The imbalance occurs because the first player gets quite a large bonus at the start of his turn, as they occupy many countries. If they capture more than 1 or 2 of the opponent's countries, the opponent gets a smaller bonus when their turn starts.
In addition, If the first player conquers 3-5 of the opponent's countries in the first go (and it's very unlikely that they would not be able to do this) they get an immediate bonus which goes a long way towards offseting their losses so far. They can then lather, rinse repeat for as long as possible, lleaving themselves fairly weak, but their opponent with such a small starting bonus that they cannot recover.
Also, depending on which version of the rules you have (there are many), the defender can be allowed to roll just 1 die if they choose to, so if the attacker rolls double 6 you can roll just 1 defence die, and only lose 1 army (unless you get a 6). This skews things even further in favour of the defender.
This is because of a flaw in the rules. Nowhere in the rules (at least in any version I have seen) does it actually define when a player's turn ends!
If you assume that a player can attack as many times as they like before the, the first player in a 2 player game can always gain an overwhelming advantage before the other player gets to make a move.
Risk is only close to being a balanced game if you put some limit on the length of each turn.
Imagine being born and being presented with a huge book psychoanalysing your every emotion and impression in detail. The pressure to go crazy and enslave mankind would be enough to make you go crazy and enslave mankind.
My advice to you is: don't go visit any wibsites with 'blog' in their name.
Why are people so hung up on the 'batteries' concept? The explanation is SO obvious!
Morpheus is sinmply WRONG about the humans being used as batteries. He's lived all his life in a video game, how the hell would he know about thermodynamics?
How many more clues do you need to realize that the Zion/scorched earth scenario isn't what Morpheus thinks it is?
If you are going to pick holes in Zion's feasibility, why not go for the reactionless drive that everything flies about with, or the thing that Neo does near the end of part II, or the lack of global warming even though the sky is shrouded in black clouds, or the way that you bleed when injured in the matrix, or the way you can plug into the matrix with no problems but you can't unplug without finding a particular telephone.
Zion/scorched earth is not full of plot holes, it's full of CLUES. Please fashion a stick out of them and hit yourself with it.
I have put some of my own music on the net, which I wrote, performed and produced myself. I'm not affiliated with any major organisation, and have given permission for anyone in the world to copy and share this music free of charge.
When you are investigating a suspected mp3 pirate, how do you distinguish such legally owned and shared files such as mine from ones that have copyright restrictions on them?
Here in Britain, we recently shut down the governemental body that regulated our train services because they were tending to take the side of the small number of contact personnel at the train companies that they dealt with on a day to day basis rather than the side of the faceless multitiude of passengers who they only knew through a few angry mails.
Given that your department will (in the vast majority on cases) be working on behalf of a very very small number of copyright-holding organisations against potentially millions of nearly anonymous file sharers, how will you prevent this 'going native' phenomenon biasing your investigations in favour of people you having a close working relationship with, and how will you defend yourselves against the inevitable accusations that you have 'gone native' and are a 'private police force' for the copyright holders?
That method of ending that turn gives a huge advantage to whoever goes first in 2 player games, if they ignore the neutrals and just attack the other player, victory is practically certain, since the 2nd player will get a tiny start of move bonus compared to the first player, and the first player will have the benefit of trading in cards for armies before the other player even starts to play.
Stopping a player's turn when they either no longer want to attack or have 5 cards seems more balanced (that's the way the computer version I have plays it).
The other option of taking it in turns to attack once leads to the allocation of a huge number of armies, if players get defensive, you can use all the pieces up quite quickly.
I've also seen beginners try to play that each side must keep attacking until attack is impossible!
The instruction booklet doesn't tell you which of the above systems you should actually be following.
For fortification, most people also seem to add a stipulation that the destination is either adjacent to the source (which renders the reinforcement stage very ineffective) or that the destination must be reachable without passing through enemy territory, and some play that the reinforcements can go from one source to several adjacent destinations, and others will interpret the word 'can' in your definition to mean that more than 1 army can remain at the source, others that it only means the entire reinforcement stage is optional.
Again, the instruction booklet is unclear about this, and you need to agree with whoever you are playing what method you are following
Because the rules often don't function well as a tutorial, since they (ought) to deal with every concievable circumstance.
Also, there are some games where the rules are horribly incomplete, for example the board game Risk, which (in all the editions I have seen here in the UK) doesn't bother to explain when a player's turn ends. Differnet people use different conventions for when it's the next person's turn, and for the inadequately defined 'reinforcement move at end of turn'.
In space, no-one can hear you scream
on
X Prize Race Heats Up
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
which significantly reduces the problems of going transsonic. Once you take the lack of air into account, turbulence becomes a lot less of a problem!
