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Hardcore GSB players, who have played 100+ challenges would say “no way” but to a lot of new and casual GSB players, who only played offline, the campaign can seem like a suicide mission. Here are some tips:

1) Don’t rush to expand. You need to build up. Trying to take and hold a planet with 2 or 3 ships is futile. Think bigger.

2) Don’t build slow moving tanks. You WILL need to retreat them at some point, and if they are too slow, you are toast.

3) Make sensible choices as where to attack, based on your needs. You either need cash, or you need crew for your ships. Deciding which planet to take next is pretty vital.

4) Keep an eye on loyalty. Loyalty acts as a multiplier for the income or other facilities on a planet. Taking a world is step 1, you MUST hold it for a period too, else it’s just a waste of lives and ammo.

5) Hold the chokepoints, those places where hyperspace lines converge. Especially ones which have anomalies preventing certain ship types. These are your best barriers against enemy attack.

If you are still getting crushed, feel free to edit how the campaign runs…

Gratuitous Space Battles/campaign/data/campaign_opt.ini lets you edit all this yummy stuff…

connected_fleet_multiplier = 0.5
loyalty_boost_per_turn = 0.05
loyalty_fall_per_turn = 0.15
threat_fall_per_turn = 0.05
threat_rise_per_turn = 0.11
enemy_attack_chance_multiplier = 1.0
fleet_garrison_loyalty_multiplier = 0.01
max_fleet_garrison_loyalty = 0.20
no_attack_window = 6
no_attack_fadein = 8
no_attack_homeworld = 36
homeworld_attack_fadein = 8
max_ai_attacks_per_turn = 4
ai_repair_low_rate = 0.1
ai_repair_high_rate = 0.3
ai_attack_spam_freeze = 6
ai_homeworld_spam_freeze = 9
ai_new_conquered_attack_freeze = 5
ai_new_conquered_threat = 1.0
ai_armsrace_fear_degrade = 0.05
ai_armsrace_fleet_growth = 0.17
ai_fleetsize_reduction = 0.04
ai_armsrace_fear_spread_multiplier = 0.6
newgame_credits_normal = 10000
newgame_crew_normal = 450
newgame_pilots_normal = 50
newgame_credits_easy = 16000
newgame_crew_easy = 600
newgame_pilots_easy = 70
newgame_credits_hard = 5000
newgame_crew_hard = 300
newgame_pilots_hard = 32
repair_cost_multiplier = 0.5
diff_game_length = 500
diff_min_adjuster = 0.5
diff_max_adjuster = 2.0
futile_attacks_threshold = 0.4
ai_repair_adjuster_easy = 0.5
ai_repair_adjuster_hard = 1.5
nobattle_boredom_threshold = 10
emotion_consec_victories_cocky = 5
emotion_consec_defeats_depressed = 5
emotion_cocky_adjust = 1.3
emotion_depressed_adjust = 0.7
maintenance_percentage_easy = 0.005
maintenance_percentage_medium = 0.015
maintenance_percentage_hard = 0.025
proximity_boost_multiplier = 0.9
freshy_conquered_minfleet = 2000
freshly_conquered_needs_defense = 6
freshy_conquered_undefended_penalty = 0.09
aifleet_replacement_limit = 24
ai_max_fleet_size = 200000
absolute_attack_freeze_max = 10
absolute_freeze_reduction_after_conquest = -8
lostworld_attack_freeze_easy = 8
lostworld_attack_freeze_medium = 4
lostworld_attack_freeze_hard = 1
max_fleet_growth = 4000

When you are a game designer, you become more attuend to this phenomena, but it is all around us. In games, we really notice it. In fact, a talented journalist once reviewed kudos by saying “it’s just watching numbers go up, but sometimes, that’s all you need”. (or words to that effect.)

You probably know what I mean in terms of stuff like ‘leveling up’ in games like World Of Warcraft, or earning skill points in an online shooter. It’s nothing new, when I was a kid there was a lot of obsession about winning a place on the high score table at your local arcade. We seem to love nothing better than getting a high score, a better score, better than our friends, better than yesterday, better than 10 minutes ago.

It’s only when you analyse it, you realsie it’s not just in games, but everywhere. We love getting a pay rise, even if the rise is taken up entirely by extra tax. We care about the ‘top 10’ or the billboard ‘top 100’.  And we love seeing numbers change. It’s not enough to know who is #34 in the worlds richest/fattest/sexiest/cleverest person. We need to know they have risen 4 places!

I love playing the stock market, I get a whole page full of numbers to check, and they go up and down in REAL TIME! And deep down, I know that one of my motivations for getting solar panels is that I’ll get to watch more numbers change each day.

What does surprise me is that employers don’t do this stuff more. My brain would melt if I had a job on a checkout at a supermarket, or driving a truck long distance. However, if there was some built in emtrics and measurement meta-game to my job, based on how efficiently, or consistently I did my job, I’d end up focusing on that, and it would probably make my job go much easier.

People love seeing numbers going up, and comparing numbers, why don’t workplaces make use of that?

I have chatted to various people who dabble in virtual novels / interactive fiction. I hear not much money is made, but this surprises me. I am assuming that nobody has really done it right yet.

