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What are some other games where spreadsheets help? I'll start: - Kerbal Space Program. Figuring out the sizes of different stages, how many solid boosters to

What are some other games where spreadsheets help? I'll start: - Kerbal Space Program. Figuring out the sizes of different stages, how many solid boosters to add, etc. - Factorio. Ratios of different factories, mostly for creating science packs. - Cookie Clicker. Figuring out what to buy to get the best marginal cookies per dollar.

npteljes 4y ago
Factorio, Mindustry, and Battle Cats were the games I used spreadsheets for.
Bayart 4y ago
I had massive spreadsheets playing WoW when addons that facilitate accounting weren't there.
gtaylor 4y ago
X4 and any other titles in the X series. It’s single player spreadsheets in space.
- cridenour 4y ago
  Luckily there are enough factory planners out there to minimize the need.
Taek 4y ago
For cookie clicker and factorio the math was simple enough that you could mostly do it in your head, plus each of them had wikis that spelled out all the answers. I think you only really need a spreadsheet if the numbers are dynamic and continuously changing depending on your situation.
- bentcorner 4y ago
  In Factorio I just let things buffer on belts and eyeballed things as I went along. The hard part was designing things such that I could arbitrarily scale out builders/belts as needs changed. Satisfactory requires you to be slightly more intentional with ratios but (at least when I played) I came up with some balancing belt designs that let me get away with not needing to be super accurate with matching input/outputs. As long as I kept things at like 101% it'd all work out at the end. I'd need to do some head math to figure out initial build capacity of some product and I'd expand after that as needed.
  - massysett 4y ago
    I always used Helmod (a Factorio mod) to plan my factory. I though using a spreadsheet would be too hard. But by the time I figured out Helmod I probably could have just used a spreadsheet. But at least with Helmod it’s still in the game UI. Using a spreadsheet seems too much like work.
  - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
    > In Factorio I just let things buffer on belts and eyeballed things as I went along. Same. I'm surprised how many people talk about spreadsheets with Factorio. I cover a resource patch with miners, then keep building smelters until I end up with an idle one at the end of the line. When I discovered a new item I'd need to produce, I'd just built a small line of assemblers and see what my output looked like, and go back to fix any supply constraints. Was it optimal? Almost certainly not. But I definitely enjoyed not playing it as a spreadsheet.
    - argomo 4y ago
      Same. My first play thru I just allotted a large space into which to extend assembly lines if needed, then I brought their outputs back to a central spine from which I could siphon them off for input into subsequent assembly lines. I think this really helped me "feel" the concept of backpressure.
- depaya 4y ago
  Factorio has been talked about a lot on HN for it's parallels to programming. I think it would be an excellent learning tool for people looking to get into programming, and I think this also extends to spreadsheeting too. As you say, to start out the ratios are simple enough, but to a beginner it'd be a good exercise to plop the Red and Green science ratios into a spreadsheet for practice. Once you upgrade your assembly machines there is a modifier bonus applied across the board, now you need to account for that in your ratios. Not only can you pump out more product from the same footprint, but you potentially need to rebalance your ratios to account for the modifier. Once you get into speed/efficiency/productivity modules complexity can really ramp up. In addition to getting the ratios correct for the machines, belt speeds need to be factored in, production rates need to be considered...
  - ineedasername 4y ago