'A box full' of 'Sharp objects' 'In the club with a bottle full' of 'Bud' 'Mouthfull' of 'Seaweed' 'The Beard Full' of 'MailBoxes' 'My Mouth is full' of 'Warm Juice' 'stuck in a gal full' of 'retards' 'cds full' of 'pr0n' 'My Pants Are Full' of 'Skid Marks' and 'Full' of 'Sex'
The MMPORG planetarion requires you to name your planet, name the ruler of the planet (and if you want to succeed you'll also need an irc nick). You are referred to in-game as 'ruler' of 'planet'.
If you don't want people taking revenge for things you did in the last round, each round you need to think up a new pair of names every 2-3 months when a new round starts.
In the past, I've been: Andy_R of Just a Planet The Ambassador of The Embassy (claiming diplomatic immunity whenever I attacked!) Mr K of X$X (short names are easier to deal with) James Bond of World That is Not Enough (our entire 15 player galaxy used characters from Bond films, which indicates to outsiders that we were pretty well organised!) The Neoist of Akademgorod Commander Powell of Dark Star (from the film of the same name)
If anyone wants to browse the entire 14,236 palent/rulernames in the game at the moment, there is an external browser that shows you the rankings here: http://www.pilkara.com/rank.php?action=planet
With free enegery, the big change is that diamonds would be cheap to make in arbitrary sizes and quantities. Diamond fibre reinforced alloys have strength to weight ratios that make Formula 1 car designers long for the day they can afford to throw away all their flimsy heavy carbon fibre and magnesium alloys. Imagine what it would do to the construction and transportation industries if they were cost-effective?
Diamond itself also has amazingly good heat conductivity that will allow revolutions, since you can simply pipe heat away from wherever it is not needed to wherever you want to locate your cooling device.
Well, that is exactly the sort of claim that needs to be verified by testing.
Given that the 2 processors are (presumably) sharing 1 video card, one set of RAM chips, one I/O system, and one disk drive, surely there must be *some* kind of performance hit from sharing the rest of the machine with a second processor? Or some performance drain from putting all the housekeeping talks onto just one of the 2 processors?
I think this adds weight to my original point - that benchmarking a dual G5 against dual amd or intel systems is the only way we'll settle this 'fastest PC' question, and that arbitrarily shutting half the sysem off isn;t a sensible way to test things.
But why on earth would you want to? Unless you are an intel/amd fanatic trying to prove a rather dubious point by crippling the Mac or an imb/apple devotee trying to skew the field by giving 1 cpu the entire 1Ghz bus bandwidth. Either way it's not going to give a useful result.
If you can think of a good reason to turn off 50% of your processing, why not save a lot of money and go for one of the two mid-range single cpu G5 configurations that Apple will happily sell you?
By testing in this ludicrous 'half a machine' mode, we don't get any of the potentially really interesting information about the efficiency of apple's dual cpu hardware and OS support, and how much difference their 1Ghz bus makes compared to intel/amd offerings. It's this area which will make or break the claims of 'fastest PC'.
That depends on which country you are in, not everyone on/. is American.
The rest of the world has it's act together on space exploration, with the European Space Agency, the International Space Station* and so on.
Maybe if NASA joined in more with the rest of us, we could get to Mars a lot quicker?
*clarification for Americans - the International Space Station actually is International, with other nations involved, not just mentioned in the name to sound impressive like the 'world series' sports competitions.
They renamed the ibm 970 to "G5" for marketing reasons, so if they used the 750GX why on earth would they give it the outdated sounding G3 name? Calling it a G750 or G5e or something else would be far better from a marketing point of view.
$2700 (plus $250 shipping) gets you a brand new official 'Class of 1981 Greatest Hits' 25" screen arcade cabinet, manufactured by Namco, which plays Ms Pacman, Pacman and Galaga. It even has a dollar bill validator!
They showed four top-shelf apps: Photoshop, Mathematica, Emagic, and one other I'm spacing on. In each case the apps were not demoed by mac but rather by someone from the app company.
Emagic is the software company, not the program, and the fact that their Logic program one was demoed by Gerhard from Emagic rather than someone from 'mac' ( I think you meant Apple!) is a rather dubious disinction when you consider that Emagic is actually a subsidiary of Apple.
Having said that, my contacts in the pro-audio community are hugely impressed by the specs that were being thrown around. Apple's decision to but Emagic and discontinue development on the PC version of Logic was widely criticised, but I think the pay-off of having Logic optimised for G5 will win Apple a lot of sales.
Slashdot Mirror
The imbalance occurs because the first player gets quite a large bonus at the start of his turn, as they occupy many countries. If they capture more than 1 or 2 of the opponent's countries, the opponent gets a smaller bonus when their turn starts.
