What is wrong with the NES version of MULE

[_The Doctor__]

so work to depress prices and when it drops buy every bit of it up...

[reifsnyderb]

40 minutes ago, David_P said:

Selling to the store, in theory, depresses market prices (assuming that the market then holds more than is needed for the colony).

On the Atari version this is a fact.  If the store has an inventory, the price drops.  The computer has a habit of not planning ahead, however.  So, the computer players will, for example, convert their plots to smithore then run out of energy.  My strategy is to start with a food plot, keep a paper map of all crystite assays, try to get the best crystite plots, and remain energy independent.  Most of the time that works.  With a map, its usually possible to anticipate where high crystite plots will be before they are assayed.  So, I get those plots and usually do well.  The computer player, on the other hand, will do things like converting all of it's plots to crystite, run out of energy, then produce nothing the next turn. 

[+David_P]

First plot: Food (river)

Second plot: Energy

Third plot: Energy (preferably adjacent to prior plot)

 

Then go wild on Crystite, with potential to buy plain land plot adjacent to food (river) plot for additional food production.  (Nine times out of ten, other people will conveniently over-produce Smithore).

 

And make the computer run up prices on food and energy - also buy out the store on those to make your holdings more valuable, and force the computer to drive up prices.

 

I'm not saying that in a four player game my friends have, on occasion, physically restrained me from participating in auctions because I created artificial scarcity.  Not saying it didn't happen, either...

[zzip]

I have a "real estate" strategy I use sometimes.

grab the best plots I can, they don't need to be adjacent as I'm not going to develop them apart from maybe one food and one energy plot.

Also I buy land at auctions if cheap enough.

Then each turn I list the plots of land for auction that I think will fetch the most money at that point in the game.   Since listing land doesn't take long, there's plenty of time to go Wumpus hunting for extra cash if you have enough food.

 

If the other players are unwilling or unable to make a high enough bid for a plot, I'll refuse to sell and try selling the same plot during a later round

 

You will be broke first few rounds, but this is good as you get first dips on the best land.   by mid to late game, the CPU players will pay a ton for land especially if it is adjacent to theirs or has crystite.    This is where you make your killing.   I have won the game using this strategy.

[Zolaerla]

In Altirra, I just did a play-through to see what it would do to the economy by saving right at the end and selling vs. holding on to everything. I found out that Crystite will spoil down to 50 if you hold on to a LOT (my wife went from 77 to 50 as spoilage on turn 10, costing her first place... ouch). The prices are rolled AFTER production occurs, but BEFORE the auction starts, so a save state before everybody pressed the button could be reloaded at a slightly different time causing the prices to fluctuate. Smithore switched between 43 and 50 a couple times, but crystite was as random as ever, one time hitting 140 and another time hitting 53.

 

What I did find out is that, though the commodity values are rerolled right before the auction, the atrophy of value occurs after the auction phase, even before scoring the final round. If you sell everything in the last round and nobody else does, you drag the entire colony down, but only a small amount, if food and/or energy are high value like they tend to be in the games I play with the AI. My gap went from 1,783 above 2nd place from keeping everything, to 1,941 above 2nd place from selling everything, but even my final score was lower (as was everybody else's).

 

Final commodity values: Smithore - $50, Crystite - $104, Food - $118, Energy - $140
Blue (Me) - Smithore: 0, Crystite: 32 ($3,328), Food: 4 ($472), Energy: 6 ($840) = $4,640
Magenta (Wife) - Smithore: 0, Crystite: 36 ($3,744), Food: 3 ($354), Energy: 17 ($2,380) = $6,478
Green - Smithore: 0, Crystite: 27 ($2,808), Food: 0, Energy: 8 ($1,120) = $3,928
Orange - Smithore: 9 ($450), Crystite: 0, Food: 0, Energy: 9 ($1,260) = $1,710

 

So... it makes a very marginal difference selling everything. Might be a tie breaker in some instances.

 

See attached screen shots.

Edited May 5, 2023 by Zolaerla
fixed typo

[zzip]

9 hours ago, Zolaerla said:

In Altirra, I just did a play-through to see what it would do to the economy by saving right at the end and selling vs. holding on to everything. I found out that Crystite will spoil down to 50 if you hold on to a LOT (my wife went from 77 to 50 as spoilage on turn 10, costing her first place... ouch). The prices are rolled AFTER production occurs, but BEFORE the auction starts, so a save state before everybody pressed the button could be reloaded at a slightly different time causing the prices to fluctuate. Smithore switched between 43 and 50 a couple times, but crystite was as random as ever, one time hitting 140 and another time hitting 53.

