f13.net

http://www.side-quest.com/caption/ (http://www.side-quest.com/caption/)

See if people vote you clever.

Edit.schild: Rename.

This is a good thread. Stickied.

If this isn't love Schild I don't know what is...

http://nigoro.jp/game/rosecamellia/rosecamellia.php (http://nigoro.jp/game/rosecamellia/rosecamellia.php)

Yea, saw that a few days ago. Played it.

Those girls took a beating at every level of difficulty.

I actually read the site that Kotaku sniped it from.

That was amazing!  Way too hard on a laptop, unfortunately.

Too many ninjas!!!!

http://www.foddy.net/Ninjas.html (http://www.foddy.net/Ninjas.html)

http://houyokusen.com/tmp/377178_pokemon.swf

Stare at it for hours.

http://onslaught.playr.co.uk/about.html

Lots - o - fun at work.

That Game is EVIL.

Anyone got any strategies ?

So far, nuke and shockwave. Don't get black hole, you don't get cash for enemies killed by it. Fully upgrade your turret first, then get a nuke, then work on shockwave. Shockwave and the zappers slow enemies so it works well. I put buff turrets in the middle next to the nuke symbol +damage one.
(http://www.filedump.net/dumped/ons1190910874.jpg)

I finally got bored of it, nukes and shockwaves work for along time, you can plant railguns so they hit everything along a line, but I'm not sure if they are worth the cash. I got to wave 500 before I decided to kill myself by slamming the next wave button. It looks like only one upgrade works, you can't stack +damage towers. I tried but I couldn't find any combos with the later towers (sniper, railgun).
(http://www.filedump.net/dumped/ons21190914303.jpg)

WTF??!


Edit :  Christ, that worked a treat.  Combos FTW or summat.

Vector TD (http://www.candystand.com/play.do?id=18047)

When you get bored with that one.  I think this one's a little bit harder.

Glad i could turn you guys on to it.

Strategies? (http://onslaught.playr.co.uk/about.combos.html)

Vector TD is fun, but those ads piss me off. I can beat all the beginner and intermediate maps, but the hard maps are, well hard. I don't know the tricks to it and I gave up trying to figure it out.

The predecessor, of course, was desktop tower defense. I think it's still the best one and the most fun. I've beaten every mode except the only splash, only squirts, and the one that sends only spawners at you.

Can't seem to get past 20 waves at a time.   :cry:

I get to about 5000 kills and then they get so tough they just bull through my defenses.  Guess I am going to have to consider strategically placed black holes to thin the crowds a bit.  I haven't been using them because if you aren't careful the take over the game and you get no more $$$$.

is cash flow in the main game greater then in the Tutorial? cause i managed to get to wave 45 or so in the tutorial and i couldn't even manage to come remotely close to maxing out any weapon, let alone starting any kind of combo.

As I found to my immense embarrassment, you take 1 combo (3 turrets) in a proper place and max the first one (usually the Launcher) and give it some Rate too.  Then you move onto the next turret to get the combo started, then the 3rd one.

It's actually easier than it looks and you get more money than you think.  By wave 45, you should almost Certainly have a 3-Combo spewing out Nukes, which can take 3 waves AT A TIME.

Bhodi really made this game easy for me.

My preferred early strategy so far is build a cannon somewhere you get good coverage.  Upgrade the cannons damage every time you get enough cash, you should stay ahead of the waves just enough to keep one-shotting everything as it enters your firing range.  Once the cannon is maxed build a rocket launcher just behind it but close enough for them to sync up.  Start upgrading the rocket launchers damage.  Between the two of them you should still be able to kill everything as it comes into range.

Once the rocket launcher is at max damage start extending the range of the cannon. As soon as it's range is outside that of the rocket launcher it will begin firing cluster bombs which will be able to pretty much one shot the next 30 or 40 waves by itself which should give you cash and time enough to prep other defenses.  It's simple, only needs two weapons and is a good beginning to some of the advanced combo structures.

At this point I usually go for a middle game strategy with an emplacement of two cannon, laser, and two rocket launchers all in sync range but with the two cannon on opposite sides so that they are not in sync.  If you do the ranges right this gives you an emplacement that will fire big laser cluster bombs, followed by BFG missles and 2 nukes as the things advance toward you.  Stick a couple of maxxed out tasers near where your max range is for your emplacement and that will hold everything still while you beat on it.  Should get you to wave 300 or so in good order.

End game has me scratching my head though, there are people on the leader boards clocking in 15,000+ kills on the classic map (approx wave 1500) and I don't know how they do it.  I have created a defense with black holes that could have gone indefinitely but you don't get kill credit for black holes (I think.)

http://www.littledeviant.com/

http://www.addictinggames.com/treasureofcutlassreef.html

I really liked the art style of that one...game play, not so much. but cool all things considered.

Isn't that a Scion Ad?

Yes.

This is one of my all time favorites.

Urban Dead (http://www.urbandead.com/index.html)  :thumbs_up:  (Can we get some Zombie smilies?)

No.

 :sad_panda:

Sorry.  It's not you.  I'd also protest if you wanted feet.

(http://www.barhah.com/images/smilies/getitoff.gif)
(http://www.barhah.com/images/smilies/ouch.gif)
(http://www.barhah.com/images/smilies/zombieeye.gif)
(http://www.barhah.com/images/smilies/panic.gif)

Le awesome.

I used to play the shit outta that.  Then I just switched off.

It seems to have changed quite a bit...

There is also an optional "Skin" that will bring GUI like sexiness to this browser based game (http://udtoolbar.mozdev.org/).

(http://udtoolbar.mozdev.org/Screenshot1.jpg)

Thanks for the zombie smilies..but can we get them in the little posting window smiley thing here?

Wow. Nice.


Wonder if my char is still there...

I was still alive, with my 1 xp point....i need to get better at firing guns or something.

It's not a game but it is kind of interesting, 15 billion pixels of Da Vinci (http://www.haltadefinizione.com/en/cenacolo/look.asp).  It takes a while to load...

http://fffff.at/tourettes-machine/ (http://fffff.at/tourettes-machine/)

PORTAL the flash version!!!!!!!

http://portal.wecreatestuff.com/ (http://portal.wecreatestuff.com/)

OK that was cool. Difficulty much more to my liking. I'm up to level 23, unfortunately I've run out of time to play :/

It saves your progress in a cookie.  There are 40 levels in all.

http://www.gamedesign.jp/flash/chatnoir/chatnoir.html (http://www.gamedesign.jp/flash/chatnoir/chatnoir.html)

Too easy:
(http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/8564/chatnoirqk7.png)

More incredibly evil tower defense (http://www.handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/Game.asp).

The challenge is seeing how few circles you can fill in, not how many.

(http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/2333/catnoirum8.jpg)

The challenge is to trap the cat.

I trapped the cat.

We can layer all the rules on it we want. My cat is still going nowhere. :oh_i_see:

Admit it, all the extra dots were just taunting it as it struggled feebly for escape.

Damned escape-prone bastard, I swear that cat is untrappable sometimes.

But seriously, Desktop Tower Defender will consume your life, assuming you haven't heard of it before (which, in retrospect, is unlikely).

The only areas I can't beat on it are the 'all squirts', 'all splash', and the one that is all splitters.

http://kittytoxin.deviantart.com/gallery/

NSFW, but this is the most beautiful fetish model / British scientist / unrepentant geek-babe you will see... ever?  She's even wearing an XKCD shirt in one of them.

Wow.

My mind?

Really, really blown.

(http://lh4.google.com.au/Lamaros/R1Yy4cOQZzI/AAAAAAAAAEo/vPxCiSH1WME/cat.JPG)

fuck i'm bored.

I am posting my scores in the "Bat Country" group.

Since my pathetic scores are the only ones who show up, it looks like i created that group ...

Christmas Crap for the Kiddies! (http://www.akidsheart.com/holidays/christms/chgames.htm)  (http://www.mymerrychristmas.com/forum/images/smilies/109.gif)

That Gingerbread SOB is hard to catch and he doesn't stay caught long.

Decorate the Xmas tree was fun.  They need more clothing options for the elves. 

The Gift Dig game is Minesweeper without the numbers.   :ye_gods:

Click Me!  (http://www.pugvillage.com/forum/images/smilies/icon_coolsnow.gif)  (http://snowmanconstructionkit.com/create_snowman.html)

(http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/5070/snowmanitsmydickinaboxshk0.jpg)

Title: its my dick in a box
Creator: schild
Date: 2007-12-10 05:15:41

Your snowman has a sort of swamp poop look on his face.  Why?

Perhaps he's singing (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-nzhsRCncY).

Have a smelly Xmas!  (http://www.funny-games.biz/christmas-with-the-sproutifarts.html)

When Granny Poppypants made her appearance, I decided I didn't really want to win the game that much.

I can't beat that tower defense on hard and it is starting to frustrate me.

If you want to spoil yourself, some people have posted their winning Tower Defense strategies on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suGX9rAexB8).

Where is your God diploma NOW???

Bah, that's no fun.

Yeah, juggling is totally cheesy.  I can't anyone who pulled off hard mode that way really deserved it.

Hey, anyone want a web-based dungeon explorer-type thing?

http://www.kongregate.com/games/garin/monsters-den/

Jeeze, I'm gonna be so not productive tomorrow at work :P Thanks! I think.

http://www.travelpod.com/traveler-iq (http://www.travelpod.com/traveler-iq)

Holy shit that dungeon crawler is awesome.

It's better than most "real" RPGs I've played.   :ye_gods:

I'm doing pretty well.

The closest I've gotten to is Warsaw.

Hebrew School paid off!

Much fun. But placing a ton of the "medium" questions in Africa fucked me over.

