While We Wait: The Next Generation

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Heck, I've been waiting for ABNW2 update for 2 days! I might have posted a couple of times in the main thread that I wanted the update to arrive, and now some people seem to be after my blood. Don't know why, they should have known that Impatience is my 2nd name.
 
That sounds very interesting. I'd like one of those for my own NES I'm developing. How do you make one of these? And also, is this similar to the stat calculator program? We need one of those..

"Black box" stats in regards to NESing is an approach to play where players provide spending orders that go into a computational model to produce the end of turn results "automatically". Players do not have full knowledge of how the model works so they cannot calculate the effects of their spending ahead of time. Hence the "black box". Many NESes use a more "transparent" system where players can calculate the effects of spending pretty accurately: spend 2 EP and raise your economy 1 level etc.

I found that when I play in a game with very a "transparent" set of rules, I tend to spend my time planning and figuring out how to improve my stats to the specific levls that I think give me an advantage. I can usually map out several turns of spending in advance.

That is harder to do with a "black box" system. My hope is that with BirdNES players will focus on spending in character as if they were the king and get a sense of how things work over time. If you know the full effects of spending, you don't have to think about it, all you have to do is decide. If you don't know the full effects, then smart players do think about things before they act. They ask themselves questions. I would prefer that players think about their spending orders rather than just calculate results.
 
Actually, Masada, what about the Greek city-states? Sure, their struggles with overpopulation more or less defined their history from what we know, but the impossibility of establishing any large empires seems to be spot on. And what really reminded me of this was the fact that many cities technically moved around in their immediate vicinity for economic purposes, more or less as you described; though it is pure semantics to some extent, perhaps it would be more correct to say that the driving factor of Greek history was not so much overpopulation as poor agriculture and chronic food deficits even by Ancient standards. On the other hand, personal factors matter very little for once (although, Syracuse's empire is a Mandala state if I've ever seen one...). "Greek individualism" indeed.
 
Well, ljNES was a natural thing for me since a number of people have been calling me lj for short from time to time, and since I like that nickname. Like I hope that Abby, EQ, NK, Nwag3 (That short name is awesome to boot), Bj and das like their shortened names too.

I hate it that everyone calles my Charles. It reminds me of mom.

Call be Chuck or CL or something.
 
You just remind people of a Charles, I guess. Chuck is a name you could be called irl, while CL is more reasonable, but Charles just sounds better.
 
Well, you should've thought about that before you named yourself Charles Li for this forum. Bloody hell.
 
Same here; I'm stuck with this rather terrible user name, but I like being called lj. And you like Charles Li and hate being called Charles.

Nobody wins.
 
That sounds very interesting. I'd like one of those for my own NES I'm developing. How do you make one of these? And also, is this similar to the stat calculator program? We need one of those..
They are one and the same. If I explained the stat calculator to you in great detail it would no longer be a "black Box". As the game progresses and you learn/figure out more about how it worls, it becomes less of a "black box".

A stat calculator pretty much needs to be customized for your game. I have posted exasmples in other threads here. To begin you figure out your posted stats then how each is calculated. If you knowand have Excel I can help you with getting started.
 
Same here; I'm stuck with this rather terrible user name, but I like being called lj. And you like Charles Li and hate being called Charles.

Nobody wins.

Call yourself something else that shortens to LJ. Little John. Lord Jose.

They are one and the same. If I explained the stat calculator to you in great detail it would no longer be a "black Box". As the game progresses and you learn/figure out more about how it worls, it becomes less of a "black box".

Which is why black boxes don't appeal to me. The game becomes more about figuring out the stats than just playing.
 
Call yourself something else that shortens to LJ. Little John. Lord Jose.

Or just LJ. Or Lee Jordan.

leejordan-film.jpg


But currently I'm not really in the mood of changing my user name. It's not the best name in the world, but it's decent enough to keep. Otherwise I would of course have changed it ;) Thanks for the suggestion thuogh.
 
Which is why black boxes don't appeal to me. The game becomes more about figuring out the stats than just playing.
that's why it should be complicazted enough that it can't be figured out with any precision. Just like in real life, the president puts together a plan, gets it passed and we all wait to see what happens. We all hope that things go the way we plan, but but....

I think that "not knowing" allows players to focus on IC decisions with less thought about the calculations.
 
I think that "not knowing" allows players to focus on IC decisions with less thought about the calculations.

Not if someone who's actively been monitoring how the stats work throughout the entire NES finally gets how it works, while those who are spending based solely on their own intuition fall further behind...
 
Not if someone who's actively been monitoring how the stats work throughout the entire NES finally gets how it works, while those who are spending based solely on their own intuition fall further behind...

I'd highly doubt that anyone would be able to do so. I'm still trying to understand parts of BirdNES2's spreadsheet! Mainly the army and navy indexes.:crazyeye: Anyways, I'm sure Bird would easily catch a person who tryed to figure out the system, and that person would end up having a horrible country also.
 
I like my name abbreviation/diminutive, which is almost universally used by those online who know me well and has no ambiguity on where to abbreviate.
 
North King said:
Not if someone who's actively been monitoring how the stats work throughout the entire NES finally gets how it works, while those who are spending based solely on their own intuition fall further behind...

Quite.

Matt0088 said:
I'd highly doubt that anyone would be able to do so. I'm still trying to understand parts of BirdNES2's spreadsheet! Mainly the army and navy indexes. Anyways, I'm sure Bird would easily catch a person who tryed to figure out the system, and that person would end up having a horrible country also.

You could get a rudimentary understanding of how things work by targeting selectively with spending certain areas over a number of turns. That would allow you to get a gauge on the possible band range that you could expect per unit of expenditure. The band range wouldn't be all that great, no matter how much you claim otherwise otherwise you would be mooting the whole point of using a complex set of stats to approximate reality.
 
Forum going down at 10:00 ET for an upgrade.
 
Agreed- that makes three.
 
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