From: curt@oasys.dt.navy.mil (Curt Welch)
Newsgroups: rec.games.pbm
Subject: Re: Galaxy Results Format
Date: 23 Dec 92 22:13:10 GMT
Reply-To: curt@oasys.dt.navy.mil (Curt Welch)
Organization: Carderock Division, NSWC, Bethesda, MD

cinnibar@netcom.com (Jeff Wood) writes:
>Oh, to those with flames, I have no objection to parsers and such to
>break down
>the output to something you like better, I myself have one for hypercard to
>produce star maps.  It's when you start designing AI's that you're losing the
>spirit of the game.

In rec.games.pbm, hankins@cs.swarthmore.edu (Luke Hankins) writes:
>        Hum.. IMHO, things like this aren't AI in any sense of the word.
>The programmer is simply taking all the boring, repetitous algorithms in his
>head and putting them in code.  Try attacking this person and see how long
>they last if they leave things to their scripts.  Automation is fine in
>peacetime, but war still needs a human.

This discussion hits on somthing I don't like about Galaxy.  I've
suggested to some people (I don't think I posted this idea before - but
I might have) that the game would be better if the concept of
population was removed from the game.  I think building industry is
fine, but having to grow population just makes the game more tedious
and time consuming.  The tedium of planning the logistics of the
transportation of colonist and capitol are exactly the type of thing
that you could automate. The route feature of Galaxy is already a first
step in the direction of "o automatic on".

I think if the game has aspects that can be easilly automated like this,
then that just points out a weekness in the basic design of the game.  What
makes any game interesting is the part that doesn't become obvious after
a few games.

Galaxy is an interesting game because most of it is non-obvious.  It's not
obvious how much time should be spent building ships vs building industry.
And it's not obvious what type of fleet to build, and where to put them.
Most of this is non-obvious because the correct answer depends on guessing
what your opponets will do - or are doing.

But once you decide which planets to develop, and how many turns you
are going to spend building industry, then the rest - i.e.  making sure
you have your transports in the right place and making sure you have
more colonist than industry, and making sure you have all the correct
routes set up, and generating all the B,L,S, and R commands is booring
and time consuming.  I find I can usually make the initial decisions
in about 5 minutes, then I quite often spend another 60 minutes checking
and double checking all the logistics issues.   And even after all
that, I still make mistakes and end up with a group of transports sitting
on the wrong planet because I turned a route off and forgot to add a
send command to move them.

Eliminating the concept of colonist (basically just assume all planets
are fully populated at the beginning of the game and stay that way)
would greatly reduce the complexity and logistic problems of building
industry.

For that matter, I think the concept of building and transporting material
is also un-needed.  But unlike colonist, it doesn't really get in your
way having it there.  It's only needed for that occasional low resource
large size planet that you feel you must develop and use.

Curt