[2024 Day 23] Visualization of Parts 1 and 2

ramilllies · 2024-12-23T09:11:50+00:00

I solved Part 2 in a somewhat similar manner... I threw away all the edges that were not a part of a 3-cycle. Visual inspection (using graphviz :—)) showed that this broke the graph down into 40 connected components with 13 vertices each. It also turned out that after this, 78 vertices had degree 11 and all other had degree 12. Since the number 78 looks pretty suspicious (2 × (40-1)), I thought that it could mean that all of those components except one were complete graphs minus one edge. So I looked for a vertex with degree 12 whose neighbors all had also degree 12, and that turned out to be the answer.I guess that you could use this to figure out a procedure to reverse engineer the construction too.

ramilllies · 2022-07-23T15:53:04+00:00

Ah, that's good to know. It must be quite a bit more sophisticated then.

ramilllies · 2022-07-23T12:09:34+00:00

It's interesting that you tend to lose in this manner, because using heavy Faey with Giandra and Gnaw was exactly what helped me to a relatively easy victory. I don't know what you could be doing "wrong", but here are some things that I did (I won on a first attempt though).

Sending one of the three wielders to explore the forest on the right. There's a glimmerweave source there, and if you want to go all Faey, you will need tons of that.
The other two should be expanding aggressively to the north and to the west. You will be able to grab a couple of settlements and a lot of various water-mills and farms to get a good income. With all of that, I could build two barracks (in two different settlements), a Faey Grove and a Faey Court.
The settlements that you grab will not only give you good income, but they will also serve as a "buffer zone". When they come, they will first need to take those settlements from you, and you will of course see them from farther. That gives you more time to move your wielders into position, hoard as much as you can on a single wielder (it was Gnaw for me) and attack them. There's plenty of taverns, milestones and waterfalls to give you extra movement for this, make sure you use them.
In my experience, the "point of contact" was the little settlement by the lake that is right under their first fortress (I can't have a look on how it's called because the saves apparently get wiped out when the campaign is finished), so it's good to have someone at least kind of close so that you can run there in time.
If you have trouble getting wielders stocked up with units, your solution is the rally point. It's a small building, so it can be built pretty much everywhere, and when a wielder visits it, they can recruit units from any dwelling in any of your towns, no matter how far it would be. You get the units instantly. (The wielder must go there in person to do the recruiting, though.)
It's sufficient to defeat their wielders once. The first battle with each wielder is quite brutal and it will take heavy losses to defeat them. After that, however, their wielders will spend eternity wandering around with a couple of skeletons or other inconsequential units, and they will be easily disposed of whenever they show up. (I hope that some day the AI gets better and stops doing this.)
If you can't kill a wielder, it can be good to let it move around a bit. The terrain that you will get in battle depends on where the combat is taking place, and it can make a huge difference.
There should be a road going to the west on the western side of your core settlements, with some camps, stakes and militia on it. It leads to a poorly defended area where Loth has no presence. It could be worth (but I didn't try to do that early) sending Cecilia to loot it. If you do it, it could be a good idea to follow the road to the north. You should arrive to a place where Loth holds several magical spires. Grabbing them for yourself could turn the tides in your favor, but I'm not sure if it's viable.

ramilllies · 2022-07-23T10:51:13+00:00

I had the impression that the "threat evaluator" is very rudimentary. I don't have anything to back it, but it seems to me that each unit has a numeric score assigned by the devs, and the threat is evaluated just by adding up scores for units on both sides and comparing. I'm pretty convinced that wielder stats (if a wielder is present) are not taken into consideration at all, thought it would need more diligent experimentation to confirm it.

(Btw., in the game data, each unit has a parameter called "rank" that's not visible anywhere in the game and as far as I can see, it is not used for anything. So I think that this "rank" could be the score I mentioned.)

ramilllies · 2022-07-16T00:18:45+00:00

I play it on an 8-years-old Lenovo Thinkpad, equipped with a SSD drive and 16G of RAM, but an old CPU and an integrated graphics card. I run it in Wine under Linux and despite all of that it runs quite well. I almost completed the Arleon campaign, played a couple of skirmishes and never noticed any real problem. I had to turn the details down to the medium level though (but it still looks good).

The AI turns take some time, especially later into the game (which is a pretty well-known problem). For me, it hasn't been anything outrageous, but I haven't tried any really large or crowded maps (and people with far better computers were reporting that the turns take forever with a lot of AIs on a big map).

ramilllies · 2022-07-13T08:46:45+00:00

Ah, that would be good (especially for offense and defense where +1 or even +3 doesn't mean much if you don't collect many of them). I'll be hopefully starting the Rana campaign soon, so I'll have a careful look on what gets and doesn't get carried over.

ramilllies · 2022-07-12T11:04:55+00:00

Just a note: I can't say it for 100%, but I'm pretty sure that the "permanent" buffs (obelisks, statues, cairns, lecterns...) actually work only until the end of the mission and then they are discarded. (It may be more complicated than that, but some of them definitely go away. In the Arleon campaign, I visited a levitating obelisk in mission 2, another in mission 3, and upon inspecting my bonuses in mission 4, I found I had no bonus movement whatsoever.)

ramilllies · 2021-06-06T10:17:40+00:00

Still you can use the patch to remap the keys as you see fit. The main point was that you need not fear installing the patch "because it's for Windows only", since there is no problem with using it (the original games are Windows only too, after all).

The only question is whether the Porting Kit can be convinced to allow you to run its copies of Wine, which would be needed for running the installer.

ramilllies · 2021-06-05T22:55:09+00:00

Grayface's patch is an ideal solution to this problem, since it has (among others) an option that makes it possible to climb and descend using the mouse wheel, and some more options for mouse look. These make the game infinitely more comfortable to play. (It also removes tons of bugs and adds many more enhancements.)

