Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[n9103]

Yes Rock, we smell it. It smells like Rikishi's bumhole again.

lol'd hard

[snelg]

I remember setting up battles in Operation Flashpoint mission editor, then placed myself as a civilian and observed the AI armies duking it out, despite some AI quirks it was lots of fun to edit or change the various units soldiers and vehicles positions to see how the battles would be influenced.

I had no idea you could do that, good to know. Not that I ever really looked into the editor.

My brother, having played a lot of Operation Flashpoint, spend I'd say maybe %90 of his time messing with the editor and scenarios and modding. There is an enormous amount of cool stuff you can do with it. A favorite new sport we discovered was "place explosives under vehicle, run back, press boom, and see how high/far it will go." Or jacking up the max speed of a bicycle into insanity. And yes, giant gratuitous tank-on-tank battles.

I'm guilty of all of the above as well. Except the bicycle part. The editor was a great source of entertainment. I would also set up cross island races with a lot of cars driving through various hazards, obstacles and battlefields.

[Sergarr]

I remember setting up battles in Operation Flashpoint mission editor, then placed myself as a civilian and observed the AI armies duking it out, despite some AI quirks it was lots of fun to edit or change the various units soldiers and vehicles positions to see how the battles would be influenced.

I had no idea you could do that, good to know. Not that I ever really looked into the editor.

My brother, having played a lot of Operation Flashpoint, spend I'd say maybe %90 of his time messing with the editor and scenarios and modding. There is an enormous amount of cool stuff you can do with it. A favorite new sport we discovered was "place explosives under vehicle, run back, press boom, and see how high/far it will go." Or jacking up the max speed of a bicycle into insanity. And yes, giant gratuitous tank-on-tank battles.

I'm guilty of all of the above as well. Except the bicycle part. The editor was a great source of entertainment. I would also set up cross island races with a lot of cars driving through various hazards, obstacles and battlefields.

I remember making makeshift rockets with scripts spawning explosives. And pretty laser beams with those tracer rounds. It was fun.

[puke]

Ooo.. that reminds me..
Both SEIV and SEV have automation options, and if you set them all it's essentially under full computer control.
Using this and changing to different empires through the Players menu is basically an observer mode.
Still have to manually end turns, but there's no further player input.
Stock AIs weren't/aren't so great (not awful, but not great), but there are many community-made alternatives.

Back in the day, there was a big multiple-elimination tournament with a whole bunch of custom fan-made AI.  I don't know if the links in this thread will still work, probalby not.  But maybe it has enough information to find the details somewhere:

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=9776

[Ghills]

Majesty can be fun to watch - each type of hero has a distinct personality. It's not really possible to just sit back and relax in the campaign missions, but in the freeform play? Oh yeah.

Pro tips: Paladins can be comedy gold. Rangers usually avoid trouble. Elves are just irritating.  Healers are surprisingly hilarious when trolling groups of mobs at high levels.

[Sergarr]

Majesty can be fun to watch - each type of hero has a distinct personality. It's not really possible to just sit back and relax in the campaign missions, but in the freeform play? Oh yeah.

Pro tips: Paladins can be comedy gold. Rangers usually avoid trouble. Elves are just irritating.  Healers are surprisingly hilarious when trolling groups of mobs at high levels.

It actually depends on the campaign mission you're playing. Evil side is much more friendly to the player micromanagement-wise - they get most their key strength from the lowest level, so if they die - you can always just recruit more of them!

Warriors of Discord are actually really good "trash" cleaning heroes - they can solve the level by themselves if you recruit enough of them. Sure, they're slow, they don't buy stuff, they're not very strong against single hard-hitting mobs... but they automatically attacks monsters and lairs, without any actual input from you in terms of rewards. And if you want to direct them, they're also very easily attracted by rewards...

I've solved the Elven Treachery with Warriors of Discord in 21 days. Could've been faster if I haven't managed to fail to spot one tavern on the side of one the little settlements. All because elves were too scared to actually fight them and were constantly running away from them.

It's actually a thing I've recently noticed - in some scenarios, with strong mobs roaming around your castle, you're better buying off heroes that are too dumb or too brave to retreat from danger (like WoDs or Solarii), or forcing your heroes into fighting - usually they do that if the monsters attack their home guild, or the palace itself (the last one makes all heroes go into "defending the realm" mode which pretty much disables retreat for them, but it requires a proper setup to really make use of, and a lot of luck to not actually lose your palace if the strong attackers come).

WoDs and Solarii have also another good quality in them - they attack lairs automatically, without having you put a bounty on them. Very useful, very economical.