Take all this with a pinch of salt, because I rarely read novels, I prefer businessy / pop-sciency or historical reading. But here goes.

Firstly, a 2011 virtual-novel needs to be extensively hyperlinked. If I’m reading about a character, and I forget who the hell they are, I should be able to hover over their name and be reminded. I tend to read novels in short bursts. I always forget who is who. Especially in novels like catch 22, with 400 characters in

Secondly, a 2011 virtual novel should never, ever have me confused, or out of the loop. I guess the old fashioned way books handled this was footnotes, and I can see how they might have seemed a bit jarring in terms of layout. However, this is the time of hyperlinking, so we have basically solved all that.  Say your story is set is Rome, would it hurt to have a map of rome in the book? maybe a huge, detailed one?

Thirdly, the 2011 virtual novel should be a two way process in terms of feedback. Books really lack this. Shouldn’t it be trivial to send feedback to the author? The best example I have here is Iain M Banks. He is a great ‘big concept’ sci-fi writer, who is also a bit sick and twisted. Frankly, I hate the sick and twisted bits, and sometimes even skip them. I don’t want to read sci fi novels to feel scared or horrified, just amazed and interested is fine. I’d love to find an automated way to convey this to him. For all I know, EVERYONE reading his novels feels the same way, but they keep buying them, so he doesn’t know.

Fourthly, the 2011 virtual novel should have some sort of optional community interaction. Once I’ve watched a movie, I often surf to wikipedia or imdb to see what people think of it, and how it was described. Sometimes there are whole subtexts to movies I miss out on, or vital bits of background to characters that escaped my attention. I’d love access to that sort of post-novel discussion within the novel itself.

All of my suggestions are likely rubbish, but one thing is true. The novel will change as a result of technology, we just don’t know exactly how yet. What are your guesses as to what will happen?

People who follow me on twitter will have got used to my ranting about my internet connection woes up until a few weeks ago. Basically I was getting random disconnects, and sometimes failure to re-synch the ADSL for several hours at a time. For an internet business, this is far from ideal.

Eventually, after not one but two BT engineer visits, the problem was resolved. To this day, nobody really knows what it was, but I strongly suspect there was some corroded, crappy wiring at the point where the wire from the telephone pole connects to the house. As this is outside the master socket, it’s BT’s problem, so they replaced something up there, and my connection has been perfect ever since.

Not only that, it’s been faster. And not a bit faster, almost twice as fast, from an average of 3MB to an average of 7MB. Wahey.

I have to say though, that it doesn’t really matter. I don’t buy and download many big games, I don’t download any movies, and cool though the iplayer is, TV has been crap lately, and watching it on a laptop sucks anyway. So for me, I conclude that any internet speed above 2MB is probably just academic.

In other news, I added a new interview to my little side-site showmethegames here:

http://www.showmethegames.com/puppygames_interview.php

And I am working away merrily on my next big game. I’m currently in the ‘trying hard to visualise the finished product’ phase. I’m a LONG way off showing anything, or even describing it.

I saw that a well known ‘anonymous’ file sharing site won on appeal their right to continue ‘unknowingly’ hosting copyrighted movies, music, games etc, this week. A great victory against ‘the evil megacorps’ that already have too much money blah blah.

Except of course, that the site in question is a huge company, one of the biggest online users of bandwidth, and likely all of it’s ‘sticking it to the man’ directors are millionaires. Undermining the system from within?

I have no problem with people using online dropboxes. Quite a few contractors in my industry use them to transfer finished art assets to customers, for example. And every time someone, fairly reasonably points out that 99.99999% of rapidshare/megaupload etc’s content is copyrighted, they always wave their arms at the odd graphic designer who uses their site for legit reasons.

I think the solution is simple. Continue for it to be legal to host file drop-boxes, with the normal DMCA takedown procedure, but make it non anonymous. Ensure you need to buy a one-off account, for maybe just $1, with a proper bank account. A traceable one, basically. One that, if *horror of horrors* someone uploaded a copyrighetd movie/game, they could easily be traced by their bank details, and prosecuted for damages.

I’m sure people will say ‘what about whistleblowers’, and yay, what a great point. By all means, allow anonymous uploads. Cap it at 10MB a day. 1 MB is a comrpessed copy of War & peace. Exactly how many classified documents do you need to upload in a day? You can still leak those emails to the press, you just can’t upload  Spiderman3_HD1280_RiPpEdByMe_3434.rar.

There is absolutely no justification to allow unlimited uploads to a server you run in the multi-gigabyte range from someone anonymous. Especially in the form of password-protected rar files. Try going along to one of those self-storage places and saying

“I want to store 4 lorryloads of stuff in your warehouse, and I want the only key. By the way, yes I look a lot like the guy who stored stuff here every day for the last 2 weeks, and every single time it turned out to be stolen goods, but clearly it won’t be this time, honest guv!”

At some point, hopefully, the era of ‘anonymous file hosting’ will be put to rest by lawyers. I doubt it though. Lawyers are good at earning themselves money, not seeing the right thing done. I won’t shed a tear if one of those companies gets a huge business-destroying fine though.