10 ms·

How do you stop a randomized game from randomly being boring sometimes?

95 points by yread 10y ago

askyourmother 10y ago
Bugs. Make sure it crashes at random times, then it takes longer to become boring.
babuskov 10y ago
I was hoping for more, but it only talks about strategic video games.
- vkou 10y ago
  An incredibly... Unpolished strategic video game, in particular.
1123581321 10y ago
The context is that the author wrote a negative review of a space strategy game because he had poor experiences with it. This article seems to be a way of saying that he was wrong to say the game is objectively bad without denying his own bad experiences are an objective problem. The solution is to tune the game and add additional mid-game content (the part of the game with the most room for dynamism), which the author points out is on its way. One of the more interesting comments said that the game would be well served if its developers collected play through data and started prioritizing the game seeds that tended to cause the most interesting games, arguing that there would be enough seeds to hide the lack of randomness.
- pjc50 10y ago
  This article seems to be a way of saying that he was wrong to say the game is objectively bad Where did he say that? People seem to keep mistaking reviews for impossibly objective analyses of games.
  - wastedhours 10y ago
    "Seems" - it's not explicit, but the implication is that objectively saying a randomised game is bad when it's only been bad from a subjective perspective isn't the best approach.
    - pjc50 10y ago
      But I'm not seeing where the reviewer made the claim that the game was objectively bad?
      - wastedhours 10y ago
        It's in the linked review[0] that he wrote, and the subsequent follow up by the developer[1]. [0] http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/05/09/stellaris-review http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/05/09/stellaris-review [1] http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1solvon http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1solvon
        jsnell 10y ago
        It'd be really strange for any publication to claim their reviews are "objective" (there's objectivegamereviews.com, but it is intended as humor). The usual view is something along the lines of a review being just an indication of one person's experience with a game at a specific time. And as far as I can see, the latter is the case here as well. Neither page you link to contains the word "objective". The only mention of the words "bad" is in the phrase "bad luck", in a sentence specifically talking about how other people might have a better experience and Rowan might have been just unlucky. There is a score, but to interpret that you'd look at the review guidelines for IGN. To quote: Under no circumstances are review scores influenced by anything other than _our own opinions_ on the quality of the product in question. (Emphasis mine).
        pjc50 10y ago
        Neither of which contain the word "objective", and the second one says "lower than liked score" and "opinion".
- fao_ 10y ago
  Even better, they might be able to find a pattern in the seeds that are more interesting (They could be prime, or a power of two), and generate or manipulate seeds to conform to that pattern.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    Assuming that the seeds are actually seeds for any sort of half-working random number generator, and given the amount of different subsystems which will depend on that seed, that sounds incredibly unlikely.
    - fao_ 10y ago
      I didn't mean that they would find a pattern in the random number generator, rather a pattern in the interesting seeds, that they can then abuse to make random seeds interesting. An example of this is that perhaps numbers that are even produce more interesting games than those that are odd, so they could then write something like the following: int new_seed(void) { int seed = random(); if ((seed % 2) != 0) seed++; return seed; } which makes seeds less random, but is more likely to produce interesting games.
      - vertex-four 10y ago
        Finding an obvious pattern in the seeds implies that the random number generator's output has an obvious pattern. Given the point of RNGs, that seems unlikely.
- lmm 10y ago
  Preserving a seed like that wouldn't lead to a similar game without a lot more work. If there's one more or less combat, or you meet the other factions in a different order, you'd "desync" the stream of random numbers and have an entirely different sequence of random events later on.
- y7 10y ago
  Assuming the random events are also based on how the game progresses, and not just from the starting seed (if they were, then at the start of the game you would be able to predict all random events for the entire game to come, which sounds implausible for a complex strategy game), then the seed won't help you much in predicting game events. Pseudorandom number generators are chaotic, otherwise they wouldn't be called pseudorandom. This means that if there is, say, an extra random number generated in the middle of your game, it would likely completely change the random events in the remainder of the game. What would help is, instead of prioritizing seeds, looking at optimal distributions of random events that lead to fun gameplay. This might mean for instance making your next random event dependent on previous ones (e.g. to compensate previous bad events with more fortunate ones, and vice versa).
flashman 10y ago
