Best posts made by redrum

@djensen @Panther Great work and thanks for all you guys do!

I’d highlight that the new forum IMO is already way better than the old one. The interface is much cleaner, searching actually works, its better organized, and has much better customization options. Are there a few things left to still add, sure, and there will always be ways to continue to improve it. My only advice is don’t burn yourself out as its already to a good place and the remaining todos can be slowly knocked off.

The final thing I’d like to mention is all of this is also true for the TripleA software, lobby, dice server, and forum (https://forums.triplea-game.org). Without these, folks wouldn’t be able to play A&A games through PBEM, PBF, or the lobby or get fixes/enhancements to TripleA. We also don’t run it as a business so don’t make any income at all from it so do it purely as a hobby and for fun. We could really use more donations and more volunteers (everything from developers, forum/lobby moderators, testers, marketing, server admins, map makers/maintainers, etc)!

@Wittmann I’m sure you let her win!

I’d add Terraforming Mars, Agricola, and Dominion.

Well, I think the only way to find out is on the battlefield and that you should fire up TripleA and play Civil War!

https://triplea-game.org/map/civil-war/

@colt45554 Does that mean I get credit if you win? :)

Thanks fellas. And yes to @Black_Elk’s point, game development is difficult and takes a lot more time/effort than most people think. A&A games also have complex rules with a lot of edge cases which can be challenging to make into a robust PC game. Its great to see a new version out there now that hopefully will draw more people to our community of gamers. And its great to see that the Beamdog developers are being very receptive to feedback and making quick fixes.

@djensen TripleA pre-release with new A&A play by forum poster can be downloaded and tested: https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/releases/tag/1.9.0.0.13066

We will look to publish this on the TripleA website as the next official stable this weekend if no major issues are found during testing.

@Rauno-Kinkar Generally, if there is any choice that is not obvious then you would post the combat moves then ask the defender for his decisions before rolling the battles. That is how its handled using TripleA and doing PBEM/PBF.

@VitalSigns There are also many great A&A-like games available for download through TripleA. You can preview all the maps here: https://triplea-game.org/maps-list/maps/. Several of these are very high quality and arguably more fun and balanced than any official A&A game.

@DoManMacgee Or you can choose to instead use TripleA which essentially has all of those things already :) There is also no legal reason I’m aware of they couldn’t ask the TripleA devs questions. As long as they aren’t utilizing any of the code and breaking the terms of the open source license, there shouldn’t be any issues.

I am interested to see how they ended up handling some of the more difficult rules like fighters/ACs and some of the edge cases as TripleA handles these fairly well but isn’t perfect. It isn’t easy anyway you look at it though I would say once you try to support all the various A&A maps especially the more complex ones like global, it will get much harder.

I’m also interested in the AI they will include and if its any good. The TripleA AI is fairly decent given that it has to be able to handle all of the various A&A and custom made maps. I wonder if they made a generic AI looking forward to implementing future maps or if the AI is very hard coded to the 42SE map.

@djensen Well unless we added similar limitations for the TripleA forums, I imagine most folks would just migrate their PBF games there if you added any limitations here since its essentially equivalent PBF functionality (and now very similar forum functionality as a whole).

@Grinchveld TripleA only support integer costs right now though you can do 2/3/4 for X to somewhat simulate decimal costs which is what many maps do. And yeah you could do like 10 for 3.

You can also just increase all of the income on a map by 10x and leave unit production limited to what is now and then have more refined units costs for example 32 for inf, 40 for art, 50 for tank, etc.

Agree, they are definitely taking their own view of things and IMO trying to make games more casual and play faster by adjusting some of the rules. I’ve actually considered some of the same ideas. I think in games like 42SE, those changes can make sense as it has pretty simple A&A rules and doesn’t have a complex unit set, scrambling, interception, etc. So it minimizes the number of choices the defender needs to make and the strategic importance of them. I’m interested to see if they eventually try to tackle say Global 40, how they would try to adjust that to fit the vision of make asynchronous play easier and faster.

Yeah, at least to some extent they complement each other and it’ll be interested to see how that plays out. My hope is that A&A Online drives a lot of new players to A&A and that a portion of those are true strategy gamers that then move on to TripleA and grow the community we have here with more passionate A&A gamers.

@SS-GEN Well to be fair, donations here don’t go to supporting TripleA and its lobby/dice servers just the A&A website/forum. So I would encourage players to consider splitting their donation if they post a lot here but use TripleA and its servers as well. You can go to the TripleA website or forum to donate:
https://triplea-game.org/
https://forums.triplea-game.org/

@Black_Elk Dozens of people… Wish I had half that many. 19 bones… wish I got paid that much :)

@djensen Definitely has my vote. Given that TripleA has become the default software to play A&A style games, having a more dedicated category would be helpful.

@aardvarkpepper Well if you are interested in developing an AI or improving the AI for A&A games and for an implementation much closer to the actual game then you should consider TripleA as we are always looking for contributions: https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea

@djensen Oh, I guess it only turns off the highlighting which is like the only good part of it :) The scrollbars are the really annoying part especially the horizontal ones.

I’ll look to make a TripleA code update to move the posts to markdown syntax especially since now both forums use it.

@JuliusBorisovBeamdog There is some research that has shown weaknesses of the Xorshift128+ generator:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10020
https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.03251
https://lemire.me/blog/2017/09/08/the-xorshift128-random-number-generator-fails-bigcrush/

But yes it has been adopted by some pretty highly utilized tools like Javascript 8 though the PRNG they used before was well really bad: https://hackaday.com/2015/12/28/v8-javascript-fixes-horrible-random-number-generator/

I’m not sure it really matters and to some extent you’ll always have people complain about getting screwed by dice no matter what you do.

@CrazyIvan I think we have this resolved now :)

@djensen Don’t worry, even though you were tempted by the shiny new thing, we’ll still welcome you back to TripleA :)