Sunday, October 30, 2011

Can you 'compute' the game?

During and after the amazing Spiel '11 Essen experience, many people came to us with one obsessive question: since there's no randomness in the game, can you 'compute' your way to victory?

The answer we always gave was no. For some that was enough, for others, well, they needed to hear the reason.

The simplest and funniest was "can you compute chess?" and if you're no Kasparov, the answer is most likely no. Even though Warriors & Traders is not and never aimed to be as complex as chess, it is still complex enough so that there's no guaranteed winning technique that one can apply in all games and have a 90% probability to win.

Through play testing, and I am taking about more than 200 tests, we balanced the game in such a way that no matter what path you're choosing, you have a chance to win. More than that, we've seen that no one was getting even close of determining the result of the game even two turn before someone actually won.

To conclude, for the skeptics the complete lack of random is a reason to believe that they can actually compute their way into victory no matter what... and this would be true if they played alone. But the truth is that any opponent can and will come up with surprises. So, just like in life, the acts of other create enough randomness so that the game remains non-deterministic and... fun!

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