Goddamnit.  I'm so screwed.

That is a fun dungeon crawl but it gets repetitive after level 10 when you "win" the game and get "infinity" mode which is just that everything ramps up by 10 percent each level and repeats over and over again.

Expert mode is moderatly diverting. But still it's the same over and over in the end.

It's a kind of progressquest imo. Really what a lot of people seek in mmo. Shitty combat and dingratz and a lot of gear. WITH PURPLE!

Does the max difficulty mode have more purple loot, even though it says less loot overall?

Hardcore had a fair amount of purples...it didn't seem much more difficult though. My warrior went with 2-handers the whole way, while in the front row.

If ProgressQuest had graphics, game mechanics more complex than its current abstraction, and more of a story, it'd be the perfect RPG.

New action space flash game that looks kind of fun.  I haven 't tried it yet.   CLICK ME!  (http://64.20.36.214/lucasforums.com/images/smilies/beam3.gif) (http://www.warpfire.com/)

I've become obsessed with Dolphin Olympics 2 (http://www.kongregate.com/games/arawkins/dolphin-olympics-2).  I've made it up to Saturn, but that is it so far.

As a contrast to the infinite-levelled dungeon game, here's something that take 5 minutes to play: Passage (http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/index.html)

The only hint I'll give you (because quite a few people miss it) - you can move up & down as well as lift & right

http://www.nikon.co.jp/main/eng/feelnikon/discovery/universcale/nano.swf

Saw that on digg.  Was def. fun to mess around with for 10 mins.

wow I want to punch whoever come up with the UI for that. It's simply a fucking mess. Great concept, horrible execution.

bigger/smaller goes to the next scale, there's no way to see the items of the same scale side by side, if you move to a new scale it pops up a big menu that you're probably already read, the list goes on and on.

Terrible.

Scrollwheel zooming is love though.

I forgot amoebas were that big.

Shift (http://onemorelevel.com/game/shift)

Interesting (but evil) concept.  Neat game.

"The timer is a lie"

A distraction, in the same way that Wikipedia is a distraction (http://xkcd.com/214/): http://tvtropes.org

Too fun!!!

http://guessmycrime.blogspot.com/ (http://guessmycrime.blogspot.com/)

Word of advice: Smiling in a mugshot makes you look like stupid, white trash. Even if you're asian. Or black. Or, well, anybody.

I found myself playing "Hot or Not" with the mugshots.  Is that wrong?

We play something like that with our local paper, which lists EVERY arrest in my city (which is why I had to give up pot, even getting a violation would cost me my job because it'd be in the paper). We say the age and home address and the other person has to guess the crime.

Over 50, it's almost always DUI.

Sky, where the fuck do you live that is so ghetto you get accosted by your own home, but that also seems to have a decent library?

Most places have decent libraries. WE ARE EVERYWHERE.

Also, most cities in upstate NY are pretty ghetto once you get over 10k people. Rust belt and whatnot.

Ah, so....like most of Connecticut?

Bringing useless distractions back from the dead to pimp my first game (http://www.kongregate.com/games/damijin/oh-buoy).

Its got many flaws, but its my first finished game project. Flash is pretty cool.

Very clever game..

Magic Pen. (http://www.bubblebox.com/play/puzzle/975.htm)  Very similar to Crayon Physics.

You have to BURN the ROPE. (http://www.kongregate.com/games/Mazapan/you-have-to-burn-the-rope)



 :drill:



YHtBtR Trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjWMXjjdBgI)

Biggest problem I had was the United fucking States. Damn country is too fucking large, if you can't remember if a city is on the left or right hand side of central Kenya, then who cares.

Guessing which part of flyover land hicksville USA is in becomes a problem.

http://members.iinet.net.au/~pontipak/redsquare.html

After several tries I made it 20 seconds.  I'm done now.

21.67, keep trying.

Neat time travelling robot puzzle thing:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Scarybug/chronotron

The worlds hardest game. (http://armorgames.com/play/1043/the-worlds-hardest-game)

Pretty damn close anyway. 

Anyone want a free, Flash-based MMOG?

http://www.maidmarian.com/Sherwood.htm

That game is so bad it makes me want to play WoW again.

Drunken Masters (http://www.kongregate.com/games/DannySeven/drunken-masters (http://www.kongregate.com/games/DannySeven/drunken-masters))

Bartender drink mixing/flair game. Well made, good fun.

zomg fun minigames! (http://www.gacha-net.com/enjoy/tokusyu/new/index.html)

No Japanese required.

(http://www.gacha-net.com/enjoy/tokusyu/new/img/ttl.jpg)

Hey, it's free. You get what you paid for.  :grin:

http://www.smart-kit.com/games/poiser/

That would be fun if it told you what the next block is, as it is now the only way to win is clickspamming and/or luck.  (64th place, bitch!)

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Blips/pandemic-2

Build a disease to kill everybody.




Muahahahaha!

Gladiatus*- Hero of Rome (http://s5.gladiatus.com/game/c.php?uid=156273)


Browser-based silliness, but something to keep you mildly entertained in your cube.







*this is the same thing the harem girls said about the emperor with the pube in his teeth.  :rimshot:

You dirty swine! (http://s5.gladiatus.com/game/c.php?uid=158423)

 :awesome_for_real:

Heh. All sorts of Euro-Engrish there.

I have no fucking clue about this quest. The first little expedition I did had an icon for the helmet as a reward, but I don't seem to have it or see a way to end the quest if I do. Bizarro.

The quests are weird. Usually if you just pick one of the expedition locations you will eventually get a quest drop (if it isn't something specific to one of the locations like bandit fingers).

Yeah, I figured it out. Got the drop from that expedition totally by mistake, the mail attachment thingy for quest rewards is funky. Then I lost the next three expeditions. Going to muck some stables, fun.
:awesome_for_real:

Hahaha nice.

The combat spam reads like slashfic.  I don't know if that's a bad thing or an awesome thing.

I played once to see what it was like. I'll probably never be back. Web games aren't quite There yet for me.

Don't be sad because I let my weapon get down on you.

Also, I think the zombie horde is searching for your library.

Wait until you get another desk job.

Minimized timers ftw!

Urban dead not so much, had a newbie fireman idling on a pc I'm configuring. Got back to it a half hour later and he's dead :| That game is odd.

I had one for nearly 3 years and didn't like webgames then :P There was even a time when there was 45 minutes between calls and they bored me.

OMG Tangerines! (http://www.kongregate.com/games/thegamehomepage/tangerine-panic)

I don't know why this isn't on here, it's a terrible oversight that must be immediately corrected!

Pie Hard! (http://www.freeworldgroup.com/games2/gameindex/pie.htm)

Am I missing something with Pie Hard?

I doubt it.  It's a strange game, but strangely addicting.

There are multiple levels but the fact you only get one life and the strange hit detection makes it a challenge to get to them.

Give it a chance!

http://the-minusworld.com/2008/09/11/the-resident-evil-activity-book-for-kids/ (http://the-minusworld.com/2008/09/11/the-resident-evil-activity-book-for-kids/)

light-Bot (http://www.i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_id=33893)

Despite the horrid wall-jumping mechanism, I'm still posting this. Cute little 8bittish thing from the Gish dude.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/463241

Our own dannyBstyle did the music. The music is much better than the walljumping.

I agree.

http://www.crazymonkeygames.com/fullscreen.php?game=Pandemic-2

Destroying the world is fun, so far I've been able to take out everything but Madagascar.  In fact, I infected everyone in the world BUT Madagascar without a single death, and then BAM!
All fear the mighty Narf parasite.

(http://i34.tinypic.com/2cesq4k.jpg)

(Couldn't resist posting this)

I was suprised to find that this was still around.  This was a great distraction for me back in the late 80's.

http://dopewars.sourceforge.net/

Cursor * 10 (http://www.nekogames.jp/mt/2008/01/cursor10.html)

Pretty cool. I haven't beaten it.

Beat it without touching a single pyramid. You have to have some serious speed to do it with the highest score.

(http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/39720/me/typeracer.png)

I know it's old, but can someone please get me away from Typeracer (http://play.typeracer.com/).

Also:
(http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/39720/me/mice.png)

I probably could've hit every pyramid in one of those last two if I thought about it. But high scores are for typing games. :awesome_for_real:

99 bricks (http://www.kongregate.com/games/WeirdBeardGames/99-bricks)

It's basically reverse tetris, how high can you build with 99 tetris blocks.

The trick seems to be to keep all your columns linked together as much as possible.

Haha, Typeracer is great.  After my second race it popped up a giant captcha to make me prove I wasn't cheating.   :awesome_for_real:

It popped one up for me too, I beat my last score it was like OK FINE JUST GO MAKE FUN OF 8 YEAR OLDS, MEANIE.

I was shocked that it knew why I was playing.

I played a bit this game : http://www.kongregate.com/games/ArmorGames/sonny
not too bad I though

I seem to have a problem with that game.

It will be rock solid, 0 gaps for about 50 blocks, then it will just suddenly start swaying and splitting in half.

Also, everyone check out http://www.kongregate.com/

The Game. (http://www.kongregate.com/games/nutcasenightmare/the-game)  It's not what you think it is, surprisingly enough.

That was fun :)

Audiotorium (http://www.playauditorium.com/). A really fun addicting puzzle game. I'm stuck on Spring 3:6. Beat it.

This is worth playing, try it.

Desperately needs to be a PSN title with uncompressed audio.

Yeah. Like flow, this would transfer over very well.

Raptor Safari (http://raptorsafari.com/play.php).  Fun driving game.  With raptors.