In addition, If the first player conquers 3-5 of the opponent's countries in the first go (and it's very unlikely that they would not be able to do this) they get an immediate bonus which goes a long way towards offseting their losses so far. They can then lather, rinse repeat for as long as possible, lleaving themselves fairly weak, but their opponent with such a small starting bonus that they cannot recover.
Also, depending on which version of the rules you have (there are many), the defender can be allowed to roll just 1 die if they choose to, so if the attacker rolls double 6 you can roll just 1 defence die, and only lose 1 army (unless you get a 6). This skews things even further in favour of the defender.
This is because of a flaw in the rules. Nowhere in the rules (at least in any version I have seen) does it actually define when a player's turn ends!
If you assume that a player can attack as many times as they like before the, the first player in a 2 player game can always gain an overwhelming advantage before the other player gets to make a move.
Risk is only close to being a balanced game if you put some limit on the length of each turn.
Imagine being born and being presented with a huge book psychoanalysing your every emotion and impression in detail. The pressure to go crazy and enslave mankind would be enough to make you go crazy and enslave mankind.
My advice to you is: don't go visit any wibsites with 'blog' in their name.
Why are people so hung up on the 'batteries' concept? The explanation is SO obvious!
Morpheus is sinmply WRONG about the humans being used as batteries. He's lived all his life in a video game, how the hell would he know about thermodynamics?
How many more clues do you need to realize that the Zion/scorched earth scenario isn't what Morpheus thinks it is?
If you are going to pick holes in Zion's feasibility, why not go for the reactionless drive that everything flies about with, or the thing that Neo does near the end of part II, or the lack of global warming even though the sky is shrouded in black clouds, or the way that you bleed when injured in the matrix, or the way you can plug into the matrix with no problems but you can't unplug without finding a particular telephone.
Zion/scorched earth is not full of plot holes, it's full of CLUES. Please fashion a stick out of them and hit yourself with it.
I have put some of my own music on the net, which I wrote, performed and produced myself. I'm not affiliated with any major organisation, and have given permission for anyone in the world to copy and share this music free of charge.
When you are investigating a suspected mp3 pirate, how do you distinguish such legally owned and shared files such as mine from ones that have copyright restrictions on them?
Here in Britain, we recently shut down the governemental body that regulated our train services because they were tending to take the side of the small number of contact personnel at the train companies that they dealt with on a day to day basis rather than the side of the faceless multitiude of passengers who they only knew through a few angry mails.
Given that your department will (in the vast majority on cases) be working on behalf of a very very small number of copyright-holding organisations against potentially millions of nearly anonymous file sharers, how will you prevent this 'going native' phenomenon biasing your investigations in favour of people you having a close working relationship with, and how will you defend yourselves against the inevitable accusations that you have 'gone native' and are a 'private police force' for the copyright holders?
That method of ending that turn gives a huge advantage to whoever goes first in 2 player games, if they ignore the neutrals and just attack the other player, victory is practically certain, since the 2nd player will get a tiny start of move bonus compared to the first player, and the first player will have the benefit of trading in cards for armies before the other player even starts to play.
Stopping a player's turn when they either no longer want to attack or have 5 cards seems more balanced (that's the way the computer version I have plays it).
The other option of taking it in turns to attack once leads to the allocation of a huge number of armies, if players get defensive, you can use all the pieces up quite quickly.
I've also seen beginners try to play that each side must keep attacking until attack is impossible!
The instruction booklet doesn't tell you which of the above systems you should actually be following.
For fortification, most people also seem to add a stipulation that the destination is either adjacent to the source (which renders the reinforcement stage very ineffective) or that the destination must be reachable without passing through enemy territory, and some play that the reinforcements can go from one source to several adjacent destinations, and others will interpret the word 'can' in your definition to mean that more than 1 army can remain at the source, others that it only means the entire reinforcement stage is optional.
Again, the instruction booklet is unclear about this, and you need to agree with whoever you are playing what method you are following
Because the rules often don't function well as a tutorial, since they (ought) to deal with every concievable circumstance.
Also, there are some games where the rules are horribly incomplete, for example the board game Risk, which (in all the editions I have seen here in the UK) doesn't bother to explain when a player's turn ends. Differnet people use different conventions for when it's the next person's turn, and for the inadequately defined 'reinforcement move at end of turn'.
which significantly reduces the problems of going transsonic. Once you take the lack of air into account, turbulence becomes a lot less of a problem!
Because the shuttle reenters about an order of magnitude faster than the jet.
Well, this round there are:
'A box full' of 'Sharp objects'
'In the club with a bottle full' of 'Bud'
'Mouthfull' of 'Seaweed'
'The Beard Full' of 'MailBoxes'
'My Mouth is full' of 'Warm Juice'
'stuck in a gal full' of 'retards'
'cds full' of 'pr0n'
'My Pants Are Full' of 'Skid Marks'
and
'Full' of 'Sex'
The MMPORG planetarion requires you to name your planet, name the ruler of the planet (and if you want to succeed you'll also need an irc nick). You are referred to in-game as 'ruler' of 'planet'.