From my experience so far, Stellaris will benefit greatly from performance and feature patches (I hear lots of complaints about grinding late-game framerates even in modestly-populated galaxies). It does seem to suffer from a lack of gameplay options. I think a useful comparison is Civilization V at launch versus after its 'Gods and Kings' and 'Brave New World' expansions, both of which added many new gameplay avenues. The game seems to be more organic than strategic, lacking crossroads where your decision is based on your priorities. The major exception is the research system, where the 'choose one of three' feature means selecting one option closes off the other two possibilities for an indeterminate period. But besides that, in my experience the game is about expanding like a slime mold and gradually wearing down your opposition (as conquest is the only viable victory type).
- adwf 10y ago
  I have a feeling from looking at the patch notes and plans for the future, that they intended the ethics system to be a much more diversifying effect than it currently is. ie. You would have a lot more factions within your empire and sector rebellions would be something to deal with, making the mid-game more exciting. Instead, if you can get a happy empire running, it's pretty stable all the way through and the mid-game can get very boring. Have to say that I love the research system though. It completely turns a lot of standard 4x/strategy style gameplay on its head by preventing 100% forward planning.
  - Agentlien 10y ago
    I haven't played Stellaris, but I looked up the research system after reading your comment. It does actually seem really cool and like a good use of randomness. It reminds me of Master of Orion 2, which also had non-deterministic research. There, each point in the tech tree was a category containing multiple items and, when research into that category was done, you got a random item from that category. If you wanted one of the others, you'd have to get it by trading with or spying on other races.
    - adwf 10y ago
raverbashing 10y ago
Well, sometimes you can't Freecell is a good example, some games are trivially easy or too hard (not sure if there are impossible games)
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  Impossible freecell games are easy to generate. Game number negative one is an example.
- fenomas 10y ago
  Freecell would be a perfect example of how to tune difficulty. Consider: some initial layouts can be solved without using all four free cells; others can't be solved without five or more cells. If a Freecell game implements a solver that can find the minimum number of cells needed to solve a given layout, then it could easily tune the difficulty - by only giving players layouts that require certain numbers of cells, or conversely by varying the number of free cells depending on the layout.
- stefs 10y ago
  not really related, but i wrote a freecells solver some time ago. it either solves the board in a couple hundred milliseconds or runs out of memory in a couple of minutes for unsolvable boards. one thing i've been interested in was seeing how my solvers results (i.e. # of steps, visited boards, time to solve) correlated with perceived difficulty for a human player - i didn't go that far though.
navbaker 10y ago
Having had "play a 4x space strategy" on my gaming bucket list for quite some time, how does this game compare to others that I've had my eye on like Galactic Civ 3 or Sins of a Solar Empire?
- adwf 10y ago
  Firstly, I'll say Stellaris is a great game, but I would also say that Stellaris isn't actually a pure 4X game if that's what you're looking for. Something like Gal Civ 3 or Star Ruler 2 would be better on that front. Stellaris is more like Civilization in space, or Crusader Kings. It's grand strategy, about managing empires at a high level, whereas a 4X game tends to be more about resource management, research, and building spaceships.
  - lachgr 10y ago
    > whereas a 4X game tends to be more about resource management, research, and building spaceships. I think those three are represented as well in Stellaris. As mentioned above research is done very well, and presents often dilemmas when you want to research multiple things and you don't know when a certain option will be available again. Ships can be designed by the player and offer a lot of customisability. Resources are abstracted behind three basic resources so is probably not as deep as other games, but it is in. I really like the randomness of Stellaris, not only of the research options but also the randomly generated galaxy and AI empires, which means you never encounter the same systems or competitors (unless, of course, you start in the Sol system or let certain empires spawn, which can be chosen at game start). The article seems to be of someone who doesn't really like the game. Arguably it isn't as fleshed out as other 4X games, but to me it doesn't seem fair to blame it on the random generated content.
- pjc50 10y ago
  I'd actually suggest MOO 1 as a good place to start, as it's considerably simpler.
- ascagnel_ 10y ago
  Sins of a Solar Empire is a real-time game (vs a turn-based game like Stellaris or GalCiv), so it will play out very, very differently.
Animats 10y ago
If the universe is a simulation, maybe this is why life sucks: User boredom if it doesn't. "Why is God punishing us?"
Agentlien 10y ago
