(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...

[Timstone]

SJ said:

The question of Why would make a huge difference:
Consider if you had personally ordered a training facility built in a chokepoint system to help boost the troops as they arrived.

"Governor Joe wants permission to scrap your training facility at Algaran I"
Heck, no! I built that for a reason, dummy!
...(Two Months Later)...
"Governor Joe REALLY wants permission to scrap your training facility at Algaran I"
What? You again!? Grr, now I've gotta go and look at everything to see what's got you so upset. 50 lashes for wasting my time!

-or-

"Governor Joe wants to scrap your training facility at Algaran I because a higher-level training facility is under construction (2 months) near the resupply depot on Algaran II (Y/N)".
Ah, excellent work. Have a cookie!


Hahahaha!!!! Great stuff SJ! Almost fell from my chair. Hahahaha!!!! LOL!!!!

[Slick]

Although I voted for knowing exact values, I voted for this game only. I believe that this is consistent with the flavor of how I would want to play this game.

I could envision another game where I would want vagueness if it is consistent with the flavor of that game. A good example are First Person Shooters (which I play occasionally). I really don't want to know exactly how many hitpoints the various baddies have nor how much damage the Rocket Launcher delivers with a direct hit and/or splash damage. I'd much rather figure out by playing that some guys will be blown to smithereens with one hit and other bad guys are best dealt with by increasing the distance between them and my high-tailing rear end.

Bottom line for me is that it matters on the kind of game.

[brianeyci]

Well no, you don't. But there are numbers in FPS. For example, you don't know exactly how much damage a rocket launcher will do, but you know a rocket launcher in the face will kill them. So, in a FPS, there is an incredibly simplified style of playing. This is different for different games of course, especially with more modern games that have hitboxes where shooting them in the head does more damage than in the foot. But generally, you know that a sniper rifle hit to the head will kill, you know that six pistol shots will kill somebody, etc. Its just not quantified, but qualified when you see the person hit the deck =D.

Brian

[PvK]

As counterpoint, there have been cases where people were shot several times in the head, didn't die, and in fact got up a bit later and started fighting again. Not often though. Even now that we know the exact (advertized) muzzle velocity of a weapon, in reality, we don't know the actual chances of what will happen when it gets fired. Not that many of us want that in a FPS game.

In fact, each of us want different things from different games, but it's interesting to see a bunch of others' thoughts.

boran_blok, it was fun to read your ideas about having to discover the rules during play - I'd had some similar thoughts myself.

Thanks for the interesting thoughts and comments, everyone!

PvK

[Traskelion]

I prefer to not know formulas. If I know too many, I feel like it's the numbers playing instead of me. Then again, maybe that's just being ot lazy to figure out what they are. If I DO end up knowing some formulas, I play via calculator. Either way tho, I feel there must be enough beyond my grasp.

[Caduceus]

I'll agree with Slick about the character of the game determining whether I give a fig about formulas. To be honest, I have calculated stuff a handful of times in SE IV, gotten the wrong answer and then determined that I was doing the math wrong, not the machine adding mysterious modifiers. Talk about embarassing.