    >I think it would be an excellent learning tool for people looking to get into programming That's a bit like using crack cocaine to help learn about the pharmaceutical industry.
blamazon 4y ago
Satisfactory is like 3D Factorio.
- malfist 4y ago
  Did they ever improve the belt system? I played it in early access and it was a chore to get belts to tile reasonably and be able to manifold off of them to feed more than one factory
  - bart_spoon 4y ago
    They continue to improve the building and placement across the board, so that really depends on when you were playing. It remains in early access but its very solid at this point.
    - malfist 4y ago
      Last I played was July 2020, about a month after release
  - Isthatablackgsd 4y ago
    Coffee Stain (Satisfactory Dev) made improvement with the games. They are on Update #5 now and soon will be releasing Update #6. Try it out now to see if they fix it.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  I really wanted to enjoy Satisfactory, but I found that a first-person perspective just plain sucks for factory building. I haven't played it in a long time though, so maybe they've made some improvements? I ended up enjoying Dyson Sphere Program so much more. It's the "Factorio but with a third dimension" that I really wanted.
  - InfoSecErik 4y ago
    About 40 hours into my save, I realized I could use the "foundation" blocks as a way to organize the factory since everything snaps to a grid when you place stuff on top of it. There's also a "hoverpack" item in late-game + some folks use fly-mods. I haven't gotten that far, so I end up using lookout towers + foundations to get things neatly arranged.
pjc50 4y ago
Anything stat-heavy. Genshin Optimizer: https://frzyc.github.io/genshin-optimizer/ https://frzyc.github.io/genshin-optimizer/ for example; the game has no data export at all, so there's an OCR program you can run that screenshots your inventory for analysis.
- user_7832 4y ago
  Slightly tangential but do you still play Genshin Impact? I used to play for a while before I realized how terrible it was for my mental health and fortunately stopped.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    I do .. lightly, and without spending money on it. It's a nice world to wonder around in. But I can see how people might fall down the gatcha hole.
    - user_7832 4y ago
      I agree. The design (particularly the audio) - I find really great, but the gacha aspect is bad, and the game is also very inconsiderate of players' time (eg the low payout of the dailies). I've also not spent any money on it, and don't plan to spend anything on such games in general. Very ironically, what pushed me off the game was losing my 50/50 of Hu Tao... something designed to make me spend money cut me off entirely haha.
  - wccrawford 4y ago
    As with most Gacha games, the gacha portion of that was so poorly designed for casual players that it was basically poison. I really, really liked the gameplay and the exploration, and to a point, even the plot. But the gacha was absolutely murder for me. I couldn't talk myself into spending a single cent on it. And I say that as someone who probably spent over $500 on a single gacha game over a couple years.
pacoWebConsult 4y ago
A lot of Runescape resource to XP / hours calculators. What they really need to do is replace VBA with a proper programming interface. Rubberduck VBA [1] Adds some essential features into the VBA IDE but they really just need to add C# support directly. [1]: https://rubberduckvba.com/ https://rubberduckvba.com/
Mockapapella 4y ago
Cyberpunk 2077 for crafting items to figure out the best return on items used to craft
amalcon 4y ago
Almost all of them. Back when I used to play Kingdom of Loathing (a super casual game whose main attraction is that it contains a lot of jokes), I used spreadsheets to optimize everything from which food to eat to which familiar to use when. Way back in the day, I wrote a (for me-at-the-time) math-heavy guide for the N64 Goldeneye game; I used spreadsheets for that. I know of people who've used spreadsheets for routing speedruns of games you wouldn't think you could optimize that way (e.g. entries in the Mario Kart series).