I was going to post this as I just came across it yesterday. I'm not surprised someone here already saw it as it's a really good one. Try it if you haven't yet.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/ArmorGames/achievement-unlocked

852 seconds. I'm certain you'll all do it faster.

Took me about that long on the first time through, and 350 seconds on the second try.  Cute game.

This is a pretty good "Twenty Questions" type thingy: http://en.akinator.com/

It didn't know Lady Guinevere.

Maybe you don't know Lady Guinevere as much as you thought you did?

Fun game on Kongregate. (http://www.kongregate.com/games/urbansquall/bloody-fun-day)


Description: "What would Death himself do if he were surrounded by ultra-cute critters? Kill them, of course! You play the reaper, who needs to kill red cuties in order to stay alive. Killing other cuties will help charge super powers that make it easier to get to the red cuties. How long can you survive before the dwindling cutie population stifles your life? You can’t help but have a bloody fun day in this addictive puzzler."

I tried to give this a go but something's frakked. I get the question speech bubble but it's empty and clicking on responses doesn't seem to do anything at all.

This goes here. It's a fun game, I wasted about 3 hours playing it today.

Daft Punk (http://www.najle.com/idaft) sound board. Amused me for a while.

desktop tower defence update

http://www.kongregate.com/games/CasualCollective/desktop-td-pro

is it still centered around "juggling" at high levels, deleting and re-creating a tower to fool the pathfinding? If so, no thanks.

This is what most TD games devolve into. Which is a shame. Fieldrunners on the iPhone could've been excellent if you didn't have to juggle on fucking easy mode for some of the final levels. Lame. Bad Design, imo.

Edit: Or rather, I suppose you could eventually drop enough lightning towers and build them up by level 100 in fieldrunners to not have to juggle, but that's really not fun either.

I fucking hate juggling. I prefer actual creative maze construction, not a single wall where you delete and re-create one tower.

This is pretty awesome

http://armorgames.com/play/3785/llama-adventure

Entertaining one button game (http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/510303).

The company of myself. (http://armorgames.com/play/4918/the-company-of-myself)

Pretty good -- reminds me of Chronotron.  Also a little of Braid, except not shitty.

Fun game

After a while, I notice that this reminds me of Jet Set Willy but with Flash animation lag and remember that ctrl-W closes the browser window.

Choice of the dragon (http://www.choiceofgames.com/dragon/)

Always I want to be with you, and make believe with you, and live in harmony harmony CLIFF (http://games.adultswim.com/robot-unicorn-attack-twitchy-online-game.html)

That game is way more fun and awesome then it has any right being.  :drill:

Yes. It's incredible.

Saw it a few weeks ago and all I could think was "This is awesome, but it's a million times more awesome with Erasure blaring."

http://images.google.com/hosted/life

Life photo archive counts as a massive distraction.

(http://www.gstatic.com/hostedimg/d1d3e944e9b3e4c0_large)

There's a guy in that photo that looked like he time traveled back to the 50's from current day.

RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE

http://www.notdoppler.com/burritobison.php (http://www.notdoppler.com/burritobison.php)

I can't stop playing this thing.

Damn you. 

http://armorgames.com/play/10317/gemcraft-labyrinth

For your Tower Defense ding/grats.

Argh.

Haha! We went there on our last trip to Disney.

This is an awesome game.  :awesome_for_real:

Edit: Maxed buffed out. Best time 1min 14 secs through entire game.

Best I've done is 1:10 - but most of my times are at least 10 seconds slower than that.

I'm addicted, damn

I got 1:06 once.  You get a huge speed boost for breaking through the clouds, so if you can keep slamming off the flying things and getting that boost you can keep your speed pegged pretty high.

1:07 is my best. Lucky cloud slam into hang glider and a pogo at the end to eat up a lot of time.

1:01:30.   :drill:

I just did 1:09 which is my best time so far.  Oddly, it happened when I had to get up from the computer just after the second door and let my guy flop through the third stage on his own. 

http://pleasingfungus.com/#Manufactoria

Proper brain twisting done quite properly.  This shit is hard yo.

Oh yeah, I meant to post about Prior (http://armorgames.com/play/10843/prior).  It's artsy.

(edit) Manufactoria is awesome.

I don't get it.

At all.

Which for some reason infuriates me to no end.

What am I supposed to do in the 2nd level ?

edit: duh... got it. Games like this are probably not for me. My brain hurts.

I got past the first few but even just the first tier of more complex puzzles is really hurting my brain.  And my ego.

That bison thing is addicting.

Also it appears to be a semi-knockoff of one of my favorite wacky shockwave games, which I can't remember the name of...something crash. Japanese thing, really weird.

Manufactoria is not my deal.  I have to get my brain crunched all day at work.  Burrito Bison is much more my mindless cup of tea. 

Nanaka Crash or something?  I remember that one.  Burrito Bison is superior in all ways, though.

1:04 even, ugh, was "Pants On Fire" fast the whole last section and up in the clouds most of the time. Needed a better launch I guess. Got all the achievements and all the powerups, guess it is time to try another game!

Burrito Bison is absolutely spectacular.  And I curse whoever posted it here.

Argh.  Manufactoria's inability to have paths cross over each other is driving me nuts.  I have the state machine in my head, but I can't seem to implement it in two dimensions.  (I'm on the RoboMecha level, where the output needs to be the input with the last item shifted to the beginning.)

(edit) Ha. HAAAA!   I got it, and I am so fucking proud of myself that I have to share.  Spoiler alert!


Hint: When it's not possible to connect one part of your state machine to another, you have to DUPLICATE the part you want to connect to.  Fucking devilish.

I can't get my head around Robocats at all.

The annoying thing is I've done Robostilts, but I want to advance along both lines to master the techniques.  My head fucking hurts now.

Try holding Shift.

 :awesome_for_real:

Here's my Robomecha.


Sam, I never considered turning the switches so the robots are entering the switch thru one of the output sides, holy crap that saves a ton of space.
have fun with Androids, it's harder IMO.  I'm on Rocket Planes which I think I have a way to do, but have to wait till tomorrow to implement it bc I'm off to work.

I had to trial and error it a bit, I'm starting to realise that it's all about the right numbers of loops.

My solution to Robocats

Did this one myself before you posted, but your solution looks better than mine, I think.

 :ye_gods:

 :why_so_serious:

Maybe that'll make Androids a bit easier.  It's the last one I've got left in that tier.  I'm pretty sure the solution is going to be something inductive where the entire tape gets rewritten several times...

I hadn't thought of using conveyor belts to force bots back onto branch units; that helped me solve Milidogs.

Arg, you bastard.  I've been brooding over that one for an hour and clicking your spoiler made me realise how much of I tit I was not even using my own previous cleverness to fucking sort what is actually an easy problem.

Done now tho.

I would like to comment that if someone makes a MMOG where the crafting is something like Manufactoria but relies on solving uniquely generated problems (so you can't just look up a walkthrough), I will probably never be seen again.

I just completed Robomecha, but it said 'I got bored, you fucking suck, you don't have to try again, but I know you can do better'.

My ego is now in the toilet and I feel ashamed and slightly used.

I don't even want to post the monstrosity I built, nor click on the two solutions to Mecha that's been done for fear that I'll just top myself.

This game is fiendish

Argh.

So much more elegant than mine.

Ah, you don't have to return faulty robots to the start.. that will help alot..

Was going to post robomecha, but mine looks like greebo's.

Androids was a lot easier than I expected.  The solution ended up being pretty simple... I want to poke at it some more and shrink it down to run faster, this was just a rough first attempt.


(edit) My robo-children solution works, but the malevolence engine lost patience with how long it takes to run.  I'm not sure if I'm satisfied with that or if I'm going to need to optimize it to feel better about myself.


(edit) The "multiply by 8" one made me LOL.  I imagine that one might stump you for a little while if you never learned cheesy binary math shortcuts in school.

My RoboMecha is way less elegant than any of yours:

Fake edit: Hoho, I JUST realized that you can flip the branch mechanisms with spacebar. Maybe I can actually fit my solution into the space available on Android now.
Real edit: Also, when the Malevolence Engine runs out of patience that means there's an infinite loop in your machine somewhere. It lets you go to the next level, but you didn't really solve it.

And one more: This thing is smart. I put in this "solution" for Robo-children and it called me a cheater and told me it was disappointed. I like it anyway, though:

Not really.  It will do this, of course, but it also does it if your machine is just more shite than it needs to be.

Trust me, your Robomecha is a DaVinci compared to mine.

Also, Sam, you KNOW you're going to go back and tinker with it until you're happy.  You're fooling no-one.

My saved levels are gone because I had to reinstall everything... again.

What does it mean when "fewest pieces" is in green?

Had to redo the mecha, so made it a small as I could think. Can probably be done better though.

I think I've reached the limit of my competence.

Soldiers -> Rocket Planes are difficult and fiendish wee buggers for me and I can't get my head around the lessons I've learned up till now to make any headway.  Which I know isn't right.

Sam, did that Androids solution pass?  Because I don't think it works for BBRR, could be wrong tho.

Edit:  Oh, nm.  I see it now.  Nice.

Here's my Androids.


E2:  Also, on soldiers, I tried the easy way and it worked.... but my solution doesn't work for null tape.  I don't think there is a way to make it work either, without green/yellow writers...  annoying.

Is the game poorly written or is it just me? I have no idea what I'm meant to be doing sometimes, thinking the instructions are different to what they actually want me to do.

I don't really know what Androids is asking me to do. Is it asking me to make sure the numbers of red and blue are equal? In any order? Or to check that the numbers of blue at the start are followed by an equal number of reds, and no more?

