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Outer Space Chess. Space-themed game with hyperspace and regular space boards. (2x(5x8), Cells: 43) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

Peter Aronson wrote on Sun, Apr 13, 2003 07:38 PM UTC:

Nicholas, Your tone could really use some work. The CVP is generally a polite, adult discussion environment, and we like it that way. As for Zillions, have you examined it in any detail? I am professional software designer and programmer with a degree and 27+ years of programming experiance, and I am really impressed by what Zillions is and does. The AI is not enormously strong, but it doesn't make assumptions, and the macro language is very, very impressive (having implemented several macro languages myself, I know what is involved). Implementing a game with Zillions isn't as good as playtesting with a human, but doing both is better still. Game designers will often have blind spots about their own designs, and their playtest opponents may or may not spot those blind spots. I have seen Zillions, which after all does not play like a human, find these blind spots very quickly after human to human playtesting (often fairly considerable amounts of it) have failed to find them. In playtesting, having players with different play styles is invaluable. Zillions provides a playtester with a very different style. As for using math to analyze games, well, I have seen far more failures than successes at that. It is all a matter of assumptions, and if you make the wrong ones, well, GIGO. I have also found that coding a game for Zillions (and by the way, writing a ZRF is coding) to be one of the best ways I've ever found to analyze a set of rules, since it requires you to resolve all ambiguities, and determine in detail all of the piece interactions.