- vintagedave 4y ago
  Do you still have a copy of the Goldeneye guide? I'd be curious to read it. Math was not in my mind when I played it back in the day.
  - amalcon 4y ago
    I don't, but GameFaqs still does. Keep in mind that 1999-me was... not a great writer, or particularly good at math, by HN standards. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/n64/197462-goldeneye-007/faqs/3229 https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/n64/197462-goldeneye-007/faqs/...
    - pedrosorio 4y ago
      "If you want to know what Perfect Dark is, just do a search for it (I used Yahoo and got tons of hits, and the game's not even out yet)" Feels like getting out of a time-machine :)
- forgotpwd16 4y ago
  >Almost all of them. For any game that can be optimized in some way someone has made a spreadsheet for it.
- ElvisTrout 4y ago
  Hey fellow KOLer! It was a spreadsheet heavy game for sure. Good times.
ineedasername 4y ago
Cult Simulator. Used one to keep track of related bits of information and card interactions in order to piece everything together.
ehnto 4y ago
At some point StormWorx creations need some significant planning to pull off. Star Citizen even in it's current alpha form, you can plan mining and trading activities to get the best results.
8K832d7tNmiQ 4y ago
Genshin Impact for gaining the best possible damage out of your available artifacts.
glenneroo 4y ago
I use spreadsheets for lots of games for various reasons but generally because the UI of many games is "klunky" and often doesn't provide enough information without requiring tons of clicks, or even worse, only shows info once and you have to remember it for the next 100 hours of play-time. I generally don't play a game through to the end in one sitting, I'll put it down for months and revisit and have no idea where I left off. Here's a small list of recent spreadsheets... - Divinity Original Sin to track skills i've assigned to which characters as well as discovered recipes. - Dyson Sphere Program to keep track of which star systems and planets i've visited (there are tons) to show roughly how much of each resource is there, sun/wind energy stats, etc. and whether i've exploited the resources there or not. - Game Dev Tycoon to keep track of what types of games i released and the resulting ratings (which determine payouts). It's a very arbitrary system and i feel only through trial-and-error can you discover what games will get good reviews. It's borderline cheating but i figured since i did it myself, it's only half-cheating ;) - Mount and Blade to keep track of which kings, queens and princesses i have interacted with and their likes/dislikes for when i communicate with them. Necessary because once you start a dialog there's no way out until you finish the dialog. And there's absolutely no way i can remember 300+ names and their standing with me, plus i play very irregularly (still Early Access and things change constantly). Yes you can click on royalty names and it'll tell you the standing, but it's just so much easier to have a spreadsheet open on another monitor which you can glance at from time to time. - Rogalia for recipes, rent, combat, conversion times, selling rates...
wingmanjd 4y ago
I recall having something like this for Freelancer. Calculating best profit over time for cargo runs while balancing the risk of the route for said profit.
robotnikman 4y ago
From the Depths, for creating the right cannons and ammo for your ships
aabbcc1241 4y ago
Travian. Figure out how many troop to send after receiving spy report
- delroxy 4y ago
  I played the heck out of this game, and funnily enough it led to becoming friends with some other players IRL
  - aabbcc1241 4y ago
    And exchanging mind with non-programmer travian players is a good experience
nivenkos 4y ago
- Kerbal Space Program I thought it'd be cool to write an optimiser for this. I.e. given this craft file for a payload subassembly, give me the cheapest/lightest/fewest parts booster subassembly that will get me to orbit with a remaining delta V of X. Parsing the possible mount points seemed like a nightmare though.