Symmetric blocks of red and blue.  bbbrrr, br, bbbbbrrrrr, and so on.  There's two basic methods to the solutions, one involves painting the tape with yellow or green while you count blues, then counting them down as you count reds.  The other is just a big symmetrical sort that brute forces it and takes advantage that the tape can't be more than 50 steps.

--Dave

But you're not wrong :  It's actually an awesome and addictive game that does itself no favours in the instructions or presentation department.

This is one for my fellow programmers.  I've been distracting myself with http://pexforfun.com/ lately.  Pretty much it gives you failing test cases, and you have to code up a solution that will pass all testing conditions.

Yes I am proud to be a complete programmer nerd.

 :uhrr:

I am pretty sure Manufactoria is a better programming game than anything that has you actually type code out.

I'm also on Soldiers and I'm trying to figure out what the "easy way" might be.   :uhrr:  I've had a few ideas but none of them resemble "easy".

Dude, here is "the easy way".  If you look at it I think you're going to be disappointed.

Oh, my bad, that was the multiply-by-8 one.  Yeah, I got that one.   :why_so_serious:  What's the one where you have to put a yellow dot in the center of the tape?  That's the one I can't figure out.

(edit) Police.  That's the bastard.

Ah!


And not entirely true. Misread you after looking at the other answers here. What you say is correct! Mine:

I don't like it's uglyness, I guess someone else can make it smaller? I like Samwise's version.

Police looks like a bastard. The others look like what was done earlier, just combined. But Police? Ugh.

Figured out Rocket Planes.  I swear the hardest part of that one was just getting it all to fit!  I had to redo it 3 times and reuse as much of the machine as possible before it all fit in.

Yes, Police looks like a horrible thing.  No idea yet how the heck to find the middle of the string.  Also Officers looks pretty heinous.  Add 1 to the binary string eh?  Easy if it ends in red, but if it ends in blue?  Not so much.

My thinking on Police is that you go something like:


but I don't think a machine that goes through all those phases is going to fit on the board.

Which one was rocket planes again? I don't remember struggling with that one too much. But then, once you 'get it' that first time you always wonder why it took you so long.

Rocket Planes:  Output=the input but with all blues at the front.

Got Police!  Sam, I didn't use your idea really, but you did get me thinking on a tangent that eventually led me to the solution.  It's a PITA to implement.  The board is barely big enough.  I'll spoiler it and post it up if anyone asks.

Ed:  And what does Police open up?  [Accept:  (Even length) Strings that repeat halfway through]    :ye_gods:!

Kudos on police.

Since I've got stuck, I've taken to redefining my existing things.  The parts go green when you're doing 'better'.

I won't put this in spoilers, but you can paste it over your own robocats to see if it's better.  Don't forget to toggle the 'don't wipe mine with Ironwoods you bastard' button.

?lvl=6&code=c12:4f3;p12:7f7;p12:6f2;p12:5f2;c12:8f3;c12:9f3;c12:10f3;c11:7f1;c11:6f1;c11:5f2;c13:7f0;

Compact and Bijou.

Ironwood, I stole yours.

Teachers was fairly easy, but it opens up two more miserably hard ones.

Gah, took me 3 years to figure the first one (lavalamp) out, until I discovered that you can have a 'check loop' on a particular color ON THE SAME SWITCH by an immediate loop back to it! I was thinking too 'physically', if that makes sense.

Same.

I gave up on the one that makes you do binary math. My brain can't handle that right now.

If you like Manufactoria, you should really try SpaceChem.

Rocket Planes didn't give me much trouble and didn't even take up much space, but then I opted for the most sluggish solution possible (each trip through the machine shifts one blue dot one position).   :awesome_for_real:

I way overbuilt mine.  After looking at yours I was able to change 2 things and take out 16 pieces.  Now space isn't a problem.

Officers!

Took me at least 3 straight hours to puzzle out this one.

After spending about half an hour on Officers last night and getting nowhere, I started over from scratch this morning, determined to get it working before I left for work, and knocked it out in about fifteen minutes.  Sleeping on it always helps.   :awesome_for_real:

Yours are always prettier than mine.  I build urban sprawl.

Thank god Generals is fairly easy.  Have you done Judiciary, Politicians or Academics yet?

I don't think so.  I was tempted to tackle Generals this morning because my instinct tells me I can just take the Officers solution and flip all the colors and it'll work.

Besides that, the two I haven't done yet are the "put a yellow mark in the middle" one and the "reverse the input" one.  And each of those has something locked behind it.  Now that Officers has gotten me used to the technique of using a mark as a "cursor" I think those two won't be too difficult.

Well, you are taking one off the tape instead of adding one on, so just reversing all the gates won't completely work.  Probably still easiest to build from the same solution though as lots of it will be the same.

It completely worked.   :awesome_for_real:


I literally took my Officers solution and flipped every color (red and blue, yellow and green -- I could have left yellow and green alone but I was feeling silly).  No other changes, and it worked flawlessly.

I did mine yesterday too.  I tried to make it different, but in the end I ended up with exactly the same thing and all the switches flipped...  I was hoping you wouldn't notice.   :grin:

Here's my Police.  Curious to see yours, grebo... I didn't have that much trouble making it fit, but I did end up using pretty much the entire board.  Makes Judges difficult since the obvious solution to that one would involve building something off the tail end of Police...


(edit) hmm, I was able to do a little pruning.  Might actually have enough room to implement Judges off that.

Here's my Police.  It's not much uglier than yours.    :awesome_for_real:

I agree on Judges, I'll have to get out the heavy duty pruning shears.

Still fiddling with Manufactoria on and off.  I quite enjoyed Academics.

http://www.devastatingexplosions.com/ (http://www.devastatingexplosions.com/)

Boom!

Heh

Awww the new chocobo theme for FF XIII-2 is here! :3

I bet it is evocative of the iconic whimsy of previous chocobo themes and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEUOOgNzOv4

hm

I... what?

I mean... I guess it sounds a little bit like it... then "crazy" is one word to describe it. It's like when they put this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGIswJBe9PU) in 10, just odd compared to everything else.

(http://forums.f13.net/index.php?action=dlattach;attach=5685;type=avatar)

Pretty amazed that's actually track 2 on disc 4 according to another youtube video.

Kingdom Rush. (http://armorgames.com/play/12141/kingdom-rush)  I'm mostly tired of tower defense type games but this one got me good.

I'd recommend people to try it out. Best flash TD I've ever played, and you can pick it up for the iPad I think.

This game is brilliant. Thank you. Bookmarked.

Is there an endless mode ?

God, I wish.  None of the levels last long enough for me to achieve my dream of filling the screen with fully upgraded artillery.

Yeah.  Was why I asked.  I'm replaying to get all the units fully upgraded to see the funnies, but even the last level screwed me on the Boom Boom.

That was excellent. Got all the cheevos, and all the stars including for the Heroic and Iron challenges, gave them money and also did the bonus content.

The challenge levels are fun, especially iron mode where it's one long wave and you aren't allowed to build certain tower types.

Is there a way to give them money that doesn't require a goddamn Paypal account?

I bought their iPad app verison, it's pretty fun ($2.99).

Though I find I'm not as good at this game as I originally thought.  :why_so_serious:  Stupid map 10 (or somewhere around there) is stumping me on normal mode for cheesecakesake.

My strategy advice is below.  Spoilering because figuring this stuff out through experimentation was fun for me, and being told it straight out may just ruin the game for you.  You have been warned.

You're mad.  Barbarians RULE.
 :why_so_serious:

Here's my 0.02€.

That would all be fine if there was ever cause to max it like that.

But alas, without an endless mode, there never is.

I think the last time I played the second to last level (my favorite to play around on because it's symmetric and has a nice mix of baddies with no OMG PUNCH THE MONKEY tower-freezing bullshit), I had eight maxed Berthas at the end.  So many missiles swooping around the screen looking for something to kill.  It was glorious.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/siread/new-star-soccer (http://www.kongregate.com/games/siread/new-star-soccer)

I've been playing the crap out of this game. It's just...I can't understand why it's so addictive, but it's a great little soccer game.

Fuck you Paelos.  :awesome_for_real:

It's fun, right!  :grin:

Just Click it.  :awesome_for_real:

http://nothingsgonnastopmenow.com/

Site suspended.

Thank you for ensuring that I get nothing done at work this afternoon!

Works here.

That's because it's cached for you. It doesn't work.

Worked for me once I got home.  :ye_gods: 

I don't think I'm going to be able to sleep tonight, however.

Worked fine for me, and also - what the hell?  :ye_gods:

I don't even know.... what the fuck did I just experience?

20 years already...

http://wolfenstein.bethsoft.com/game_NA.php

Perfect strangers game is amazing.

http://www.skrillexquest.com/

Despite the title, it's actually a fun little diversion.

Dikembe Mutombo's 4 1/2 Weeks to Save the World.

http://www.oldspicesavestheworld.com/

Yes, it is marketing. No, you won't care.

Wow, that's both insane and funny.

http://hackertyper.com/

It's a fun little toy. Just be careful if you use it in public because someone else might take it seriously.
There's some keystroke commands hidden in there too.

Strangely the entertainment value is lost on me since I spend much of my day actually typing code at high speed.   :awesome_for_real:

The Secret Door: http://www.safestyle-windows.co.uk/secret-door/
A bunch of interesting google maps streetviews hooked up to a RNG.

I'll just leave this here

http://drop.notch.net/

That's pretty damned cool.

Not sure whether to put this here or in Useless Videos, but here goes:

www.donottouch.org

(Note:  somewhat NSFW due to bewbs)

That's awesome.  I'm sure it gets less NSFW daily.   :grin:

I liked the last nude where most pointers fled to see nekkids, while others "kept her modest"  The the guy's face shows up and everyone agrees to hide it.

http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/ (http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/)

I almost don't want to even try to describe it for fear of spoiling it.  It starts off very simple and gets less so.

