UltraCorps News

June 6, 2005: Delta Finished

This 40-tick game is over. Appropriately, DeltaGreen was the winner in Delta. Several interesting things came out of this game:

The top six scorers, and one member of the three-way tie for 7th, were experienced players . . . but the Top 10 was rounded out by two complete newbies and one SJ Games staffer who had not played before we acquired UltraCorps . . . but has become pretty scary in just a few games.
The two new units we added, the WarMek and the X-8 Assault Shuttle, both look like possible keepers. The WarMek may need to be a bit "bigger" for carrying purposes, and the Assault Shuttle may be a bit overpriced, but tweaking is easy.
The old economy code is SO broken. We dug into it a bit because the WarMek price kept going down no matter how many were bought. We don't yet know what the problem is, but apparently the code isn't doing what it is supposed to do for many units . . . it just hasn't been as obvious as it was for the Meks. It is possible that the economy code never actually did what it should have done.
Starting the Orn with an OMG (that's Orn Moon Gun, of course) really does make for an interesting setup.

Another test will start before too long, but we are still discussing what we will test. Two leading possibilities right now: a game with no unit price changes at all (since the code that controls that is known to be bad), and a game where your nearest neighbor is a huge distance away (which is a potential learning scenario).
-- Steve Jackson

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	June 6, 2005: Delta Finished This 40-tick game is over. Appropriately, DeltaGreen was the winner in Delta. Several interesting things came out of this game: The top six scorers, and one member of the three-way tie for 7th, were experienced players . . . but the Top 10 was rounded out by two complete newbies and one SJ Games staffer who had not played before we acquired *UltraCorps* . . . but has become pretty scary in just a few games. The two new units we added, the WarMek and the X-8 Assault Shuttle, both look like possible keepers. The WarMek may need to be a bit "bigger" for carrying purposes, and the Assault Shuttle may be a bit overpriced, but tweaking is easy. The old economy code is SO broken. We dug into it a bit because the WarMek price kept going down no matter how many were bought. We don't yet know what the problem is, but apparently the code isn't doing what it is supposed to do for many units . . . it just hasn't been as obvious as it was for the Meks. It is possible that the economy code never actually did what it should have done. Starting the Orn with an OMG (that's Orn Moon Gun, of course) really does make for an interesting setup. Another test will start before too long, but we are still discussing what we will test. Two leading possibilities right now: a game with no unit price changes at all (since the code that controls that is known to be bad), and a game where your nearest neighbor is a huge distance away (which is a potential learning scenario). -- Steve Jackson Top • Latest News • All News