(OT) Do you prefer to know game formulas?

[deccan]

Suicide Junkie said:
Focus points...
So many ways for that to go wrong.

Sure, and it wouldn't be for a pure strategy game of course, rather more like a new kind of strategy + RPG hybrid, in which governors et al. have "personalities" which determine how they behave as so forth.

Bruce Geryk's essay Master of Orion 3 rebuttal really says what I think on the subject.

[boran_blok]

I think exact values and formulas should be a research item in itself. when people made handguns at first they knew they could kill people, when people make handguns now, they know the approximate speed at which the bullet leaves the gun, how much of an impact force it has, and how much it'll travel in distance.

Also the formulas are like the formulas of physics. hence I'd keep the formulas hidden until you have researched physics.

Offcourse in the game you could write them down once you had them researched and never need em again. you could prevent this by making a semirandom universial constant. say, gravity is 9.8 m/s² today on earth, and another game its 11,4 m/s² slight differences, which still make it realistic, but make your previously noted formulas off by quite a margein.

Would be great imho, would also make the theorethical sciences more than just tools to unlock the others.

Because the exact knowledge of the formulas gives you a more detailed view of the game and helps you to build better designs, i think it's something you should earn and spend resources on.

[Aiken]

I prefere to explore (myself, or along with community) a _good_ game for its underlying mechanism (like formulas, algorithms), rather than to read this kind of info from manual. It reminds research work and it has an indisputable virtue - pleasure of gaining new knowledge.
Of course if game is bad, I have no interest in such research.

[Fyron]

deccan said:

Sure, and it wouldn't be for a pure strategy game of course, rather more like a new kind of strategy + RPG hybrid, in which governors et al. have "personalities" which determine how they behave as so forth.

Bruce Geryk's essay Master of Orion 3 rebuttal really says what I think on the subject.

That is what MOO3 was supposed to be... 5X, with the 5th X being "experience." Of course, due to the usual corporate marketing snafus, the game concept was trashed to hell before it was ever released...