cgh 4y ago
Dark Souls and friends, with the help of soulsplanner.com, eg https://soulsplanner.com/darksouls/weaponatk https://soulsplanner.com/darksouls/weaponatk
fbcpck 4y ago
Any games that have competitive, collaborative multiplayer aspect I think! Especially Google Spreadsheets; perhaps not math/computation-heavy like EVE, but it's one of the best tools to organize data in a collaborative manner online. An example: Inventory management/dashboard of a clan of 30 members: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tpbLmB4Fha_0TpMd4h3d2xmpf_GztvpFP_DFmdaOHfM/edit#gid=1615449627 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tpbLmB4Fha_0TpMd4h3d... I also see it (ab)used frequently as a mediawiki/online text-editor alternative, barely using any spreadsheet mathematical formulas, using it simply as a place to write text for others to read, e.g.: this gigantic reference spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JjK7Ws4gfzKChRs5ueoxEZVN5SXK10nhDC1-nbm0NUs/edit#gid=303232073 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JjK7Ws4gfzKChRs5ueox...
- slightwinder 4y ago
  Any game can be competitive, it doesn't need multiplayer for it. Speed runs are a prime example of this. All you need is a goal, and people will compete who will reach the highest value. I mean we have even an Excel esports-League now, and there are twitch rivals for the cozy game Stardew Valley...
wmeredith 4y ago
Every time I try to get back into Destiny 2 (I have thousands of hours in that game), I remember that I basically have what amounts to old actuarial tables I'd need to go update and I just bail after about 30 minutes.
perlgeek 4y ago
Let me throw https://www.fallenlondon.com/ https://www.fallenlondon.com/ into the ring. It has lots of options to acquire various items and qualities, and depending on our situation, spreadsheets can help a lot figuring out which one is most efficient. It even has the "bone market", an exchange where you can build skeletons from various bone types, and sell it to NPC vendors, some of which have non-linear payout curves. There's an optimizer for that written in Python: https://github.com/Saklad5/Bone-Market-Solver https://github.com/Saklad5/Bone-Market-Solver It's an awesome combination of great writing, bizarre, whimsical stories and a potential (but not a hard requirement) to optimize by spreadsheet and other methods :-)
- spiralx 4y ago
  I realised after getting back into it this year that I started playing FL about 11 years ago, it's amazing that it has not only lasted that long but that it still has a ton of content I've yet to complete.
peeters 4y ago
Stardew Valley had at least one well-shared spreadsheet for planting schedules and expected yields.
SkeuomorphicBee 4y ago
- Diablo 2. Figuring out the optimal distribution of skill points for your build, taking into account all the different buffs from all the different mechanics.
freeflight 4y ago
Pretty much all of them, taken to the extreme this manifests in ways like automated/machine assisted speedruns. On the not so extreme level; DPS calculations to decide which item/ability combination is the most efficient in dishing out damage.
jakamau 4y ago
Two defunct website games from 20 years ago come to mind. - Archmage - Archspace I think back on those games fondly and haven't found anything that scratched the same itch.
vkou 4y ago
Most MMOs 'benefit' from spreadsheets and APIs. Any situation where players are incentivised to optimize/track/gather statistics benefit from them. Guild Wars 2 is an example of a very casual MMO that nevertheless has an extensive API, and a wide range of fan-built sites that use it to optimize/track history of trades, manage your account, track achievement histories, improve wiki information, etc.
colanderman 4y ago
Dwarf Fortress famously has Dwarf Therapist: https://github.com/Dwarf-Therapist/Dwarf-Therapist https://github.com/Dwarf-Therapist/Dwarf-Therapist