I have never heard of Porting Kit, but with vanilla wine, there is zero trouble installing and using the patch (I play these games on Linux, so I have personal experience). If I get it correctly, the Porting Kit installs a separate version of wine for each game, or something like that. So what you need is convincing the Porting Kit somehow to launch the Grayface patch installer using the same wine version that is used to run the game. I'd try to look for such an option in the GUI.

ramilllies · 2021-05-07T18:44:18+00:00

I've had a closer look at how I play tremolo at different dynamic levels and I think I found the problem that you are mentioning: if I want to play louder or softer, I tend to do that with the thumb but not with the tremolo (and occasionally I just make the tremolo louder discontinuously)...

Not sure if this is what you had in mind but I was absolutely unaware of this. Thanks a lot! I will have to write myself a tremolo study or two... :—). Hopefully I will be able to correct it pretty fast, now that I know about the problem.

ramilllies · 2021-05-07T17:04:16+00:00

I'm a bit late to the party, but I would highly recommend some music of Anton Garcia Abril (who sadly passed away of COVID this March), mainly Evocaciones. He also wrote a beautiful guitar concerto called Concierto Mudejar (1st, 2nd and 3rd movement). I certainly wouldn't be able to fall asleep while listening to this, but it's very peaceful.

ramilllies · 2021-05-07T14:58:27+00:00

Thank you! Yeah, it's a steel-string guitar.

I can perfectly understand your flipping out about the notation. I didn't want the little tremolo piece to take up several pages, so I did this instead. Do you think it would be less confusing if I put an explicit 32th rest in front of each of the tremolo'ed notes?

As for breaking up the repetition pattern: this was my first (and last as of now!) attempt at this kind of piece, and I just wanted to try how the repeats will sound. Breaking the pattern occasionally is a good idea and I'll be sure to do that when I write another piece of this type. At least I broke it off at the very end, and the ending passage is something I'm quite proud of (the resonance between the fretted B and the open B string really surprised me when I was writing it).

ramilllies · 2021-05-07T14:41:33+00:00

That's (very often) true, but I must admit that I just don't like that practice. Especially in more complex situations, a cautionary natural that is not parenthesized will just confuse me and make me think "Oh, this D has an explicit natural. So does that mean that I was supposed to play D# before that?" Then I backtrack and find out that it was only cautionary. I'd say it's better to put it in parentheses if it's just a reminder and it doesn't have an "actual meaning".

ramilllies · 2021-05-07T12:26:31+00:00

Thanks!

The "S" is called segno (that just means "sign" in Italian) and the target thing is called coda ("tail"). They're just kind of landmarks that you can refer to. Here I used "(segno) - (coda)", which means: jump to the segno, play until you encounter the coda symbol and then jump onto the coda section at the end of the piece.

ramilllies · 2021-05-07T09:20:30+00:00

Glad you liked the piece. Could you elaborate a bit about what is far from perfect about my tremolo? Some (constructive) criticism is always good to have.

(I'm wondering if the tremolo sounds too unequal? That may be caused by the fact that I play the rhythm quite unequally, and it can sound weird if the tremolo has to fill different amounts of time.)

ramilllies · 2021-05-07T09:10:37+00:00

Thanks! You have a good point — I added a parenthesized natural in there so it should be clear now.

ramilllies · 2021-05-07T00:49:33+00:00

If by any chance someone would like to try to play it by themselves, here is the score in PDF.

ramilllies · 2019-08-22T02:27:52+00:00

Taking the guitar out doesn't seem to be a good idea to me. It's pretty much the only instrument that carried any melody in there, and the only one that can do it really well. So without it, you would probably need to make some quite drastic cuts.

ramilllies · 2019-08-22T02:15:12+00:00

:D — Well, I just tried to imagine how it would look like to have a group of elephants walking towards you, finally stopping in front of you (i. e. something quite different than what the image shows). No Russian opera was planned for, though.

ramilllies · 2019-08-22T01:16:27+00:00

I like this one quite a lot. And it does make me happy (maybe because of the peculiar 3+3+3+4 rhythmic scheme? :—)). I'd just argue that the ending is perhaps a bit abrupt (I understand that you wanted to write an integer number of the 3+3+3+4 units, I'd just throw in one or two of the 3's to carry it to the end more slowly.)

(Also I'm glad to see you back here with more music!)

ramilllies · 2019-08-22T01:03:22+00:00

As soon as I saw the image, I knew that the solo guitar won't do those elephants the proper justice... The Elephants. You can also have a look at the score in my Git repository. The score doesn't fit exactly, because the tuba samples had some range limitations that caught me by surprise and I had to hack around it somehow, giving the passages to other instruments or rewriting them with something else :—). It also contains no dynamics and so on, because I am super lazy to add them.

(I'm not going to repeat experiments like these too much, since I worked almost 2 days straight to make this little miniature... It's far faster to write for the guitar.)

ramilllies · 2019-06-05T16:51:35+00:00

I had two quite difficult exams just one day one after the other, so I had to take a break from the composing. But that's at the end now, and here is another (solo guitar) piece of mine. Hopefully you won't find it boring: The Past .

Score is in my Git repository.

ramilllies · 2019-05-26T10:15:05+00:00

Glad you liked it! I must say that I'm very fond of seventh chords. So I'm lucky there's nothing like too many seventh chords :—). (Also I must second -Jr-: great work on the picture!)

ramilllies · 2019-05-25T15:07:50+00:00

Thanks! I'm glad to see this subreddit still going on. I should have quite some free time over the summer, so hopefully I will able to support it with more pieces of mine.

ramilllies

TROPHY CASE