(http://24.media.tumblr.com/4fd0c3a220e011d26c9a23c1be16dfe0/tumblr_mrnjusgVhh1r0ykpto1_500.png)

Well-played.  :oh_i_see:

It actually took longer than I expected to find the dog on that despite the grid being relatively small in size.

Same, I was thrown off at first assuming that it probably didn't exist in the box and the DOG below the box was the right answer with some "Think outside the box" idea.

Is this like one of those magic eye pictures? Because I could never do those.

Christ, that took me a while.

I do not understand the rules of this game.

Diagonals count even though the letters aren't spaced properly for it.

 :uhrr:  I found a diagonal "DOG" within about two seconds of seeing the picture and assumed that was too easy to have been what I was supposed to find.

Catleidoscope (http://catleidoscope.sergethew.com/)

 Geo Guesser  (http://geoguessr.com/)  (Apologies if this is a repost)

9029 points (http://url.geoguessr.com/4tGk). I'm proud enough of 4/5 of those guesses that I'm not going to do it again lest I disappoint myself. I might have even gotten E if I'd known which way Russians drive.

9851.  I got lucky with a few that had some obvious eastern Euro languages and Russian.  Then I had two that were in the middle of nowhere, just trees, sky and road.

Very cool!

11080 points (http://url.geoguessr.com/4tHi). For some reason 3 of the 5 places were in Australia  :uhrr:

Tip: If its in a random place with a lot of pine trees click somewhere in SW Canada. Usually does the trick..:P

I also refuse to admit I spent 15 minutes with google IDing a cafe in Nuremburg to get me a 16000 point game...nope not me!

Wait til you start thinking you've got Australia down and then it turns out to be South Africa. Gargh.

10k points, challenge me! http://url.geoguessr.com/4tIC

11164, I had a hotel in one that was obviously in Hong Kong.

It was close  until D  (http://url.geoguessr.com/4tJ1)

As they say, one night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble.

Swords & Potions 2, a wee web game on Kongregate.

It's swallowed my Soul.

 :ye_gods:

re Geoguesser - halfway through my first attempt I discovered you can zoom in on the guessing map, and by the end I learned how to zoom and pan the picture!  :why_so_serious: <5K total, since I guessed the wrong Albany, confused arctic circle Alaska for Antarctica, and Estonia for Argentina.

Midway through my second round I discovered you can navigate the street view, see both sides of buildings and signs, etc.  ~10k because I was still guessing some, and learning.  :awesome_for_real:

On my third attempt, I got 29284 points.  :grin: But the share score URL is just the site's home page  :sad: I got 3 within half a mile, guessing the correct Pembroke College based on a coat of arms I spotted on one of the signs (Cambridge not Oxford), finding the exact curve near the intersection of two Department roads in rural France, and the front gates of a National Guard Armory in Louisiana.  Then I got one on the wrong side of St Petersbutg Russia, and guessed a few miles off on a lonely road in nowhere Montana. I spent an hour following that road back to a town where I spotted a readable cemetery sign to google.

29k?  :drill: :drill:

an hour following a road in google maps?  :uhrr:

The old lady and I played quite a bit of geoguesser earlier this year. It was a little crashy for some reason, but a lot of fun (also, I'm dastardly good at it).

yeah, brain's been fried from work the past couple of weeks, and clicking the move forward arrow in street view was about the limit of my mental abilities at the time anyway.  Plus I just HAD to find out if it was Wyoming or Montana or the Dakotas I'd been plonked down in!

Earth Wind Map

US: http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/orthographic=-100.63,43.69,865

Europe: http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/orthographic=29.29,48.20,865

Asia: http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/orthographic=116.97,37.03,865

Viin's Challenge:

I thought I was off on my first and fourth guesses, then I realized I was almost smack dab on them.

"Your guess was 1.008 km from the correct location and gave 6394 points." on number four.
"Your guess was 0.801 km from the correct location and gave 6412 points." on number five.

You won the challenge with 23470 points against 10068. (http://url.geoguessr.com/5JFo)

You must redeem yourself, Viin! ;D

Dang, you did real good at that. Do you spend a lot of time going up and down roads?

Try this one!

http://url.geoguessr.com/5JJy

I hereby declare that any of you people moving from the actual spot you are plunked down are a bunch of cheaters!  :grin:

Zooming and panning are fine.

http://url.geoguessr.com/5Knv (http://url.geoguessr.com/5Knv)

The one I was really off on was when I confused a rocky coast for being in Scotland, when it's actually SAFR. Thought I was pretty slick when I at least guessed the other anglophone African spot close enough (SAFR vs Botswana).

Not a whole lot, except I did travel a bit down the road on the first one.  The Thailand one was almost unfair given there were signs everywhere.  My criteria is if I can step a few feet to read a sign, it's fair game. :-p

In the follow-up challenge you trounced me.

Also I'd like to admonish Ironwood for mentioning Swords and Potions 2.

I had to cut myself off at some point with that game.  It filled all the little addictive niches I have in my brain a bit better than I want a game to.

http://dinopoloclub.com/minimetro/

Evil evil little thing. I can't get much past 400, and don't see the point of the tiny fast train... no routes to spare for an express, regardless of how efficient it is. I don't know what comes after star... wedge, cross, star, and the paucity of squares does me in.

Got up to 508... there's a bit of luck involved since you can be screwed over by getting a cluster of the same shape, or awkward river layouts.

Damn, I can't make it far past 300. What sort of layouts are you folks using?

I just draw lines that "look right," as in look like they fit the pattern of a real-life train system, and it works out, to a point.  I might be some kind of transit savant from having grown up in a city riding subways every day.   :awesome_for_real:

Good general principles, I guess:

1) Shorter lines are better.
2) Lines that connect a greater number of different shapes are better.

Clearly these two are sometimes at odds.  When in doubt I start setting up a "grid" sort of layout with a combination of north/south lines and east/west lines, since that's an easy way to minimize rider backtracking.

Arg, this game is bullshit.    :awesome_for_real:

Came to this thread expecting dogeminer.se

didn't get that, weird.

That a recommendation then ?

I'm up to paragon 70 something from 30 something in a matter of a couple weeks. It's going quickly and the difficulty levels provide solid challenge for me.

Are you in the wrong thread ? ? ?


 :awesome_for_real:

I think diablo 3 counts as a useless distraction.

Yeah I was in the wrong thread.

Can't really blame you. You saw me saying this game is bullshit. It's a reasonable assumption.

Mini Metro high scores go here for critique.  I think 508 is still my all-time best but no screenshot.

You don't do any circles ?

500+ is good. I rarely make it to 300!

Yeah, that yellow line was a huge mistake.

Got lucky!

Needz Mor Surculls.

I tried.

Gud surculls.

I do so hate when they put about 3 or four stations next to each other that are all the same shape.  It's the randomness of this game that makes for some really fucking annoying playthroughs.

2048 (http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/2048/)

God damn you.  I unfortunatly got my highest score on my very first game.  Which of course means I've just lost hours of work trying to top it.

It gets annoying.

Rapidly.

You are evil. I hate you.

Mini Metro has a new alpha, with new rules

Tunnels don't slow your train. But they are now a resource.
Instead of a line being a resource, you now use railcars. You can "upgrade" an existing line by adding a railcar to it.
I haven't figured out what the target symbol in the lower right means.

think thats when you get an upgrade. Also your yellow line man!

It's now both easier and harder.  ARG.

Yes, whatever my problem was there, the solution was not "keep adding railcars", apparently.

Best yet in the new ruleset

Squares totally screwed you there.  I can see where you could put another 2 joins on, but I can't really tell if it would have been quick enough.

Squares seem to be the stop to screw you anymore.

I'm not a fan of the tunnel as resource.

I do like that redrawing the whole system seems to work a bit better. I'm not sure I like that mechanic though.

So far, I've found tunnel as resource to be less challenging than tunnel = slow. Maybe that's because you start with 3 tunnels in new rules land.

All of my failure points were on lines that had direct access to squares. I wonder if my problem is that I never upgrade stations? I just keep throwing railcars at crowded lines.

I almost never upgrade stations because if you have inadequate throughput any amount of waiting space is inevitably going to be exceeded.  Moar trains!  Then again I've only barely cracked 500 so there are definitely strategic elements I haven't gotten my head around yet.

 :why_so_serious:

(http://i.imgur.com/vqeQWyC.png) (http://imgur.com/vqeQWyC)

Adding more cars to a line seems to really help

Finally!

(http://i.imgur.com/TH2wLNZ.png)

Coulda saved you some trouble. (http://ov3y.github.io/2048-AI/)   :why_so_serious:

This is a forever time sink. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC1jHHF_Wjo#t=39)

http://www.monumentvalleygame.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX917y1Ly8o

I will fail law school because of 2048

Here's my best attempt at killing the magic.

Escape from XP: http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools#escape-from-xp

That game is bad and you should feel bad.

Pretty useless but clever: http://www.pointerpointer.com/

that's actually kind of creepy

That 2048 game is THE DEVIL!!!!

I like the new version of Mini Metro.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Mini%20Metro/1433.jpg)

Game called Decision Medieval

http://www.kongregate.com/games/FlyAnvil/decision-medieval

It's a browser hack and slash with zombies in a sandbox defender done with a medieval setting.