This really resonates with me, especially since he mentioned Master of Orion. I grew up with Master of Orion 2 and I can't even make an estimate of how many sessions or hours I played. Another game which I still play actively is Magic: The Gathering. I mention this, because I think the contrast between these two games highlights the subject at hand. I have experienced more incredible stories unfolding in both MoO2 and MtG than I could possibly remember. Both are games where careful strategy and tactics combined with randomness can lead to some unbelievably epic moments. Here's the thing, though: in MoO2, despite a lot of random events, I can't remember a single time I played a session which wasn't exciting or didn't feel fair. In Magic, this happens routinely. Just Google "mana screw" or "mana flood" for more results than you can read, complaining about randomness leading to boring matches where you, as someone put it, "don't get to play Magic"[1]. I still play Magic on a daily basis, and I still love the game, but I've spent a lot of time damning the frequency of these boring matches and wondering if there was a simple strategy or rule change which would fix this, while still leaving the soul of the game intact. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/4c2f65/what_fundamental_rules_or_gameplay_problems_does/d1elu5k https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/4c2f65/what_funda...
- lmm 10y ago
  I've heard it argued that Netrunner avoids the worst of those problems by always giving you the option of drawing a card. Of course the flipside is making the game less random which has its own impact on the meta. Take that to the extreme and you have Mage Wars, which a friend described as "Netrunner chess"; there's almost no randomness, which makes for a more strategic game - but in its own way that makes it less fun, particularly between players of different ability.
  - Sniffnoy 10y ago
    Have you heard of David Sirlin's game Codex? It's not out yet, unfortunately, but I think it takes an interesting approach to this (I've yet to see how it actually plays). The basic rules resemble Hearthstone, but rather than building a deck beforehand, you just pick one of seven 10-card starter decks, and 3 of 20 "codices", and then at the end of each turn you take two cards from your codices and add them into your deck. So there's still luck of the draw, but not to the extent of having to shuffle a 30 or 60 card deck beforehand. (Also you go through your cards Dominion-style rather than one-card-per-turn Magic style, but I'm honestly not sure as to whether that counts as an increase or decrease in luck!) I've heard this compared to Mage Wars, but looking that up, it looks like that just lets you cast spells straight out of your spellbook, no deck at all. Is that right? So I guess Codex is another intermediate step there. (As regards "mana", it doesn't follow Hearthstone, but rather takes the fairly-common approach where any card from your hand can also be turned into a mana producer (this permanently removes them from your deck, so you can remove cards as well as adding them).)
pjc50 10y ago
XCOM2 has a slightly controversial "randomness compensator": repeatedly missing increases your chance to hit, and being hit repeatedly by the aliens lowers their hit chance. Various games (L4D is the first prominent example, there may be others before it) include "AI directors" that try to keep the player involved through balancing exiting events and periods of tension. This makes it a lot harder to have a "boring" game, or one where you get "unfairly" hammered by the randomness. In fiction I'd trace this to Asimov's Foundation series, which is premised on "psychohistory" being a sort of fully deterministic fusion of economics and psychology enabling the development of future society to be predicted. Until a few books into the series where the "mule" is introduced, who is an individual powerful and unpredictable enough to throw off the determinism of historical inevitability.
- evincarofautumn 10y ago
  > repeatedly missing increases your chance to hit That’s amazing—a logical fallacy as a feature!
  - vintermann 10y ago
    It's not so unusual. Sid Meier has talked about a feature like this, and I think even Civilization (the first) had it.
    - minikomi 10y ago
      Mario Kart certainly has a "the more you're losing, the faster you go" .. or at least the inverse implemented. Along with "the further behind you are, the more likely to get a blue shell".
      - vintermann 10y ago
        That's a catch-up mechanism, that's different than merely smoothing out outlier streaks. Though I think that the reason this feels necessary, isn't that people are irrational and believe in streaks - it's that they used a poor random model in the first place. Maybe a spearman should simply never beat a battleship.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Olscore 10y ago
Discovered a quote from Sid Meier's the other day; he says "A game is a series of interesting choices." From that perspective, the definition of a game and what constitutes gaming changes dramatically. It undercuts the question here. Preventing a game from being randomly boring is an odd question. A better question might be, how can we keep the player's decision-making interesting, regardless of what is generated? The article says it directly, but misses the golden quote which I think is essential. That quote offers up some really unique ways to define a game too. Very cool.
agentultra 10y ago
Constraint propagation solvers seem to work well.
sanj 10y ago
Related: I wrote a mahjong game many years back (the tile matching version; not real mahjong). It turns out you can have unwinnable boards if you build them purely randomly. So I ended up having the app play the board in reverse to make sure it was winnable! It still managed to hit stalemates, while playing backwards, but they were very rare. I just restarted instead of trying to avoid that situation algorithmicly.