 

What I did find out is that, though the commodity values are rerolled right before the auction, the atrophy of value occurs after the auction phase, even before scoring the final round. If you sell everything in the last round and nobody else does, you drag the entire colony down, but only a small amount, if food and/or energy are high value like they tend to be in the games I play with the AI. My gap went from 1,783 above 2nd place from keeping everything, to 1,941 above 2nd place from selling everything, but even my final score was lower (as was everybody else's).

 

So to summarize if you sell final round and nobody else does,   then you drive the price of that good slightly lower for everyone else and their final score will suffer relative to yours?  

 

Does the same apply to crystite since it isn't affected by supply and demand?

[Zolaerla]

3 hours ago, zzip said:

So to summarize if you sell final round and nobody else does,   then you drive the price of that good slightly lower for everyone else and their final score will suffer relative to yours?  

 

Does the same apply to crystite since it isn't affected by supply and demand?

 

If I sell just crystite on the final turn, everybody but green has a very slightly lower final score... I accidentally tracked green as having crystite in my previous message... ORANGE did. Green has none. I've tried it numerous times with just moving around to change the random timers in case some sort of randomization happens, but without selling, the end result never changes. With selling, the result changes, but nothing seems to change what it ends up being. So maybe crystite MULEs have less value afterwards? No... green has crystite MULEs, we just screwed him over on energy. Very strange...

 

Edited May 5, 2023 by Zolaerla

[JagChris]

On 4/29/2023 at 12:42 AM, Rybags said:

This online one looks promising.  Though it's a bit annoying that they seem to have used the C64 river graphics.

 

Have you guys watched any of these trial runs? Wampus looks a bit easy to catch. Or maybe they're just real good..What do you guys think of how itvruns?

 

Yeah the graphics are the C64 style(washed out) along with the music.

Maybe AA Mule fans can have a MULE night or MULE week if a few others here plan on supporting this.

 

 

[Rybags]

Not real impressed that they seemed to have based just about everything on the C64 version.

Just a quick look at that video - the mountains all seem too close to the river, they usually have better distribution than that.  Or maybe that's just by chance this time.

 

Agreed, the Wampus does seem too easy to catch, though the previously mentioned problem contributes.

It's been a while since I played, but I'm reasonably sure that if you move over the mountain the Wampus is on while he's away, he'll tend to pop up elsewhere.

Also, whether it's deliberate or a quirk of our version - you can walk over him when he appears but still miss him - the technique I used was generally to walk over him then do a tight circle which will increase the chance of catching him.

[Chilly Willy]

My family used to play four player MULE on my A400 back in the day. You WANT at least two players to collude on prices in the final round. It's the only way to get a fantastic finish. What you want to do is try to claim as much of the high and medium crystite plots as possible, and to put them all together in blocks as blocks of plots produce more than individual plots. One person needs to take one for the team/colony and make food and energy. For the very last round, buy as much extra energy and food as you can, and switch EVERYTHING to crystite, no matter whether the plot has any on it or not. Then in the last round auction, you need a player with at least one unit of the resource to sell, and one player with the most money to buy. The INSTANT sales are allowed, RUN FOR ALL YOU CAN AS LONG AS YOU CAN pushing the price up as high as possible. At the very last second, the other player will sell one unit. Do this for EVERY resource. However, crystite increases by 4 in the auctions, so you can drive its prices higher than anything else, which is why you want to focus on it the last couple of rounds. The worth of the colony is the final round auction price for every resource multiplied by how many of the resource everyone has. Driving the price as high as possible for everything in the final auction makes for insane scores for the colony... or the colony fails if pirates come and take all crystite, or the one player making food and energy gets hit in the last couple rounds. So there is some luck involved, but four players colluding can make insane colonies, and even two players can make really great colonies.

 

Edited May 16, 2023 by Chilly Willy
spelling

[devwebcl]

A 400 with only 16kb?

[JagChris]

7 hours ago, devwebcl said:

A 400 with only 16kb?

Weren't they expandable?

[JagChris]

On 4/29/2023 at 4:19 PM, David_P said:

With paddles you still require at least one joystick.

 

For the auctions and land grant, people use their own controller.  For outfitting MULEs, hunting the Wampus etc, the joystick gets passed around.

 

So, on an XE/XL, one joystick and a pair of paddles lets you have three players (plus one computer).

After extensive use I can only recommend this setup if you're in a pinch. Paddle controllers way too twitchy on the bidding for very good control.

 

I've been digging through storage looking for my other joystick. No luck so far.

[Chilly Willy]

On 5/17/2023 at 2:53 AM, JagChris said:

Weren't they expandable?

Yes, quite so. I started off with a stock A400 with the cassette drive. I immediately got the 32K memory card for the A400, and a BKey keyboard to replace the stock keyboard. I later got the Mosaic 64K memory card for the 400/800, and a Percom floppy drive. I used a Sony Trinitron TV to make the RF look as good as possible. Still have that old TV... and the 400, of course. It's retired with dignity after having faithfully served so many years.