If you don't want people taking revenge for things you did in the last round, each round you need to think up a new pair of names every 2-3 months when a new round starts.
In the past, I've been:
Andy_R of Just a Planet
The Ambassador of The Embassy (claiming diplomatic immunity whenever I attacked!)
Mr K of X$X (short names are easier to deal with)
James Bond of World That is Not Enough (our entire 15 player galaxy used characters from Bond films, which indicates to outsiders that we were pretty well organised!)
The Neoist of Akademgorod
Commander Powell of Dark Star (from the film of the same name)
If anyone wants to browse the entire 14,236 palent/rulernames in the game at the moment, there is an external browser that shows you the rankings here: http://www.pilkara.com/rank.php?action=planet
With free enegery, the big change is that diamonds would be cheap to make in arbitrary sizes and quantities. Diamond fibre reinforced alloys have strength to weight ratios that make Formula 1 car designers long for the day they can afford to throw away all their flimsy heavy carbon fibre and magnesium alloys. Imagine what it would do to the construction and transportation industries if they were cost-effective?
Diamond itself also has amazingly good heat conductivity that will allow revolutions, since you can simply pipe heat away from wherever it is not needed to wherever you want to locate your cooling device.
It's similar because it's a prototype of this very game.
I would tell you how good it is, but it wasn't working when I went to the exhibition, nor was the robotron or starwars cabinets. Bah!
Well, that is exactly the sort of claim that needs to be verified by testing.
Given that the 2 processors are (presumably) sharing 1 video card, one set of RAM chips, one I/O system, and one disk drive, surely there must be *some* kind of performance hit from sharing the rest of the machine with a second processor? Or some performance drain from putting all the housekeeping talks onto just one of the 2 processors?
I think this adds weight to my original point - that benchmarking a dual G5 against dual amd or intel systems is the only way we'll settle this 'fastest PC' question, and that arbitrarily shutting half the sysem off isn;t a sensible way to test things.
But why on earth would you want to? Unless you are an intel/amd fanatic trying to prove a rather dubious point by crippling the Mac or an imb/apple devotee trying to skew the field by giving 1 cpu the entire 1Ghz bus bandwidth. Either way it's not going to give a useful result.
If you can think of a good reason to turn off 50% of your processing, why not save a lot of money and go for one of the two mid-range single cpu G5 configurations that Apple will happily sell you?
By testing in this ludicrous 'half a machine' mode, we don't get any of the potentially really interesting information about the efficiency of apple's dual cpu hardware and OS support, and how much difference their 1Ghz bus makes compared to intel/amd offerings. It's this area which will make or break the claims of 'fastest PC'.
I can't seem to find the 'stop showing me every damn press release that trolltech makes' button in my preferences.
That depends on which country you are in, not everyone on /. is American.
The rest of the world has it's act together on space exploration, with the European Space Agency, the International Space Station* and so on.
Maybe if NASA joined in more with the rest of us, we could get to Mars a lot quicker?
*clarification for Americans - the International Space Station actually is International, with other nations involved, not just mentioned in the name to sound impressive like the 'world series' sports competitions.
They renamed the ibm 970 to "G5" for marketing reasons, so if they used the 750GX why on earth would they give it the outdated sounding G3 name? Calling it a G750 or G5e or something else would be far better from a marketing point of view.
http://www.bhmvending.com/namcoclassicreunion.html
$2700 (plus $250 shipping) gets you a brand new official 'Class of 1981 Greatest Hits' 25" screen arcade cabinet, manufactured by Namco, which plays Ms Pacman, Pacman and Galaga. It even has a dollar bill validator!
This article isn't about collecting ROMs (which is of course entirely legal), it's about collecting copies of the data from other people's ROMs.
They showed four top-shelf apps: Photoshop, Mathematica, Emagic, and one other I'm spacing on. In each case the apps were not demoed by mac but rather by someone from the app company.
Emagic is the software company, not the program, and the fact that their Logic program one was demoed by Gerhard from Emagic rather than someone from 'mac' ( I think you meant Apple!) is a rather dubious disinction when you consider that Emagic is actually a subsidiary of Apple.
Having said that, my contacts in the pro-audio community are hugely impressed by the specs that were being thrown around. Apple's decision to but Emagic and discontinue development on the PC version of Logic was widely criticised, but I think the pay-off of having Logic optimised for G5 will win Apple a lot of sales.
However, the current rumour is that Apple's new high end machine will have dual 970s.
Yes, FASTER?
The article assumes you have read Jeff Lee's history of Q*Bert but doesn't include a link.