An absolutely clueless post. It is impossible to design an instruction set standard with a specific game dynamics in mind. Corewar is trial and error, and it takes years to understand the balance of a particular setting. Even picking the core settings is
a difficult problem. The choice of maxprocesses = 10000 for the experimental hill was made with the intent of making imps weaker, but made them stronger instead. Maxprocesses = 200 initially appeared to be a good medium process idea, but turned out to be
horribly unbalanced.
88 is inferior to 94 in terms of strategic diversity. For example, in 88 there are very few good counters to imps. Something like d-clear with good gate is not an option. Anti-imp dat bombing is not very effective since papers are so weak. If you want to
counter imps, you are left with 2 choices:
- Anti-imp mov.i bombs
- Spiral clear
That's why stone + imps are the dominant force under 88 rules. And here are the additional options you have under 94 rules:
- Resonant papers with dat bombing
- D-clear or even two of them
- Crystal clear
94 is exactly the "interesting decisions with unclear tradeoffs" kind of game. Mov.i #1, <1 catches B, but not A-imps. Should you include A-, B-bombs, or both? Second d-clear improves the survivability against stone + imps, but worsens the performance
against scanners. The list goes on. Most of these choices are not even present in 88 since there are very few ways to do things efficiently.
This is why anything written in the 94 standard
is about hyper-optimized numbers rather than
code that does interesting things.
The funny thing is, none of the 94nop warriors except some scanners are well optimized. The only hill with decent optimization is nano. During the past couple of years I have discovered that optimization actually greatly benefits strategic diversity.
With a good optimizer I can make unusual strategies work and show their true potential.
Even if some players are content with incrementally improving existing strategies, it doesn't mean you have to go down the same path. Go ahead, explore new interesting strategies. Double scanners, new stone + imp designs, different types of vampires -
all these strategies are not just feasible under 94, they can be top performers. I know that for a fact. Or check back in a year, you'll see a different 94nop landscape.
And we also have LP and MP settings which provide even more choices. Under LP you can run many different component in parallel, giving lots of possible combinations. And optimizing for LP is easier, you can do well with minimal optimization. I think this
is the gameplay you advocate for.
This is why Corewar died as a game within a few years of the 94 standard being adopted.
A game with a steep learning curve requiring a large time investment was never going to be massively popular. But I have to partially agree with your assessment. The fact that a strategic idea alone is not enough and you need to optimize the warriors to
be competitive is an obstacle. This has nothing to do with a particular standard and is a core feature of the game. But this problem is easily solvable - we just need a simple to use, effective optimization tool which would allow the players to focus on
warrior strategies. I do have such a tool and plan to publish it. The fact that the emulators are outdated or user-unfriendly is not helping either. We need better software. And more events with online streams like Corewar Global Masters - I plan to
organize one in the near future.
If we view Corewar as a multiplayer game, then it is not quite dead (we do better than most computer games), just not very active. But here is another perspective - CoreWar is a mathematical problem of approximating a Nash equlibrium of a particular game.
If you look at it this way, the number of players is irrelevant. CoreWar is alive as long as there is at least one person making progress.
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