jetengine 10y ago
There is a theory that multiplayer is more interesting than singleplayer because you are playing against unpredictable characters. Someone toyed with this idea by letting the player of the game play against animals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DXiuzAQztU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DXiuzAQztU
fitzwatermellow 10y ago
Fantastic question! Quick and dirty solution is simply to choose a distribution that isn't uniformly random! Instead of starting with your random number generator, build up the discrete probability distribution function first. The histogram can have any shape you want. So, for example, in Tetris, rather than choosing a uniformly random next piece, we give a 10% probability to a straight one, 20% to right-sided L, etc. Now we begin to see patterns that can make gameplay challenging or interesting. If a shape has not appeared in a while purely out of chance, alter the distribution. Keeping track of what cards have been played and what moves have been made forms the basis of a feedback loop that constantly evolves.
- Kapow 10y ago
  Tetris is actually an interesting example: http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Random_Generator http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Random_Generator Officially branded Tetris games are required to use a "random bag" algorithm where they generate random permutations of the 7 tetrominos, so that for every 7 pieces (aligned with the bag start) you get each type once. You can only get two in a row if they appear at the end of one bag and the start of the next, and conversely there's a maximum of 12 pieces between duplicates (start of one bag, end of the next). Three in a row will never happen.
ghgfhgfhn 10y ago
You do what candy crush did. You make the entire game random, with just the veneer of strategy and then you can control exactly when the rewards are handed out. Then you can use the science of addiction to keep people hooked.
dahart 10y ago
Working on console games, I got out of the habit of using a random number generator directly for anything. I noticed RNGs producing boring events frequently. Instead, I started using a random shuffle to guarantee events aren't repeated before all other events have happened, but it still feels random. There were also cases where I thought random would be good at first, and later discovered that I preferred a simple hard-coded pre-set order repeating in a loop... It would feel random and go unnoticed by most players, but being able to see the pattern allows some players to take advantage. Usually I'd use random to avoid that, but occasionally realized it was okay and actually made that moment in the game more fun.
- dspillett 10y ago
  > Instead, I started using a random shuffle to guarantee events aren't repeated before all other events have happened, but it still feels random. Another option for a similar effect is to keep a counter and compare it to sequences of prime numbers: when the count is a multiple of 23 then X happens, if the count is a multiple of 7 and 11 then Y happens, and so forth. Balanced with enough thought this will ensure that enough happens without it seeming too regular to the player.
- mikeash 10y ago
  A classic example of this is Tetris, where the official version provides a random permutation of the seven pieces, then another random permutation, etc. This gives you variety and unpredictability while simultaneously guaranteeing that you never go without any particular piece for too long. Many clones just provide pieces purely randomly, which tends to give you a feast or famine situation for useful pieces.
AimHere 10y ago
Sometimes intermittent boredom might be what you want... Here is a game reviewer pointing out that one particular game (Sunless Sea) appears to be somewhat improved by having stretches of monotony interrupted by more interesting gameplay. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r6VtUW9504 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r6VtUW9504
corysama 10y ago
It's a perennial struggle for each new generation of game designers when their internal theory of gameplay mechanics comes into conflict with the general public's completely off-based intuition about statistics. Basically, people at large don't grok statistics at all. Instead they think of randomness in terms of permutations (drawing cards from a deck). When you pit them against "well-designed" statistical randomness, you are rewarded with a cacophony of complaints about how the simulation is cheating, rigged and unrealistic. Sid Meier had a great GDC keynote about his multi-decade struggle to convey basic concepts like "Something that has only a 1% chance of happening will still happen sometimes." This gets worse when you realize that a million daily active users means one-in-a-million events are a many-times-daily occurrence. That means every day someone will complain that "I rolled a one out of ten SIX TIMES IN A ROW!!! That should never happen! You are explicitly cheating me! I demand my money back!" So, yeah. Don't rand() in games. Do the shuffle and everyone will be much happier.
Pica_soO 10y ago
Well you got to have a story arc for the players experience. A short-term arc and in the long term story-arc of which the luck is just part. Randomized positive/negative Events occur more often, the longer a arc is monotone.