I was distracted for two hours this morning reading about this bloke.  His name was Phineas Gage and back in the olden times it was his job to make holes and tamp down black powder in rocks to explode them for the railroad.  One day something happened, like maybe he forgot the sand or whatev, and he made a spark and everything flew around and the tamping iron (about 4 ft. long) impaled him through the mouth and out the top of his head.  It completely destroyed his frontal lobe and damaged some other stuff.  He should have died, but he didn't.  The doctor used his fingers to dislodge and and remove fragments of brain and stone from inside his head.  Mr. Gage felt sick for a long time because of bits of his brain kept sliding down his throat and making him sick.  Just the though of that almost killed me this morning but I also survived.  So, there he was recuperating and getting better but then he got this fungal infection and somehow he didn't die again.  He recovered but he suddenly started using terribly obscene language so the railroad wouldn't have him back.  He went to work for P. T. Barnum in his freaky museum and if you paid extra, he would part his hair so you could see his brain.  You probably weren't allowed to touch it, though.

This is what he looks like now:

(http://i.imgur.com/rKk4Qst.jpg)

And that's the tamping iron what made the big hole in his head.

Popular myth is that the change in his temperment (he was very mild-mannered and bright prior to the accident) was also what inspired lobotomies. 

However, since you inspired me to read his entry again on Wiki it seems that these are both only myth and have no good documented basis in fact.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Mini%20Metro/2056.jpg)

Christ mate, that's almost London.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/Screenshots/Mini%20Metro/3200.jpg)

When does it end?

Dude, we need to get you a woman.  Several Women.

As many women as our chequebook can manage until these internet games get the hooks outta your brain.

Who likes geometry!  http://euclidthegame.org/Level1.html

:awesome_for_real:

godamnit your making me do maths

That's a good one.  Good test of how much high school geometry I remember.  I'm a little stuck on level 14 (construct a circle inside a triangle) but refuse to go look it up.

I got through 14 but 15 is making me scratch my head.

EDIT: Never mind, easier than I thought.

I just got 15 and feel very clever because I puzzled it out logically instead of flailing away drawing circles and waiting for them to line up.

I know level 11 is simple, but my mind is blocked.  It's easy to ghost the angle, but not to rotate it.

Don't mistake this post as a 'please spoil it for me' however.

Yeah, it was easy.  Ghost circles dude, ghost circles.

I'm getting old.

Oddly, I know how to do this, but the game is refusing to recognize my circle.

Did anyone else have this issue ?

Nope. I got all the way to level 20, but I really don't have a clue how to do that level with the available tools.

It's ok I sorted it.  It required a point created on any side.  Lame.

I also am stuck there.  I keep doodling the various tangents on paper and saying "well once I have THAT line and THAT line I know they're perpendicular which means THIS and THIS will be parallel", but I haven't figured out anyplace where I can start constructing that from the available points.

I think I came up with a solution to level 20, but the UI thwarts me because my solution requires me to draw two circles that are VERY similar in size (specifically I need a circle that's 2*(B-A) drawn inside a circle that's B, and B ~ 2A in their example) and I can't tell them apart.  It'd be nice if I could arbitrarily resize the circles for the purposes of "drawing" my proof.

(edit) Okay, I got it, by zooming way the fuck in so I could select the intersection I needed.  Annoying but it recognized my proof.   :drill:

I constructed an arbitrary axis below the two circles in order to have room to draw more crap.

I did that to construct the quantities I needed, but I needed that 2*(B-A) circle to be inside the B circle (so I could intersect it with another circle to find a tangent), so there was no way around that.  I'm guessing there was some other way to do it that didn't involve doing that.

http://nickreboot.com

I don't think "fair use" means what they seem to think it means...

WARNING!!!  This will suck you into a void for hours, days, maybe weeks of your time before you know it. 

Click here to get sacked from your job. (https://geoguessr.com/)

I see your DeLorean is in working order, Signe!

(it is a fun diversion, though)

I do want a 1981 DeLorean with grey interiour. 

Geometry hates touch UI, apparently.

--Dave

I'm just going to set this down, right here. (http://gridland.doublespeakgames.com/)

 :why_so_serious:

The nap I had planned for this afternoon wants to have unkind words with you.

I like this one!  wish I had a better idea what was going on with the houses and the power up icons below the grid.

Also sad that it doesn't seem to work on the ancient Android browser on my Droid phone.  :sad_panda:  I'm seriously pissed that Verizon and HTC and Google are all so quick to abandon perfectly functional hardware, especially given how much the damn thing cost in the first place.  It's not like it was a $20 throwaway or something! greedy bastards. screw em. Instead of making me eager to give them more money for a new phone, it's completely soured me on the idea of wasting another big chunk of change on the latest and greatest, and is making me consider going back to a cheapass feature phone and get a wifi tablet or something for mobile web, 10 years from now when this thing finally dies.

In the day phase, the first few houses are your storehouse, mason, loom, forge, sawmill.
In the night phase, the power up buttons that I've seen are heal, bomb, and armor up.
The armor up gives you a full sword + shield, and the bomb is like a smart bomb from Defender, i.e. it kills everything on-screen.

Thanks! Those should have been fairly self-evident, well, the powerups anyway, but I just wasn't seeing it. I'm up to day 26, hit a rough patch the past two nights that took several tries to get through. I may be falling behind in the arms race. Or missing something obvious again.   :grin:

I know discovering the rules is part of the game, so I've tried to avoid spoilers other than that one question.  One last thing stumping me (other than all the stuff that may or may not be there that I don't know that I don't know! LOL) is what the heck is that little birdy/speck/arrow thingy hovering over the houses? Or do I have bad pixels on my laptop?  :why_so_serious:

So.. basically always prioritize the 2 buildings on the right to keep the fight things stronger than the monsters?  Or am I missing something?

Boss fights and pepper powers

I maxed out all the buildings, which I assume is as close as there is to a win condition?  Fighting the monsters was hard so I just kept using the powerups to skip the night.   :grin:

Fun for a while, helped when I figured out how to skip ahead for the night cycle when I was too weak to make it through the rest of the night.  I assume once you've maxed the buildings, all that's left is to try to beat the Dragon, but I got bored with it at that point.  Still kept me interested longer than a match-3 game normally would.

--Dave

Spoiler for size

Wait, there's actually a "clear"?  What's the win condition?

Beating the dragon

Sadly, beating the dragon was anticlimactic.  I doubt it's possible to do so until you've maxed all your buildings. And once you've done so, it's seems that pretty much a straight up tank and spank is the best (only?) strategy available.
Not much replay value, but it was a fun diversion.

There actually is a tiny bit of strategy to it also.  Skipping the night entirely all the time is actually a bad idea, since gaining EXP and leveling up not only increases your HP, but also increases the amount of empty handed damage your guy does.  If you keep skipping the night all the time while leveling buildings, your guy will have awesome swords, but be completely useless without them.  Leveling up sometimes allowed me to actually facepunch stuff to death that would normally eat my face.  I generally try to survive as much of the night as possible and always keep the "end night stat!" powerup loaded and ready to go if I accidentally get a shitstorm chain of monster spawns.

That is exactly how I played it, and ended up beating the dragon down with my bare hands for the most part.  It did take a while though.

That's weird, I was only able to hurt the dragon when I had a sword.  Took me like 7 swords I think..  My strategy was to make a bunch of things happen and then make the dragon do the wing attack since that cancelled everything else out.

I'd just like to say Signe's link ended up with me almost spending as much time trying to keep up with a random white SUV as the actual game posted. Since the number plate was blanked it also didn't really help beyond 'somewhere in the States'.

Oh Hi (http://0hh1.com/)

Swarm Simulator (https://swarmsim.github.io)

I'm sorry.

You are not a nice man.

Goddamnit.. There went an hour.

Someone unplug it! Ahhhhhhh  :ye_gods:

Sigh. Can't stop. Must swarm.

You are a bad bad man

You're not sorry at all, you bawbag.

Yea, you bunnahabhain.

I've taken to playing it while watching basketball games. It's just a nice background game to other stuff.

It's cookieclicker with wasps and no pictures.

How odd.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/868747/Meat.JPG)

This is evil.  Just.. evil.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/868747/Swarm.JPG)

Hmm, yeah.  While I lost a hunk of time to this, don't think it will really stick me like cookie clicker and hero clicker did.  The graphics and other mechanics made those more engaging.

Though I'm sure some psycology student could write a good paper on why these particular type of stupid 'games' are so damn addicting.

Every upgrade level is the same base math. It's actually pretty fucking boring.

I was finally able to close the browser tab it was open in. I feel like I have won or something. I don't know.

After a certain point, any upgrades are pretty useless and it's best to just let it run until you gather enough items to buy another (greater) queen in order to eventually get a hive.  Not sure what else there is to do.

Larvae seems to be the bottleneck for most of the time.  Buying those upgrades is priority.

The fact that the resource at each level is a producer for the previous level gives it a bit more of an addictive power creep quality than Cookie/Hero Clicker have.

Yep.  Also the Larva= 2 or 3x spawns upgrades seem to be only sinks after the first tier or second tier.  Watching your purchase vs spawns per second on the Drone, Queen, Hive side it seemed I wasted more Larva and bugs doing anything beyond the 1st. Your production/ second overtakes the purchasing power pretty quickly.  Larva seem better used on the territory side, climbing that ladder.

ed: Oh, Rhyssa said that already. And goddamnit I'm Min/ maxing a number counter. 

I've left it running overnight at work. I'm gonna beat all of you!

Apparently it "remembers" your progress and gives you full credit for time elapsed even if the tab isn't open.

The cookies got me last time, but this? Fiddled for 5 mins, said 'I've done this before' and moved on to other ways to spend my time.

(http://i.imgur.com/ZbGTT05.jpg)

Hmm, gonna see if there's anything worth doing with this today, otherwise it was an amusing distraction for sure.

I don't get Cocoons.  What's the point there ?

And don't say Wilfred Brimley.


