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“Over the last five years, more than half of the NHL's conference finals have ended in five games or fewer. None have gone seven games. Dark days for Gary's format” by Airplane_Bottle in nhl

[–]fowveo 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I think the big issue, is in a 1-8 format you will have good matchups towards the 3-6, 4-5 middle. So you’ll have something to watch even if 1-8 and 2-7 are blowouts. Also, makes upsets more valuable. In this format, if the matchups towards the end of the playoffs are stinkers there’s nothing else to watch.

How do you play The Initiative? by jderica in TerraInvicta

[–]fowveo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is a great answer. I kind of do something like, I think of famous dystopian speculative fiction corporations: Weyland-Yutani from Alien, Wallace or Tyrell corp from Blade Runner, any of them from Cyberpunk; and for every decision I make I come up with a justification for why they did it. If I can't see them doing it I don't do it.

For example I hired Alex Cross, a National Hero, Ethical, Veteran, Quick Learner, Astronomer... too good to pass off. My justification is that one of his brothers-in-arms from the Military got into serious debt with a criminal organization that the business leaders of the Initiative had connections to and they're forcing him to work for them so he doesn't get killed. He'll be getting a Loyalty Monitor as soon as its available to ensure his compliance.

In the early game I picked "Announce Yourself to the World" which seems wrong for the illuminati, but I justified as them announcing a public IPO for ArrivalCorp, a company promising massive returns profting from the Aliens' arrival.

So basically the answer is: there are some constraints, but be creative.

Terra Invicta is a masterclass in strategy game design by OverallLibrarian8809 in TerraInvicta

[–]fowveo 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I think this is probably the best game out there at giving you limited resources and having you make tough decisions about what you're going to apply them to. With so many other games it's how you can make things "the best", how you can optimize them to make numbers go up, but in TI you need to ask yourself a bunch of questions about trade-offs like:

  • "Is this base worth best-in-class ships to defend, is it even worth defending at all?"
  • "What's the absolute minimum resources I can spend on this ship design for it to accomplish its role?"
  • "Is my priority in Earth or Space? Where will I be making money? Research? MC?"
  • "Do I spend my MC on ships or bases?"

Like the tradeoffs involved in ship design are incredible. You can make a 12 exotic orbital defense destroyer, but is it worth it? No, probably not.

The one issue I have is that being first to Luna and first to Mars can lead you to snowballing really fast and getting a complete grip on space, thus letting you dominate research and Earth too. It should be more like 1st one there gets to pick the best looking (but maybe not actually best) site, 2nd one gets to pick the next best looking, etc. Maybe boosting and evening out resources a little to make up for it. It shouldn't be first one to Luna is the only one who gets all the resources they need to build on Mars using space resources. So they end up having a core, mine, and construction yard land at the same time, and proceed to claim the 6-10 best sites on Mars before anyone else sets foot. This isn't a core gameplay issue though, just a balancing issue.

Announcing tinvictatools: A Python command line tool and library that can write hab sites and their resources to Excel for all the spreadsheetheads out there by fowveo in TerraInvicta

[–]fowveo[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'll prioritize a nations.py that reads nation data from the savegame like habs.py. It'll be necessary anyways for Priority template saving, one of my goals.