95 points by yread 10y ago

askyourmother 10y ago

Bugs. Make sure it crashes at random times, then it takes longer to become boring.

babuskov 10y ago

I was hoping for more, but it only talks about strategic video games.

vkou 10y ago
An incredibly... Unpolished strategic video game, in particular.

1123581321 10y ago

The context is that the author wrote a negative review of a space strategy game because he had poor experiences with it. This article seems to be a way of saying that he was wrong to say the game is objectively bad without denying his own bad experiences are an objective problem. The solution is to tune the game and add additional mid-game content (the part of the game with the most room for dynamism), which the author points out is on its way. One of the more interesting comments said that the game would be well served if its developers collected play through data and started prioritizing the game seeds that tended to cause the most interesting games, arguing that there would be enough seeds to hide the lack of randomness.

pjc50 10y ago
This article seems to be a way of saying that he was wrong to say the game is objectively bad Where did he say that? People seem to keep mistaking reviews for impossibly objective analyses of games.
- wastedhours 10y ago
  "Seems" - it's not explicit, but the implication is that objectively saying a randomised game is bad when it's only been bad from a subjective perspective isn't the best approach.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    But I'm not seeing where the reviewer made the claim that the game was objectively bad?
    - wastedhours 10y ago
      It's in the linked review[0] that he wrote, and the subsequent follow up by the developer[1]. [0] http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/05/09/stellaris-review http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/05/09/stellaris-review [1] http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1solvon http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1solvon
      - jsnell 10y ago
        It'd be really strange for any publication to claim their reviews are "objective" (there's objectivegamereviews.com, but it is intended as humor). The usual view is something along the lines of a review being just an indication of one person's experience with a game at a specific time. And as far as I can see, the latter is the case here as well. Neither page you link to contains the word "objective". The only mention of the words "bad" is in the phrase "bad luck", in a sentence specifically talking about how other people might have a better experience and Rowan might have been just unlucky. There is a score, but to interpret that you'd look at the review guidelines for IGN. To quote: Under no circumstances are review scores influenced by anything other than _our own opinions_ on the quality of the product in question. (Emphasis mine).
      - pjc50 10y ago
        Neither of which contain the word "objective", and the second one says "lower than liked score" and "opinion".
fao_ 10y ago
Even better, they might be able to find a pattern in the seeds that are more interesting (They could be prime, or a power of two), and generate or manipulate seeds to conform to that pattern.
- vertex-four 10y ago
  Assuming that the seeds are actually seeds for any sort of half-working random number generator, and given the amount of different subsystems which will depend on that seed, that sounds incredibly unlikely.
  - fao_ 10y ago
    I didn't mean that they would find a pattern in the random number generator, rather a pattern in the interesting seeds, that they can then abuse to make random seeds interesting. An example of this is that perhaps numbers that are even produce more interesting games than those that are odd, so they could then write something like the following: int new_seed(void) { int seed = random(); if ((seed % 2) != 0) seed++; return seed; } which makes seeds less random, but is more likely to produce interesting games.
    - vertex-four 10y ago
      Finding an obvious pattern in the seeds implies that the random number generator's output has an obvious pattern. Given the point of RNGs, that seems unlikely.
lmm 10y ago
Preserving a seed like that wouldn't lead to a similar game without a lot more work. If there's one more or less combat, or you meet the other factions in a different order, you'd "desync" the stream of random numbers and have an entirely different sequence of random events later on.
y7 10y ago
Assuming the random events are also based on how the game progresses, and not just from the starting seed (if they were, then at the start of the game you would be able to predict all random events for the entire game to come, which sounds implausible for a complex strategy game), then the seed won't help you much in predicting game events. Pseudorandom number generators are chaotic, otherwise they wouldn't be called pseudorandom. This means that if there is, say, an extra random number generated in the middle of your game, it would likely completely change the random events in the remainder of the game. What would help is, instead of prioritizing seeds, looking at optimal distributions of random events that lead to fun gameplay. This might mean for instance making your next random event dependent on previous ones (e.g. to compensate previous bad events with more fortunate ones, and vice versa).

