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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2662 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 20, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I think simplicity in strategy games is vastly under rated. Game devs always want to add more, and gamers are always excited by being promised more. But in practice, even a very simple game like chess has enormous amounts of emergent complexity and new strategies being discovered. A well balanced game with straightforward but engaging skill tests is better than an unbalanced super complicated game. Because when something's complicated but unbalanced, you can often pick out one overpowered strategy that actually makes a game where you choose between dozens of options easier than one where you pick between 3 options.

Its interesting because we're entering a period where you can use a computer to determine with certainty the optimal moves in a given scenario. Stockfish does this for chess, but I'd wager that you could take any given computer game and machine learning could produce an engine which can beat 99% of human players at said game given the same input/output signals.

So if you want to give your players a crutch in game, just simplify the mechanics down to "let the computer suggest three mostly optimal moves, and let the player select from among them." Leave the actual mechanics of the game under the hood and invisible to the player, let the AI figure out how those mechanics play out, and then give the player the 'choice' that will actually move the state of play along.

In this scenario, the player who takes time to learn the mechanics and fiddle around under the hood and decides they will make decisions without the AI advisor is almost certainly at a disadvantage, there's no way they can discover a better move that the AI missed.

But is the player who is at least trying to develop mastery of the game having more fun?

MAYBE!

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