npteljes 4y ago

Factorio, Mindustry, and Battle Cats were the games I used spreadsheets for.

Bayart 4y ago

I had massive spreadsheets playing WoW when addons that facilitate accounting weren't there.

gtaylor 4y ago

X4 and any other titles in the X series. It’s single player spreadsheets in space.

cridenour 4y ago
Luckily there are enough factory planners out there to minimize the need.

Taek 4y ago

For cookie clicker and factorio the math was simple enough that you could mostly do it in your head, plus each of them had wikis that spelled out all the answers. I think you only really need a spreadsheet if the numbers are dynamic and continuously changing depending on your situation.

bentcorner 4y ago
In Factorio I just let things buffer on belts and eyeballed things as I went along. The hard part was designing things such that I could arbitrarily scale out builders/belts as needs changed. Satisfactory requires you to be slightly more intentional with ratios but (at least when I played) I came up with some balancing belt designs that let me get away with not needing to be super accurate with matching input/outputs. As long as I kept things at like 101% it'd all work out at the end. I'd need to do some head math to figure out initial build capacity of some product and I'd expand after that as needed.
- massysett 4y ago
  I always used Helmod (a Factorio mod) to plan my factory. I though using a spreadsheet would be too hard. But by the time I figured out Helmod I probably could have just used a spreadsheet. But at least with Helmod it’s still in the game UI. Using a spreadsheet seems too much like work.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  > In Factorio I just let things buffer on belts and eyeballed things as I went along. Same. I'm surprised how many people talk about spreadsheets with Factorio. I cover a resource patch with miners, then keep building smelters until I end up with an idle one at the end of the line. When I discovered a new item I'd need to produce, I'd just built a small line of assemblers and see what my output looked like, and go back to fix any supply constraints. Was it optimal? Almost certainly not. But I definitely enjoyed not playing it as a spreadsheet.
  - argomo 4y ago
    Same. My first play thru I just allotted a large space into which to extend assembly lines if needed, then I brought their outputs back to a central spine from which I could siphon them off for input into subsequent assembly lines. I think this really helped me "feel" the concept of backpressure.
depaya 4y ago
Factorio has been talked about a lot on HN for it's parallels to programming. I think it would be an excellent learning tool for people looking to get into programming, and I think this also extends to spreadsheeting too. As you say, to start out the ratios are simple enough, but to a beginner it'd be a good exercise to plop the Red and Green science ratios into a spreadsheet for practice. Once you upgrade your assembly machines there is a modifier bonus applied across the board, now you need to account for that in your ratios. Not only can you pump out more product from the same footprint, but you potentially need to rebalance your ratios to account for the modifier. Once you get into speed/efficiency/productivity modules complexity can really ramp up. In addition to getting the ratios correct for the machines, belt speeds need to be factored in, production rates need to be considered...
- ineedasername 4y ago
  >I think it would be an excellent learning tool for people looking to get into programming That's a bit like using crack cocaine to help learn about the pharmaceutical industry.

blamazon 4y ago

Satisfactory is like 3D Factorio.

malfist 4y ago
Did they ever improve the belt system? I played it in early access and it was a chore to get belts to tile reasonably and be able to manifold off of them to feed more than one factory
- bart_spoon 4y ago
  They continue to improve the building and placement across the board, so that really depends on when you were playing. It remains in early access but its very solid at this point.
  - malfist 4y ago
    Last I played was July 2020, about a month after release
- Isthatablackgsd 4y ago
  Coffee Stain (Satisfactory Dev) made improvement with the games. They are on Update #5 now and soon will be releasing Update #6. Try it out now to see if they fix it.
Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
I really wanted to enjoy Satisfactory, but I found that a first-person perspective just plain sucks for factory building. I haven't played it in a long time though, so maybe they've made some improvements? I ended up enjoying Dyson Sphere Program so much more. It's the "Factorio but with a third dimension" that I really wanted.
- InfoSecErik 4y ago
  About 40 hours into my save, I realized I could use the "foundation" blocks as a way to organize the factory since everything snaps to a grid when you place stuff on top of it. There's also a "hoverpack" item in late-game + some folks use fly-mods. I haven't gotten that far, so I end up using lookout towers + foundations to get things neatly arranged.

pjc50 4y ago

Anything stat-heavy. Genshin Optimizer: https://frzyc.github.io/genshin-optimizer/ https://frzyc.github.io/genshin-optimizer/ for example; the game has no data export at all, so there's an OCR program you can run that screenshots your inventory for analysis.

user_7832 4y ago
Slightly tangential but do you still play Genshin Impact? I used to play for a while before I realized how terrible it was for my mental health and fortunately stopped.
- pjc50 4y ago
  I do .. lightly, and without spending money on it. It's a nice world to wonder around in. But I can see how people might fall down the gatcha hole.
  - user_7832 4y ago
    I agree. The design (particularly the audio) - I find really great, but the gacha aspect is bad, and the game is also very inconsiderate of players' time (eg the low payout of the dailies). I've also not spent any money on it, and don't plan to spend anything on such games in general. Very ironically, what pushed me off the game was losing my 50/50 of Hu Tao... something designed to make me spend money cut me off entirely haha.
- wccrawford 4y ago
  As with most Gacha games, the gacha portion of that was so poorly designed for casual players that it was basically poison. I really, really liked the gameplay and the exploration, and to a point, even the plot. But the gacha was absolutely murder for me. I couldn't talk myself into spending a single cent on it. And I say that as someone who probably spent over $500 on a single gacha game over a couple years.