flashman 10y ago

From my experience so far, Stellaris will benefit greatly from performance and feature patches (I hear lots of complaints about grinding late-game framerates even in modestly-populated galaxies). It does seem to suffer from a lack of gameplay options. I think a useful comparison is Civilization V at launch versus after its 'Gods and Kings' and 'Brave New World' expansions, both of which added many new gameplay avenues. The game seems to be more organic than strategic, lacking crossroads where your decision is based on your priorities. The major exception is the research system, where the 'choose one of three' feature means selecting one option closes off the other two possibilities for an indeterminate period. But besides that, in my experience the game is about expanding like a slime mold and gradually wearing down your opposition (as conquest is the only viable victory type).

adwf 10y ago
I have a feeling from looking at the patch notes and plans for the future, that they intended the ethics system to be a much more diversifying effect than it currently is. ie. You would have a lot more factions within your empire and sector rebellions would be something to deal with, making the mid-game more exciting. Instead, if you can get a happy empire running, it's pretty stable all the way through and the mid-game can get very boring. Have to say that I love the research system though. It completely turns a lot of standard 4x/strategy style gameplay on its head by preventing 100% forward planning.
- Agentlien 10y ago
  I haven't played Stellaris, but I looked up the research system after reading your comment. It does actually seem really cool and like a good use of randomness. It reminds me of Master of Orion 2, which also had non-deterministic research. There, each point in the tech tree was a category containing multiple items and, when research into that category was done, you got a random item from that category. If you wanted one of the others, you'd have to get it by trading with or spying on other races.
  - adwf 10y ago

raverbashing 10y ago

Well, sometimes you can't Freecell is a good example, some games are trivially easy or too hard (not sure if there are impossible games)

thaumasiotes 10y ago
Impossible freecell games are easy to generate. Game number negative one is an example.
fenomas 10y ago
Freecell would be a perfect example of how to tune difficulty. Consider: some initial layouts can be solved without using all four free cells; others can't be solved without five or more cells. If a Freecell game implements a solver that can find the minimum number of cells needed to solve a given layout, then it could easily tune the difficulty - by only giving players layouts that require certain numbers of cells, or conversely by varying the number of free cells depending on the layout.
stefs 10y ago
not really related, but i wrote a freecells solver some time ago. it either solves the board in a couple hundred milliseconds or runs out of memory in a couple of minutes for unsolvable boards. one thing i've been interested in was seeing how my solvers results (i.e. # of steps, visited boards, time to solve) correlated with perceived difficulty for a human player - i didn't go that far though.

navbaker 10y ago

Having had "play a 4x space strategy" on my gaming bucket list for quite some time, how does this game compare to others that I've had my eye on like Galactic Civ 3 or Sins of a Solar Empire?

adwf 10y ago
Firstly, I'll say Stellaris is a great game, but I would also say that Stellaris isn't actually a pure 4X game if that's what you're looking for. Something like Gal Civ 3 or Star Ruler 2 would be better on that front. Stellaris is more like Civilization in space, or Crusader Kings. It's grand strategy, about managing empires at a high level, whereas a 4X game tends to be more about resource management, research, and building spaceships.
- lachgr 10y ago
  > whereas a 4X game tends to be more about resource management, research, and building spaceships. I think those three are represented as well in Stellaris. As mentioned above research is done very well, and presents often dilemmas when you want to research multiple things and you don't know when a certain option will be available again. Ships can be designed by the player and offer a lot of customisability. Resources are abstracted behind three basic resources so is probably not as deep as other games, but it is in. I really like the randomness of Stellaris, not only of the research options but also the randomly generated galaxy and AI empires, which means you never encounter the same systems or competitors (unless, of course, you start in the Sol system or let certain empires spawn, which can be chosen at game start). The article seems to be of someone who doesn't really like the game. Arguably it isn't as fleshed out as other 4X games, but to me it doesn't seem fair to blame it on the random generated content.
pjc50 10y ago
I'd actually suggest MOO 1 as a good place to start, as it's considerably simpler.
ascagnel_ 10y ago
Sins of a Solar Empire is a real-time game (vs a turn-based game like Stellaris or GalCiv), so it will play out very, very differently.

Animats 10y ago

If the universe is a simulation, maybe this is why life sucks: User boredom if it doesn't. "Why is God punishing us?"

