Comments on: 1001 Games I Must Finish Making Before You Die

By: Chris K

Chris K — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 20:01:41 +0000

Just read through all of the newer comments here, and I have to say that there are at least a few valid points made.

However, it is worth noting that ever game if Captain Successor is going to be different. Sometimes you get stuck with enemies that aren’t much fun to engage, and other times you’ll get a perfect blance of the right available parts and enemies to fight. It just depends.

As far as the occasional self-destructive enemy is concerned, well, I am not bothered by it. It’s rare enough for this to happen that when it does it is more amusing than game-breaking.

By: Required

Required — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 10:16:02 +0000

@Strain Of Thought
I agree with Farbs that you should just make ship generating thing simple to prevent excessive limitation and possibly lag/delay. Don’t you enjoy staying still, do nothing and see those ships blowing themselves up?

I also think that spinners are quite hard to tackle but you can develop some tactics to beat that. For me I usually disarm every modules except the command modules, squeeze into the ship, and blow it up from the inside. It’s challenging.

By: Strain Of Thought

Strain Of Thought — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:50:57 +0000

Oh, and about the “prismatic” thing: until I saw the station I posted a picture of, I wasn’t sure if all the ships firing on themselves were using prismatic lasers or not, as it can be hard to tell when they’re also spinning and there’s lasers everywhere and you’re trying not to get hit. But if you actually *look* at the picture, you’ll see four of that station’s guns are pointed *directly* at itself. Even if those were regular lasers, they’d still fire on the station.

By: Strain Of Thought

Strain Of Thought — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:44:54 +0000

I should add, I am really missing the ship designs from captain forever right now. Most of the ships just spin wildly in place while shooting in every direction, and while that’s neat to see as a diversion from time to time, an entire game of it is monotonous. It basically comes down to flying forward in straight line “re-rolling” for new enemies until the RNG craps out a cripple. There’s no point in even trying to tackle most of the spinners. There might be if I had some *shields*, but the RNG seems to have decided that absolutely no one at all ever has ever heard of them in this universe.

By: Strain Of Thought

Strain Of Thought — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:34:53 +0000

Why not just have the random ship generator fire the ship’s weapons once before placing them in the game, and check whether or not the ship receives a hit? If it hits itself, roll again.

By: Farbs

Farbs — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:29:47 +0000

Heh. No, that’s not a bug. I had to choose between these three options:

*** 1 ***
Severely limit the use of prismatic lasers in the game (as with Sprinklers, which have this problem but worse).

*** 2 ***
Spend several days building a frighteningly complex system to determine where prismatic lasers could be placed on ships.

*** 3 ***
Deal with a small subset of ship types damaging themselves in an hilarious fashion.

I chose #3.

It sounds like your current game has opted to use prismatic lasers for many ship archetypes. You’ll probably find that this won’t happen so much on average.

By: Strain Of Thought

Strain Of Thought — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:22:58 +0000

Many, many, many of the ships I am seeing “rotationally symmetrical”. Most of them, even. They are the ones most likely to shoot themselves, too.

I understand that the station is a *station* and has no boosters because it’s supposed to be *stationary*. I brought it to your attention because *eight* of the eighteen guns on that station are pointed *at* the station, and in general about half the stations I’ve encountered have at least one pair of guns that they fire on the themselves. Please tell me that’s a bug.

By: Farbs

Farbs — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:20:23 +0000

Umm, yeah. Some of the ships are a bit dumb. I guess realism was never a high priority for me.

By: Farbs

Farbs — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:13:22 +0000

Oh my. You appear to be flying a giant pinata.

The algorithms used to generate AI swap around each time you play, so some times Golf ships will all be “stations” like that one, with no boosters. They’re the game’s treasure chests, or pinatas I suppose. In other games Golf ships might be the original mirrored designs from Forever, some weird rotationally symmetrical vessels, and tiny little gnats with no girders and poor communication skills.

By: Strain Of Thought

Strain Of Thought — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 07:58:17 +0000

Some more images!

Here’s a better shot of the station:
http://img577.imageshack.us/i/architecturallychalleng.png/

Here’s the station in the process of destroying itself:
http://img513.imageshack.us/i/architecturallychalleng.png/

And here the station has wiped out twelve of the eighteen guns it started with while another ship with an equally pointless design arrives and declares its intent to destroy me. With what, I cannot say:
http://img705.imageshack.us/i/architecturallychalleng.png/

These two designs are extreme, but they’re not so extreme that they’re not representative of what I’m seeing. That’s the second time in just this game I’ve seen the “two foxtrot girders and command module” ship, in general hostile ships with no weapons have been common, and what feels like a quarter of the ships I’m running into have at least one weapon positioned so it fires on itself.

… and then there was the ship with a single ram as a weapon that was positioned deep inside the ship such that it could never actually ram anything.

What gives, Farbs?