Wednesday, March 29, 2023

System Diagnostic

Please post your thoughts on the The Grid dynasty here

Comments

JonathanDark: he/him

29-03-2023 21:12:40 UTC

I know the dynasty was dull for a large portion of time. I’m curious why no one tried to either lower the costs of activating Disks or put in permanent Terminals or come up with some other way to activate Disks in order to make gameplay more interesting.

I’m asking because I assume that was part of the problem. There have been other dynasties that had a 48-hour cadence that weren’t as dull. As Misty said, it was the winning “power-crunch-derez-reappear” strategy that was the most optimal, but the Disks could have varied that strategy had they been a more attractive option somehow.

Lulu: she/her

29-03-2023 21:13:50 UTC

I was just fresh outta ideas, honestly.  Perhaps I was too inside the box because I was still playing the game while trying to change it.

Lulu: she/her

29-03-2023 21:15:27 UTC

I mean, the strategy was working so well, and nobody else seemed to had caught on…why not keep exploiting it?

Habanero:

29-03-2023 21:20:37 UTC

I pretty much stopped playing right around the time the infinite activations were patched, so I don’t have much to say about this one. I do really believe Computational Watches ought to have passed; the lack of ability to activate disks for free without a terminal made the game a bit of a bore.

Lulu: she/her

29-03-2023 21:21:31 UTC

I optimized the fun out of the game, didn’t I

SingularByte: he/him

29-03-2023 21:22:06 UTC

So, this dynasty definitely had a bit of a chaotic ending. One thing I did enjoy about it was how much looser the rules felt than the blizzard dynasty before it - where that one felt like the rules were rigid and unbreakable in most areas, this one had some nice flex to them. This was especially the case early on when at least 3 players went after the same infinite disk execution scam.

When it came to my central scam of classing empty cells as non-empty, I’d been aware of it since the time of that infinite executions trick, but it did feel so much harder to get use out of so it went unused for a while. It was only after there was discussion about a win condition that I came up with a chance to abuse it and I ended up building the whole proposal around it.

One thing I wasn’t too keen on was how slow the dynasty ended up being, which is probably my fault for proposing that stratums should take a whole week but it slowed even further when it got tied to batteries instead. Having very few chances to execute disks didn’t help either, since as powerful as they could be, even getting a disk to use could cost valuable resources unless you used terminals in one of the brief times they appeared.

JonathanDark: he/him

29-03-2023 21:26:10 UTC

It’s an interesting philosophical thought to be had: which do you want more, to have fun, or to win? They’re not necessarily mutually exclusive, but in the pursuit of winning, I suppose most people will naturally optimize for winning over fun, in some cases to the detriment of fun like this dynasty apparently.

JonathanDark: he/him

29-03-2023 21:27:37 UTC

Of course, winning itself can be fun, but it’s a fun that’s only achieved if you actually do win, so what if you don’t? Can you say that you had fun otherwise if the rest was a slog that you only suffered just to try to win?

jjm3x3: he/him

29-03-2023 21:51:31 UTC

I love reading all the comments here since this is my first time playing and I joined pretty late. Since I joined late I didn’t necessarily feel all the pain that it sounds like some of you did. But I would actually like to say while this may not have been the most fun dynasty it also didn’t seem like a totally awful time to join in. I was really into the theme which kept me thinking even outside of the game about how to play, win, and even make it more fun. So while it may not have ended up being the most fun dynasty I do think there was lots of potential. It does seem like lowering the cost of executing disks could have gone a long way in improving it.

Kevan: he/him

30-03-2023 09:34:49 UTC

I had to bail on this one for unrelated reasons. The efficient game rounds seemed like a success, though, to the point where I had to check with the Emperor that they weren’t accepting queued orders - the active players were just submitting them very quickly. For what it’s worth the turn structure was a mild lift from the Assassin Dynasty (which also took place on an 8x8 grid and nearly got amended to cyberpunk halfway through).

I was a bit turned off by the randomness of new Strata. I went from considering idling to actually doing so after I got walled in on Stratum 4 at G3, with lots of Batteries I would never reach. It sounds like Crunching probably resolved that later on, though.

I didn’t quite follow the endgame here. Did SingularByte magnanimously point out a flaw in their own scam after Misty posted a lot of upset “I hate scams, I hate this dynasty, these rules sucked” stuff on Discord for having their victory sniped? Or would that have come out anyway in SingularByte’s DoV?

Josh: Observer he/they

30-03-2023 09:45:48 UTC

Mm, good question Kevan. It feels a bit like no-one would have noticed the simultaneous actions scam if Singular hadn’t mentioned it.

SingularByte: he/him

30-03-2023 09:47:08 UTC

It was the former, yeah. Nobody had actually spotted that I’d performed that part of the scam, but given that JonathanDark had shot down a similar move a few turns back, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable staying completely silent about the matter.

At the time of revealing it, I still believed it to be legal, but barely.

lendunistus: he/him

30-03-2023 10:00:08 UTC

oh, jonathan, btw: what was with the grue getting stuck there

(I assume someone was sitting in a firewall and the grue got stuck trying to eat them, but I’d just like confirmation)

JonathanDark: he/him

30-03-2023 15:37:40 UTC

The Grue was in fact stuck bumping against the Firewall. This was fixed when a Proposal changed the rules for it so an alternate choice of direction could be made if the chosen direction would lead to a Firewall cell.

JonathanDark: he/him

30-03-2023 15:38:39 UTC

Amusingly, there were several close calls with the Grue where it simply swapped places with another Runner, like this:

Grue is in C5
Runner is in D5
Grue moves South to D5
Runner moves North to C5

This yo-yo effect happened several times.