(God this game was so deep in how everything interacted together, I can't believe the remakers have fucked it up so badly in Majesty 2).

[Gigalith]

Another two: DarwinBots and Corewars, both pure-observer "games."

DarwinBots is an evolution simulator, but you can put intelligently designed creatures in and watch the fireworks.

Corewars is pure virtual-machine program on program violence. If you're into assembly language, it's quite entertaining, though I've never written anything remotely competitive in it.

[n9103]

Wonder if there's a non-assembly version of Corewars.
I can manage to be competent in Lua or C++.
Assembly though, fuggedaboutit.

[Gigalith]

Wonder if there's a non-assembly version of Corewars.
I can manage to be competent in Lua or C++.
Assembly though, fuggedaboutit.

By "assembly" I mean its own unique (and quite simple) virtual machine language. Programs attack each other by overwriting the other program's code. There's other nasty things that can be done, too, (mass self-reproduction, forcing the other side to spawn too many processes and slow down, kidnap other program's processes altogether, etc.)

[n9103]

I did take a look at it.
While not assembly in the strict sense, it is a bit by bit/byte manipulation language, which makes it basically the same thing.
It's very low-level code either way.

[sambojin]

M.A.X (Mechanised Assault and Exploration) by Interplay.

A great 1997 turn based strategy game, with an awesome system of upgrades and scanning and resupply and stuff. Except, the tanks are a little too strong, everything else a little too hard to make in comparison (other than the awesome boat scout bike things) and the original AI a little too crappy.

Or actually, the Red player's AI is too crappy, all the others are great at blowing it to smithereens. Your point-of-view is locked to the red AI. I'm about to patch the game, which may improve this. Hopefully.

But 4x land based battles aplenty. Runs in dos, so runs in DosBox, on everything. Phones, tablets, wristwatches, anything.

It's way better to play. A great game. So hopefully the patch turns it into something worthwhile watching. I might see if the see all map cheat works in AIvsAI mode.

[Nuttycompa]

Skyward Collapse

There are 2 civ that are destinated to kill each other. You are the god of both.

Your goal is to make the bloodshed last as long as possible. So you kind of have to bless/punish both sides with your godly power.
Which always lead to an interesting screnario like "well, blue team just spam a huge army and steamroll red team.
In order to help red team I give them super unit, which can kill everything on the board.
But by doing that I shift the balance of power to red team, how do I solve that?
Easy, I will give Blue team even stronger unit!"

This is the game that give you " I am my worst enemy" feeling

[Sinistar]

What about Gratuitous Space Battles?

You design your ships, give them a set of decently detailed orders, deploy them... and then watch the battle unfold by itself.

edit: oh yeah, what about Earth Tongue? It basically describes itself as vivarium sim, with possibly minimal interaction needed to procure observable changes in the living world. Check it out, might be just what you are looking for.

[Gigalith]

Two more occurred to me.

The old, mostly forgotten RTS Tzar: the Burden of the Crown has multiple buttons you can press to automate portions of the game. One button, for example, automatically controls peasants. It's possible to automate absolutely everything and sit back and watch as "your" side plays itself. I only played the demo when I was young, but it's up on GOG.

On a similar note, Space Empires III (I don't know about the ones after it) has "ministers" you can activate to automate all sorts of things. Enabling all ministers is the exact equivalent of being an AI player yourself.

[sambojin]

Genghis Khan II: Clan of the Grey Wolf on the Super NES.

Think of it as mini-EUIV/CKII (but without harems for us uptight English-speaking whiteguys. But still dynasties made). While you don't really learn why or how the computer players are doing what they're doing, it's funny to watch the world map change. Just turn off battles (and maybe wars as well, although watching the different army compositions fight it out is half the charm).

Had an AI game going where England (the Angevin Kingdom) ended up in India and into central China, the Abyysid Empire took England/Germany/France, Japan essentially became the Yuan Dynasty while a rebel faction took Japan, the Pagans rule SE Asia and the Castilian Kingdom took Egypt and surrounds. No one was where they should have been, but it was quite funny to watch.

Not a bad game to play either, once you've read the manual a few times and maybe an FAQ. Turn based Europa Universalis, but from 20 years ago. In some ways, wars and army compositions are even more detailed than they are now. Just turn off unit battles. It makes a long game even longer.

Chaosforge linky to a SNESDroid save of that game about 30 years later (and ongoing). Go, go Japan!
http://forum.chaosforge.org/index.php/topic,7528.0.html