pacoWebConsult 4y ago

A lot of Runescape resource to XP / hours calculators. What they really need to do is replace VBA with a proper programming interface. Rubberduck VBA [1] Adds some essential features into the VBA IDE but they really just need to add C# support directly. [1]: https://rubberduckvba.com/ https://rubberduckvba.com/

Mockapapella 4y ago

Cyberpunk 2077 for crafting items to figure out the best return on items used to craft

amalcon 4y ago

Almost all of them. Back when I used to play Kingdom of Loathing (a super casual game whose main attraction is that it contains a lot of jokes), I used spreadsheets to optimize everything from which food to eat to which familiar to use when. Way back in the day, I wrote a (for me-at-the-time) math-heavy guide for the N64 Goldeneye game; I used spreadsheets for that. I know of people who've used spreadsheets for routing speedruns of games you wouldn't think you could optimize that way (e.g. entries in the Mario Kart series).

vintagedave 4y ago
Do you still have a copy of the Goldeneye guide? I'd be curious to read it. Math was not in my mind when I played it back in the day.
- amalcon 4y ago
  I don't, but GameFaqs still does. Keep in mind that 1999-me was... not a great writer, or particularly good at math, by HN standards. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/n64/197462-goldeneye-007/faqs/3229 https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/n64/197462-goldeneye-007/faqs/...
  - pedrosorio 4y ago
    "If you want to know what Perfect Dark is, just do a search for it (I used Yahoo and got tons of hits, and the game's not even out yet)" Feels like getting out of a time-machine :)
forgotpwd16 4y ago
>Almost all of them. For any game that can be optimized in some way someone has made a spreadsheet for it.
ElvisTrout 4y ago
Hey fellow KOLer! It was a spreadsheet heavy game for sure. Good times.

ineedasername 4y ago

Cult Simulator. Used one to keep track of related bits of information and card interactions in order to piece everything together.

ehnto 4y ago

At some point StormWorx creations need some significant planning to pull off. Star Citizen even in it's current alpha form, you can plan mining and trading activities to get the best results.

8K832d7tNmiQ 4y ago

Genshin Impact for gaining the best possible damage out of your available artifacts.

glenneroo 4y ago

I use spreadsheets for lots of games for various reasons but generally because the UI of many games is "klunky" and often doesn't provide enough information without requiring tons of clicks, or even worse, only shows info once and you have to remember it for the next 100 hours of play-time. I generally don't play a game through to the end in one sitting, I'll put it down for months and revisit and have no idea where I left off. Here's a small list of recent spreadsheets... - Divinity Original Sin to track skills i've assigned to which characters as well as discovered recipes. - Dyson Sphere Program to keep track of which star systems and planets i've visited (there are tons) to show roughly how much of each resource is there, sun/wind energy stats, etc. and whether i've exploited the resources there or not. - Game Dev Tycoon to keep track of what types of games i released and the resulting ratings (which determine payouts). It's a very arbitrary system and i feel only through trial-and-error can you discover what games will get good reviews. It's borderline cheating but i figured since i did it myself, it's only half-cheating ;) - Mount and Blade to keep track of which kings, queens and princesses i have interacted with and their likes/dislikes for when i communicate with them. Necessary because once you start a dialog there's no way out until you finish the dialog. And there's absolutely no way i can remember 300+ names and their standing with me, plus i play very irregularly (still Early Access and things change constantly). Yes you can click on royalty names and it'll tell you the standing, but it's just so much easier to have a spreadsheet open on another monitor which you can glance at from time to time. - Rogalia for recipes, rent, combat, conversion times, selling rates...

wingmanjd 4y ago

I recall having something like this for Freelancer. Calculating best profit over time for cargo runs while balancing the risk of the route for said profit.

robotnikman 4y ago

From the Depths, for creating the right cannons and ammo for your ships

aabbcc1241 4y ago

Travian. Figure out how many troop to send after receiving spy report

delroxy 4y ago
I played the heck out of this game, and funnily enough it led to becoming friends with some other players IRL
- aabbcc1241 4y ago
  And exchanging mind with non-programmer travian players is a good experience

nivenkos 4y ago

- Kerbal Space Program I thought it'd be cool to write an optimiser for this. I.e. given this craft file for a payload subassembly, give me the cheapest/lightest/fewest parts booster subassembly that will get me to orbit with a remaining delta V of X. Parsing the possible mount points seemed like a nightmare though.

