From Clipper to Java - What it Means for Alamaze

[unclemike]

Yes, changing eliminated kingdoms and their pc's/artifacts are on my TODO list but I haven't had a chance yet to do so. I've been busy with my job so development for the game has been at a crawl though this past week, I've added minor improvements to the battle text that uses the official words, phrases, and sentence fragments for events. More is added every day. While digging thru the older program, I also uncovered several issues that the older system wasn't doing correctly which slowed us down until Cipher and I discussed/worked them out. So every day, progress is being made but much slower than before due to my real life schedule.

[HeadHoncho]

Thanks so much for everything you do, UM!

[Madmardigan]

Well done!!

One note:  The document attached says that eliminated kingdom PC's change to Human controlled.  Is this new?  I have found that eliminated PC's revert to Neutral and not Human control.

Yes, new.  I didn't want the PC's to go neutral as that makes it too easy for Usurp or Parlay but didn't want to keep the eliminated kingdom with a presence just to not have the PC's be neutral.  The Humans start in control of all cities, their people have been pushed out to other population centers and take the opportunity to seize control of a PC when a regime collapses.

This is sort of a middle ground between what we did with them going neutral for the past few weeks and keeping them under the eliminated kingdom's control as was done previously.

This is a good one.  Thanks RV

[Ry Vor]

Today Uncle Mike posted the last of the 2nd Cycle changes on the Uncle Mike's Corner thread.  All players should read that thread entire to understand how the game program is operating and again an appreciation for all that is involved, reflecting our pursuit of having the Alamaze program, and so Alamaze itself, as perfect as we can make it.  Keep in mind what you see posted on that thread is just about the changes made after 99% of the program was already in place in order to restore those few areas to what players expect the 2nd Cycle game to be.  Everything before that you have seen since we started generating the XML / web-based results.

Of the last batch posted today, the major changes are to Agent orders and to Unusual Encounters.  In summary, Agent missions now resolve as they did in the previous version (Clipper) which in general means you'll be seeing higher success rates in agent missions, and lower results of agents captured / killed.  This is in effect now.

So we believe all major areas are in accordance with what was expected behavior for veteran players, except for the deliberate changes like Sanctuary instead of encampment, but these are documented in The Commands.  The exception as of now is Unusual Encounter resolution.

An alert is in order for the Unusual Encounters.  As Mike explained, the changes to get the model according to the design will only be in effect for games created from today forward because the artifacts and encounters are set when games begin.  So this area is confusing because it has seen four different kinds of difficulty for patrols since the Resurgence in 2013.  The initial version in 2013 - early 2014 was far too easy to recover artifacts.  In what was supposed to be one of the more tense and anticipated results, in unusual sighting encounters, it was instead far too easy.  So sometime in 2014 in Clipper we made adjustments to make it a bit more difficult, but we weren't happy with the model itself, that could be improved quite a bit in all aspects - matching guardian strength to artifact quality, leader emergence, leader promotion, leader death related to the encounter itself rather than somewhat random, the kingdom effecting the value of the men (warriors) in the encounter as well as the leader changes, giving "the bigs" a reduced value reflecting their difficulty in fighting in very restricted terrain but now not a value of zero as they had before (or an alarmingly high value as they had even before that, way back when), and most important of all, how the encounter itself was resolved.

This last is the main part about what the alert is about.  Without going into the whole method, with games created from today forward, the resolution will provide such that if the patrol had 75% of the strength of the guardian, they will have a 75% of being successful.  I have posted about this elsewhere as well, but did not realize it was not in place for existing games.  For existing games though, a patrol must have a value higher than the guardian to succeed.  And unsuccessful encounters can have about a 4x occurrence of leader and wizard death than successful encounters.  For example, in a successful encounter of a certain type, a Marshal might have a 15% chance of dying, in an unsuccessful encounter, this might be a 60% chance of being killed.  Additionally, the guardian strength is usually higher in current games than will be the case in newly created games.  And there is a random value added or subtracted from both the patrol and guardian for games in play, whereas it will only be the guardians who vary in new games, reducing the variability and increasing predictability of the outcome.  Because of these factors, I feel we should post the range for guardian strength for ongoing games, again, also subject to a die roll modification up or down:

Free  (no guardian)

Easy (guardian 25 - 50)

Medium (guardian 50 - 75)

Hard  (guardian 75 - 100)

Extreme (guardian 100 - 150)

So the recommendation for now is to have a value of over 55 for an Easy (Fine in games created today forward) encounter to allow for some unfavorable random rolls, something over 80 for a medium encounter.

Gold awarded in successful encounters will also be higher, similar to higher-than what it was in Clipper whereas right now it is pretty low.  The Unusual Encounter Calculator Frost Lord is developing is applicable to games created today and forward, but use the rule of thumb above for existing games.