EDIT :  Nevermind.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/868747/Swarm1.JPG)

Nope, done.  Hive Empress was bad enough, but now with Swarmling II it's just recycling content.

Done.

Meat
Meat is delicious. All of your swarm's creatures eat meat.

You own 474.709 decillion meat.

You earn 537.410 nonillion meat per second.

I mean, since we're measuring...


No hive empresses yet, but I'm close.

Why ?  Why are you close ?

WHY ??!

Ironwood, this is Samwise. I hope you enjoy to be meeting him. This is not abnormal behavior for him and you should expect more in the future.

You're just jealous of my meat.  It's understandable.

I'm well aware.  But given the sheer amount of time he's spent putting the dick in Minethings and some seriously head hurting other distractions, I literally have no clue how he has time for this nor how he can manage to put in the effort time and time again.

The amount of effort it takes to click a couple of things a few times a day or so literally does not register on my effort-o-meter.  

That's the entire appeal of this type of game for me, in fact; it's the same illusion of achievement over time you get from a MMO, but with a tiny percentage of the actual time investment and expended effort.   :awesome_for_real:  What I can't fathom is how any of you have the patience for stuff like WoW.

I have way more meat than you and will prove it with a screen shot when I get home tonight.

This is good and a whole lot less disgusting than that swarm simulator.

It has a sequel. (http://0hn0.com/)

Much easier than the original IMO, I just knocked out the largest board in a few minutes.  Neat idea though.

I wonder if the names for the numbers are procedurally generated from the Latin roots or if it has a giant table...

A quattuorvigintillion is 10⁷⁵. 1 followed by 75 zeroes.

Let's be conservative and assume these are tiny insects, and that meat is measured in milligrams:

• The Earth masses 6x10³⁰mg
• The Sun, 2x10³⁶mg
• The Milky Way Galaxy (plus its halo of shredded mini galaxies, globular clusters, and rogue stars) , ~6x10⁴⁹mg
• The Universe (and I cannot APPROXIMATELY this tilde hard enough) ~10⁵⁸ (http://www.scientificjournals.org/journals2009/articles/1437.pdf)mg (PDF warning)

75 - 58 = 17

10¹⁷ is approximately the number of atoms in a kitten.

So imagine a kitten. He is a few months old and weighs about 1.6kg. Each atom in every molecule in every cell of his little body is a universe. Every planet in each of those universes... every star, every asteroid, every diffuse nebula is composed entirely of meat.

Your drones are producing 15 of these Atomic Meaty Universe UrKittens every second.

 :drillf:

My unascended bugs (yes I'm still messing with it. It's a once a day thing in the browser) earn 28.4242 nonillion territory per second after upgrading to Chilopodomorph II.   I currently own 960.649 nonillion territory. 

A nonillion is 1*10^30. 

If 1 territory is a femtometer ( 1*10^-15 ) then I own 960.4*10^15 territory.

Jupiter's surface area is 6.14*10^10

I own 15 million Jupiters and am expanding by 462,934 Jupiters per second.

My territory (mostly claimed by my Wasp III swarm) is in the octodecillions, which I assume corresponds to entire universes.  Meats in the sesvigillions.  Them's some crazily named numbers.

ive been playing Adventure Capatalists. Its a similar game.

I'm playing Clicker Heroes.

Play family feud with  google (http://www.googlefeud.com/)

less fun because of exactness

Don't land on Europa.

http://ikeaordeath.com/

Lesser Hive Mind 0   
Hive Network     0   
Neural Cluster   270B
Hive Neuron      997Qi     +43.2T/sec   
Neuroprophet     241Oc     +1.14Sp/sec   
Hive Empress     200UDc    +1.97Dc/sec   
Hive Queen       665QaDc   +11.4TDc/sec   
Hive             1.77ODc   +523SxDc/sec   
Greater Queen    3.53DVi   +18.6Vi/sec   
Nest             6.06SxVi  +237QaVi/sec   
Queen            43.5Tg    +9.76NVi/sec   
Drone            40.5QiTg  +1.49QaTg/sec
Meat             14.1Qd    +22.2NTg/sec   


I polish my carapace with your tears.   :grin:

Just when I catch up to where you were a week ago, you edit your post. Bastard.

I was really hoping that "Hive Network" was the top and I could declare victory once I had a few quintillion of those, but no.  We require more vespene gas.

Ikea or death volume warning.  Holy fuck.

I'm sitting at Overmind IV which is 7 tiers higher, and it hasn't stopped yet  :ye_gods:

Is there at least unique alt text for the different levels, or is it all procedurally generated content after that point?

Unique to Overmind II, then it's just the same text with the cockblocks inflating drastically.  Rather than it taking 10x more units to produce the next tier, each tier of overmind requires 10,000x more units.

At least they give up on the silly number names at a certain point.  I now produce 3.54e691 meat per second (possibly--but not necessarily--kitten-flavored)

Yeah, if you start stacking Hatchery, Clone, and Bat mutations together, the results get a little insane:


That is over a year's worth of larvae production each cloning, once I have that much accumulated (going to take about 5 clonings just to reach the cap). Bat mutation doesn't actually mutate the bats, it boosts *all* abilities, even if you don't have any bats.

--Dave

Are you guys rebirthing ascending often or is this just accumulation of sitting there microing the original colony?  I've reached nowhere near those numbers.

I haven't ascended yet because I wanted to see the top of the meat chain first, but I'm thinking that is not an optimal strategy.   :awesome_for_real:

It's pretty much impossible to get to Overmind levels without Ascending. I think I've done it 6 times, when I reach the point where it only takes a few thousand energy, I do it again.

--Dave

When you ascend, your unspent Mutagen spawns larvae at a 10 mutagen: 1 Larva ratio. Every ascension boosts your growth rates by several orders of magnitude. I'm about to ascend for the fifth time I think and I'll be doing so with around 30 trillion Mutagen. That means I'm going to be shitting out 3 trillion larvae a second as soon as I hit the button.

That explains it then. I'd come to the conclusion that Mahrin said because my home version has sat for a week and I can't get to Overminds at all without several weeks of building up enough larvae and Hive Queens for that 100m hurdle.

What is the relationship between larva and territory?

Territory fuels expansions which increase your rate of larva generation. That's the only thing that territory does. Meat also increases larva generation  through Hatcheries as well as buying territory units directly.

Ah, thank you. That makes sense.

I do not understand the point of cocoons. I assume that must be because I have not seen cloning yet.

This is not as pretty as Cookie Clicker, yet more appealing. So far.

EDITED TO ADD: I see cloning now. I've been avoiding using Energy for the most part, instead wanting to save/build more Nexuses (Nexus? Nexi?). What proportion of larva do you guys cocoon for cloning and why?

Cocoons are a way to ringfence a bunch of larvae that you want to save for a particular purpose. It's essentially storage. Cloning treats cocoons as regular larvae. Honestly neither cloning nor cocooning are that useful (buffed swarmwarps give a much better return and usually 12 Larva Rushes will provide more larvae for the same cost than a single Cloning even if you are at larva cap for Cloning).

I maintain cocoons equal to the number of larvae that I can clone.  Makes it easy.

Right now, Larva Rush offers me 89.7651 sextillion larva (or a bit over 10 hours worth of larva production in one shot). Clone Larva offers me 87.8950 septillion larva, almost a thousand times as many (or just over a year's worth of larva). I could get 7.5 Larva Rushes for the same energy as a Clone Larva, making Clone Larva roughly 133 times as efficient at turning energy into larva (and at producing larva over time).

Now, I have not optimized for Rush or Warp, but a quick run of the numbers says that if I did, I would still only find either less than 1/10 as effective as Larva is now. Even allowing that I need to set part of each cloning aside to allow for growth for the next one, and had to use up 7 to get the cap originally, Clone is far more productive.

Ultimately everything else is limited by Larva, you can make your territory gain much more meat-efficient if you have plenty of larva, you can power through the level transitions for meat producers by throwing enough larva at them, etc. The only thing that is strictly limited is Energy, so using that as effectively as possible becomes your limiting factor on growth.

And yeah, I cocoon my current Larva cap plus 21% (this can drop to 10% if I've been stalled on a step for a while), after each round of cloning.

--Dave

Do you have the Clone mutation? I get a cap of ~6qui larvae from Cloning and a Larva Rush gets me 146Qua larvae. So Cloning is a slightly better deal point for point than Rushes but not by orders of magnitude as you are seeing in your game. 7 Rushes would cost me 11,200 energy and get me ~1qui larvae. On the other hand, I have Swarmwarp and Bats mutated to the point where 2k energy puts me 1 day and 16 hours into the future. As I spawn 6.5trillion larvae per second as standard, that's 936qui straight out for 2k energy. Plus of course I get a bunch of meat and 40 hours of growth on all my meat units.

I'll probably try to make it to over 4 quintillion mutagen before I ascend again, I'm a little stalled right now but I am just about to go exponential on Hive Networks, which should be enough to pump out a bunch of mutagen in a hurry.

If you have your Lepidoptera maxed out (and the mutation maxed), you need a bit over 16 minutes to generate 2K energy, 40 x60 = 2400, so that's about 150 to 1 time acceleration. I need a bit under 2 hours to get 12k energy for the Clone Larva, which pumps out 10,467 hours worth of Larva, or roughly 6,000 to 1. Now, I don't get the other benefits of Swarm Warp, but when I blow through a level transition on sheer mass of larva, my production tends to leap by as many orders of magnitude as there were between the levels.

The whole reason you tend to blow through all the stages you had already been through before an Ascension is the larva from mutagen, which tends to be an order of magnitude below what you had before the ascension. I'm just doing the same thing on the back end. On the other hand, I've run out of mutations to stack together to increase my larva production.