Agentlien 10y ago

This really resonates with me, especially since he mentioned Master of Orion. I grew up with Master of Orion 2 and I can't even make an estimate of how many sessions or hours I played. Another game which I still play actively is Magic: The Gathering. I mention this, because I think the contrast between these two games highlights the subject at hand. I have experienced more incredible stories unfolding in both MoO2 and MtG than I could possibly remember. Both are games where careful strategy and tactics combined with randomness can lead to some unbelievably epic moments. Here's the thing, though: in MoO2, despite a lot of random events, I can't remember a single time I played a session which wasn't exciting or didn't feel fair. In Magic, this happens routinely. Just Google "mana screw" or "mana flood" for more results than you can read, complaining about randomness leading to boring matches where you, as someone put it, "don't get to play Magic"[1]. I still play Magic on a daily basis, and I still love the game, but I've spent a lot of time damning the frequency of these boring matches and wondering if there was a simple strategy or rule change which would fix this, while still leaving the soul of the game intact. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/4c2f65/what_fundamental_rules_or_gameplay_problems_does/d1elu5k https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/4c2f65/what_funda...

lmm 10y ago
I've heard it argued that Netrunner avoids the worst of those problems by always giving you the option of drawing a card. Of course the flipside is making the game less random which has its own impact on the meta. Take that to the extreme and you have Mage Wars, which a friend described as "Netrunner chess"; there's almost no randomness, which makes for a more strategic game - but in its own way that makes it less fun, particularly between players of different ability.
- Sniffnoy 10y ago
  Have you heard of David Sirlin's game Codex? It's not out yet, unfortunately, but I think it takes an interesting approach to this (I've yet to see how it actually plays). The basic rules resemble Hearthstone, but rather than building a deck beforehand, you just pick one of seven 10-card starter decks, and 3 of 20 "codices", and then at the end of each turn you take two cards from your codices and add them into your deck. So there's still luck of the draw, but not to the extent of having to shuffle a 30 or 60 card deck beforehand. (Also you go through your cards Dominion-style rather than one-card-per-turn Magic style, but I'm honestly not sure as to whether that counts as an increase or decrease in luck!) I've heard this compared to Mage Wars, but looking that up, it looks like that just lets you cast spells straight out of your spellbook, no deck at all. Is that right? So I guess Codex is another intermediate step there. (As regards "mana", it doesn't follow Hearthstone, but rather takes the fairly-common approach where any card from your hand can also be turned into a mana producer (this permanently removes them from your deck, so you can remove cards as well as adding them).)

pjc50 10y ago

XCOM2 has a slightly controversial "randomness compensator": repeatedly missing increases your chance to hit, and being hit repeatedly by the aliens lowers their hit chance. Various games (L4D is the first prominent example, there may be others before it) include "AI directors" that try to keep the player involved through balancing exiting events and periods of tension. This makes it a lot harder to have a "boring" game, or one where you get "unfairly" hammered by the randomness. In fiction I'd trace this to Asimov's Foundation series, which is premised on "psychohistory" being a sort of fully deterministic fusion of economics and psychology enabling the development of future society to be predicted. Until a few books into the series where the "mule" is introduced, who is an individual powerful and unpredictable enough to throw off the determinism of historical inevitability.

evincarofautumn 10y ago
> repeatedly missing increases your chance to hit That’s amazing—a logical fallacy as a feature!
- vintermann 10y ago
  It's not so unusual. Sid Meier has talked about a feature like this, and I think even Civilization (the first) had it.
  - minikomi 10y ago
    Mario Kart certainly has a "the more you're losing, the faster you go" .. or at least the inverse implemented. Along with "the further behind you are, the more likely to get a blue shell".
    - vintermann 10y ago
      That's a catch-up mechanism, that's different than merely smoothing out outlier streaks. Though I think that the reason this feels necessary, isn't that people are irrational and believe in streaks - it's that they used a poor random model in the first place. Maybe a spearman should simply never beat a battleship.