cgh 4y ago

Dark Souls and friends, with the help of soulsplanner.com, eg https://soulsplanner.com/darksouls/weaponatk https://soulsplanner.com/darksouls/weaponatk

fbcpck 4y ago

Any games that have competitive, collaborative multiplayer aspect I think! Especially Google Spreadsheets; perhaps not math/computation-heavy like EVE, but it's one of the best tools to organize data in a collaborative manner online. An example: Inventory management/dashboard of a clan of 30 members: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tpbLmB4Fha_0TpMd4h3d2xmpf_GztvpFP_DFmdaOHfM/edit#gid=1615449627 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tpbLmB4Fha_0TpMd4h3d... I also see it (ab)used frequently as a mediawiki/online text-editor alternative, barely using any spreadsheet mathematical formulas, using it simply as a place to write text for others to read, e.g.: this gigantic reference spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JjK7Ws4gfzKChRs5ueoxEZVN5SXK10nhDC1-nbm0NUs/edit#gid=303232073 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JjK7Ws4gfzKChRs5ueox...

slightwinder 4y ago
Any game can be competitive, it doesn't need multiplayer for it. Speed runs are a prime example of this. All you need is a goal, and people will compete who will reach the highest value. I mean we have even an Excel esports-League now, and there are twitch rivals for the cozy game Stardew Valley...

wmeredith 4y ago

Every time I try to get back into Destiny 2 (I have thousands of hours in that game), I remember that I basically have what amounts to old actuarial tables I'd need to go update and I just bail after about 30 minutes.

perlgeek 4y ago

Let me throw https://www.fallenlondon.com/ https://www.fallenlondon.com/ into the ring. It has lots of options to acquire various items and qualities, and depending on our situation, spreadsheets can help a lot figuring out which one is most efficient. It even has the "bone market", an exchange where you can build skeletons from various bone types, and sell it to NPC vendors, some of which have non-linear payout curves. There's an optimizer for that written in Python: https://github.com/Saklad5/Bone-Market-Solver https://github.com/Saklad5/Bone-Market-Solver It's an awesome combination of great writing, bizarre, whimsical stories and a potential (but not a hard requirement) to optimize by spreadsheet and other methods :-)

spiralx 4y ago
I realised after getting back into it this year that I started playing FL about 11 years ago, it's amazing that it has not only lasted that long but that it still has a ton of content I've yet to complete.

peeters 4y ago

Stardew Valley had at least one well-shared spreadsheet for planting schedules and expected yields.

SkeuomorphicBee 4y ago

- Diablo 2. Figuring out the optimal distribution of skill points for your build, taking into account all the different buffs from all the different mechanics.

freeflight 4y ago

Pretty much all of them, taken to the extreme this manifests in ways like automated/machine assisted speedruns. On the not so extreme level; DPS calculations to decide which item/ability combination is the most efficient in dishing out damage.

jakamau 4y ago

Two defunct website games from 20 years ago come to mind. - Archmage - Archspace I think back on those games fondly and haven't found anything that scratched the same itch.

vkou 4y ago

Most MMOs 'benefit' from spreadsheets and APIs. Any situation where players are incentivised to optimize/track/gather statistics benefit from them. Guild Wars 2 is an example of a very casual MMO that nevertheless has an extensive API, and a wide range of fan-built sites that use it to optimize/track history of trades, manage your account, track achievement histories, improve wiki information, etc.

colanderman 4y ago

Dwarf Fortress famously has Dwarf Therapist: https://github.com/Dwarf-Therapist/Dwarf-Therapist https://github.com/Dwarf-Therapist/Dwarf-Therapist