass.
Ignoring the Molluscs rampaging through your undefended worlds, of course.
Thanks for the RNG explanation, I'm too tech illiterate to check for myself, sadly.
Quote from Dayyalu on 13 March 2022, 18h31Your fleet was reduced to roughly 10 Ramas and one nova
That alone is enough for 12-16 damage to your homeworld, and 12 more Ramas would do another 6. So this hypothetical comes down to how much you put into defense on your last turn.
Quote from Dayyalu on 13 March 2022, 18h31Ignoring the Molluscs rampaging through your undefended worlds, of course.
I mean, I did.
Too much to break through in a single round. A defender has immense advantage, particularly if like me you're in position 1. You need to steadily feed ships to maintain the attacking fleet while the defender can spam directly on the top of you, reinforce leisurely AND double attack on spawn.
A "blockade" mechanic should have been implemented, I guess. But again, 1982!