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Olscore 10y ago

Discovered a quote from Sid Meier's the other day; he says "A game is a series of interesting choices." From that perspective, the definition of a game and what constitutes gaming changes dramatically. It undercuts the question here. Preventing a game from being randomly boring is an odd question. A better question might be, how can we keep the player's decision-making interesting, regardless of what is generated? The article says it directly, but misses the golden quote which I think is essential. That quote offers up some really unique ways to define a game too. Very cool.

agentultra 10y ago

Constraint propagation solvers seem to work well.

sanj 10y ago

Related: I wrote a mahjong game many years back (the tile matching version; not real mahjong). It turns out you can have unwinnable boards if you build them purely randomly. So I ended up having the app play the board in reverse to make sure it was winnable! It still managed to hit stalemates, while playing backwards, but they were very rare. I just restarted instead of trying to avoid that situation algorithmicly.

jetengine 10y ago

There is a theory that multiplayer is more interesting than singleplayer because you are playing against unpredictable characters. Someone toyed with this idea by letting the player of the game play against animals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DXiuzAQztU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DXiuzAQztU

fitzwatermellow 10y ago

Fantastic question! Quick and dirty solution is simply to choose a distribution that isn't uniformly random! Instead of starting with your random number generator, build up the discrete probability distribution function first. The histogram can have any shape you want. So, for example, in Tetris, rather than choosing a uniformly random next piece, we give a 10% probability to a straight one, 20% to right-sided L, etc. Now we begin to see patterns that can make gameplay challenging or interesting. If a shape has not appeared in a while purely out of chance, alter the distribution. Keeping track of what cards have been played and what moves have been made forms the basis of a feedback loop that constantly evolves.

Kapow 10y ago
Tetris is actually an interesting example: http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Random_Generator http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Random_Generator Officially branded Tetris games are required to use a "random bag" algorithm where they generate random permutations of the 7 tetrominos, so that for every 7 pieces (aligned with the bag start) you get each type once. You can only get two in a row if they appear at the end of one bag and the start of the next, and conversely there's a maximum of 12 pieces between duplicates (start of one bag, end of the next). Three in a row will never happen.

ghgfhgfhn 10y ago

You do what candy crush did. You make the entire game random, with just the veneer of strategy and then you can control exactly when the rewards are handed out. Then you can use the science of addiction to keep people hooked.

dahart 10y ago

Working on console games, I got out of the habit of using a random number generator directly for anything. I noticed RNGs producing boring events frequently. Instead, I started using a random shuffle to guarantee events aren't repeated before all other events have happened, but it still feels random. There were also cases where I thought random would be good at first, and later discovered that I preferred a simple hard-coded pre-set order repeating in a loop... It would feel random and go unnoticed by most players, but being able to see the pattern allows some players to take advantage. Usually I'd use random to avoid that, but occasionally realized it was okay and actually made that moment in the game more fun.

dspillett 10y ago
> Instead, I started using a random shuffle to guarantee events aren't repeated before all other events have happened, but it still feels random. Another option for a similar effect is to keep a counter and compare it to sequences of prime numbers: when the count is a multiple of 23 then X happens, if the count is a multiple of 7 and 11 then Y happens, and so forth. Balanced with enough thought this will ensure that enough happens without it seeming too regular to the player.
mikeash 10y ago
A classic example of this is Tetris, where the official version provides a random permutation of the seven pieces, then another random permutation, etc. This gives you variety and unpredictability while simultaneously guaranteeing that you never go without any particular piece for too long. Many clones just provide pieces purely randomly, which tends to give you a feast or famine situation for useful pieces.

AimHere 10y ago

Sometimes intermittent boredom might be what you want... Here is a game reviewer pointing out that one particular game (Sunless Sea) appears to be somewhat improved by having stretches of monotony interrupted by more interesting gameplay. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r6VtUW9504 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r6VtUW9504

corysama 10y ago

It's a perennial struggle for each new generation of game designers when their internal theory of gameplay mechanics comes into conflict with the general public's completely off-based intuition about statistics. Basically, people at large don't grok statistics at all. Instead they think of randomness in terms of permutations (drawing cards from a deck). When you pit them against "well-designed" statistical randomness, you are rewarded with a cacophony of complaints about how the simulation is cheating, rigged and unrealistic. Sid Meier had a great GDC keynote about his multi-decade struggle to convey basic concepts like "Something that has only a 1% chance of happening will still happen sometimes." This gets worse when you realize that a million daily active users means one-in-a-million events are a many-times-daily occurrence. That means every day someone will complain that "I rolled a one out of ten SIX TIMES IN A ROW!!! That should never happen! You are explicitly cheating me! I demand my money back!" So, yeah. Don't rand() in games. Do the shuffle and everyone will be much happier.

Pica_soO 10y ago

Well you got to have a story arc for the players experience. A short-term arc and in the long term story-arc of which the luck is just part. Randomized positive/negative Events occur more often, the longer a arc is monotone.