jcoffey-dev
f92330b552
Convoy routing is breadth-first over the fleets actually ordered to convoy this army, so it returns the shortest chain and answers null rather than guessing. It takes a set of fleets to treat as already gone, which is what the adjudicator will need to ask whether a convoy survives being attacked. The tests found a wrong assumption of mine rather than a wrong line of code: taking the Channel out of a London to Brest convoy leaves no route at all. The North Sea does not touch the Mid-Atlantic on this board -- the long way round is over the top through the Norwegian Sea -- so the Channel is the whole western sea route.
79 lines
3.7 KiB
Markdown
79 lines
3.7 KiB
Markdown
# Great Powers
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A browser rebuild of the classic seven-power negotiation game: one human
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against six computer powers, in one sitting.
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Not the name you expect, and [NOTICE.md](NOTICE.md) will make the argument at
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length once there is more to notice. The short version is the one the
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starship game already made on this site: the rules are free to rebuild, the
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trademark and the published artwork are not. "Great Powers" is what those
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seven were called at the time.
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## What this is, and what it is not
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**One human, six computer powers, one sitting.** The original is seven people
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over weeks. A hub with no traffic cannot deliver that, and nobody is going to
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wait months for six strangers — so the other six are played by the machine
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and a game is finished in an evening.
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**It still has to be a negotiation game.** A version where you simply write
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orders is a good movement puzzle and not this game. So:
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- **Both sides open.** Bots approach you with proposals; you approach them.
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Neither waits for the other.
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- **On real terms.** Offers are concrete and about this turn or the next few
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— support this move, keep out of that province, no attack until 1903 — and
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are accepted or refused on their merits, not by a die roll.
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- **Betrayal is a move, not a bug.** A bot can agree to support you and then
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not do it, and so can you. Bots remember who kept their word, tell each
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other, and price you accordingly. That is the game.
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The press is **structured rather than free text**: typed offers, deterministic
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reasoning, and no model anywhere in it. That makes betrayal auditable — you
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can read exactly why a power turned on you — and testable, which free text
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would not be.
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## The look and the sound
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**Cartoony.** Flat cel fills and one heavy outline, the same house style the
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other three games use, on a map generated from the topology in
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`src/game/map.ts` rather than traced from anybody's board.
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**It gets the whole screen.** The other three games live in a four-by-three
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cabinet because the machines they are rebuilding did. This one is not
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rebuilding a machine, and seventy-five provinces plus somebody trying to talk
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you out of Galicia do not fit in a letterbox. The map takes the viewport.
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**The music is not cartoony, and that is the point.** It is 1914: serious,
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and intense. The joke of this game is that something charming to look at is
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the cruellest thing on the site, and the score is what says so.
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**And the turn should be heard.** Orders resolve in silence in every online
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version of this game, which is a waste of the one moment anybody cares
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about. Armies grinding into each other, guns at sea, a convoy escorting
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something across, a unit being built, a unit falling back -- each of those is
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a different noise, generated by the synth like everything else on this site.
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## The board
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Seventy-five provinces, two adjacency graphs — an army walks the land, a
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fleet follows the water — and three provinces with two coasts that do not
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connect, where a fleet has to say which one it is on.
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The topology is a fact about a published game and free to use. The artwork is
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not, and there is none here: the map this game draws is generated from the
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data, the way the cave game's dodecahedron is.
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`npm test` checks the board against itself. The one that earns its keep is
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symmetry: an adjacency list this size is typed by hand once and wrong in
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three places unless something looks. It found the Skagerrak wired to the
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Baltic on the first run — which would have quietly opened a back door into
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the Baltic and made Denmark worthless.
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## Still to build
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- the adjudicator, and the DATC cases that prove it
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- the press: offers, memory, and the arithmetic of betrayal
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- the bots' actual play
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- the map, the orders, the music
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