--Dave

Swarmwarp may not be quite as effective for raw larva production, but you don't have to fiddle with cocooning/stockpiling larva, and you get meat/territory production as well.  I just find it simpler to do.

After just hitting 8 ascensions, with 1NVI in all mutations except Lepidoptera and frequency (which are capped), and currently no bats (waiting on energy for the 5th nexus currently), swarmwarp bumps me forward 166 days.  Add in 500 or so bats, and that will be about almost 200 days per warp.

Currently producing Overmind Vs, haven't got enough for a VI yet.

How the fuck do you guys function without scientific notation.

Scientific notation is for calculators, like all math that you can't do in your head.

--Dave

If you need 2e13 things that each cost 3e9 other things, than you need 6e22 of the other things. You don't need a calculator for that unless you're expressing those numbers in quinquabajilliawhatsits.

WHATEVER EINSTEIN

Yeah, yesterday I had somebody complaining about the water jets on Ceres. He said it was impossible for a body with the surface area of India to have been spewing out 21 tonnes of water per hour for billions of years. Scientific notation (and bold approximation) made the calculation trivial:

Ceres masses 9e17 tonnes (thank you Google), there are 9e3 hours in a year. The solar system is 5e9 years old.

So 2e1 tonnes x 9e3 hours x 5e9 years = 90e13 which is 9e14

9e14 / 9e17 = 1e-3

So if it had lost 21 tonnes of water per hour, Ceres would have been one one-thousandth larger at the origin of solar system. Big whoop. Starting with the mass of Ceres as 895,800,000,000,000,000 tonnes would have done nobody favors, even if we called it 900 quadrillion.

It's not about being Einstein, it's about being a pedantic dork. Big numbers abuse the imagination.

Up to e300 or so, the game uses its fancy-schmancy terminology, and I'm too lazy to figure out just what most of those terms mean.  Play it for a while and you get a feel for what at least the abbreviations are supposed to be, and that's good enough.

Although I can't see SxTg without thinking "Sex Tag"  :oh_i_see:

Someone who understands me.  :heart:

The meat ladder appears to stop at Overmind VI.

The meat ladder stops whenever you want it to stop.

There is no end to the meat.

Meat is Delicious. Meat is Life. Meat is all.

4th Ascension and I hit Hive Queen in about an hour at the house. Didn't realize what a huge difference it would make.

It really is surprising how much more quickly you grow after ascending.  I've only done it once because I tend to leave it for long periods of time, but I can see the difference after one ascension.

I ascended yesterday with ~4.6 quintillion mutagen. For the first 20-30 minutes I couldn't click on upgrades fast enough to keep up with spending larvae and meat. I went to about 100 expansions in less than a minute, had Hive Neurons within seconds and was at level 6 territory units pretty much from the outset.

So, I feel like the last few pages are a damning indictment towards the state of modern gaming.

Or something.

I played Clicker Heroes last week more than anything. So yeah.

With my sixth ascension I crossed some kind of threshold, and I am now producing so much mutagen (currently in the hundreds of undecillions) that when I ascend again, I'll have thousands of times more larva from mutagen when I start than I had from normal production before I restarted. (Currently in the tens of nonillions).

And yes, this game has convinced me that somewhere along the way, we lost something important in modern games.

--Dave

Turns out humans don't actually want gameplay, we just want appropriately spaced progression and rewards.

Gameplay is good too, but what dumb "games" like this teach us is that things that go "ding" can cover a LOT of gameplay sins.  The actual gameplay of most RPGs is such crappy crappy crap crap that removing it entirely in favor of a single button to click is an improvement.

Modern gameplay overthinks things because, "It's all been done before and we have to be different."  That's what I've come to think of it, at least.

http://agar.io/

Eaten in about 2 minutes.

The kind of time I only previously managed in Amsterdam.

So it's basically Capitalism the videogame?

Yeah, no.

I made it about 6 or 7 minutes by hanging around some of the bigger cells until I was large enough for them to bother eating me.  Was amusing to bait other folks into the behemoth's path.

Much like real life, the flaw with FFA mode is that it's easy for trusts to monopolize the board.

Okay, I think I'll count this as a win so I never have to play this again.

(http://i.imgur.com/OEWKCWI.png)

Pro tip if you want to exact vengeance against something much bigger than you: feed the green spiky things.  Dear god is it terrifying to see somebody feeding those things when you're giant.

I was playing this earlier today. Wasted a good hour or so on it. I hit #1 for a hot moment. Also had an unnamed cell hit the #1 spot.

(http://i.imgur.com/o6Fqfqk.png)

Welcome to Erf.

(http://i.imgur.com/Zqq59fd.png)

I think that's the ultimate PvP game.

How do you feed the green spiky things?

Point at them and push W.  (Bet you were wondering why the hell anyone would ever voluntarily surrender their precious lifestuff and why there was a button for that.  It confused me for a while too.  Now you know!)

This game is very good.

I'll be honest, as frustrating as it is sometimes, it's grown on me and I keep firing it up for a quick game every now and then.  There are a lot of times when you're dead and there's nothing you can do about it, but there's a surprising amount of non-obvious tactical depth too.  I can get to the top of the leaderboard pretty often now.

Once you reach a particular size, and if you can find a quiet enough corner of the map, going around eating THE SPIKY GREEN THINGS IS almost pure profit. They're always "worth" however much a player of similar size would be... but there's a maximum number of pieces you're allowed to split into, and if you can reach it and still have a part larger than the spiky balls that park can eat them like free food. It's risky, but it's a nice way for a large blob to clear spike fields or for a medium blob to get some free food.

edit: I accidentally the whole object of the sentence.

I've been having some fun with this playing FFA but feeding other players, which sometimes forms a team, and then playing cooperatively. Or not eating anyone on purpose but seeing how big I can get. This is a very fun distraction.

I ended up playing this for six hours straight. It was fun, but something is clearly wrong with me.

Nah. As has been bemoaned on this forum numerous times, modern games are broken messes. A few simple rules and a challenge to overcome is all it takes for a fine game.

I need help. Somebody please help me.

(http://puu.sh/iz9mg/00b2b72e49.png)

Glad to know I'm not the only one still playing this but I'm no where near that level.  How many times have you ascended now?

Just four times.

(http://puu.sh/izNab/d1d6d924da.png)

(http://puu.sh/izNGT/6bf7f464e8.png)

How many ascensions is that?

4

With this current ascension, once I get all of my bats I will be able to really start socking away the expansions and what not, even without any bats purchased right now each swarmwarp gives me 3.3 days of time warp.
(http://puu.sh/izO7M/6a2030fc48.png)

(http://puu.sh/izOak/ccf274ba48.png)

Holy crap!

I've ascended 3 times at home and 4 here at work but ain't anywhere near that level.  I've been slacking apparently.

Um.

Damn dude.

 :psyduck:

I'm on 16 or so ascensions now (I'm just grinding to the last cheevo which is 20 ascensions then I will close the tab forever). My Swarmwarp puts me about a year into the future.

My 'strategy' now is mostly caretaking to get to the next ascension point as fast as possible. To that end I prioritise spending Energy in industrial quantities. Here's how it generally goes after ascension.

Hatch drones and upgrade them as fast as I can (generally this is rapid-fire alternate clicking on the hatch maximum and faster drones buttons. Once I've hatched as many drones as I can without getting a faster drone increase each time (usually around a quinquillion). I hatch maximum queens. This unlocks about 140 levels of twinning for drones. I buy that, hatch maximum drones again and hide that notification. Then I do the same again with queens until I'm at about the same point as I was with the drones. Rinse and repeat all the way up the meat tree until Overmind IVs or so. This whole process takes me about 30 minutes. The only other things I'm buying are Nexi and hatchery upgrades. No territory units as it just means I'm clicking in multiple tabs.

Once I get to the 5th nexus (takes a couple of hours) I dump all my energy into lepidoptera. I then come back periodically a couple of times a day to dump everything into Lepidoptera, bats and lightbugs. I buy a couple of thousand of whichever at a time because I'm not concerned about diminishing returns, I'm concerned about spending energy as fast as possible and doing 50 Swarmwarps optimally (buying all the upgrades and hatching max units between each one) is way too much effort. Once I've got to Overmind VIs and the top of the meat tree, I buy all the upgrades for the territory units - this is usually level 50 or so for each and buy the max of a unit about 4 or so from the top of the list (I found that this gives the best territory gain for meat cost rather than just maxing out the top one). After about a day or so I've chewed through enough energy that I can ascend within my current energy bar limit. I wait for that and then repeat the whole exercise.

Yeah, ascending as often as possible is pretty much the ticket.  The return on mutations in terms of larvae production alone is HUGE and only gets exponentially better.

The thing I'm asking myself is how could the concept of the swarm simulator be used in a game people would actually pay money for? I find it's quite similar to what Diablo does when you start on a new difficulty level with a character that already beat the game on another difficulty level. But then you already beat the game by then whereas here you start anew to get farther along after that. Or maybe there already are some games and I just don't know them (really only been playing DotA 2 for 2 years now...)

Adventure Capitalist has microtransactions, if that's what you mean. No idea if anybody actually buys them.

No I was thinking more in terms of an actual "boxed" game like an MMO or w/e. You would basically "avoid" the grind by just starting your character all over again and choosing some perks which let you fly through the early game stuff faster and then eventually get by the roadblock much easier than if you had kept grinding up come XP/SP/... the vanilla way.

Edge of Tomorrow keeps jumping in my head, but that already had a shitty game made.

In case you are curious what 17 ascensions looks like, I'm about to ascend for the 18th time (20 minutes to enough energy).
(http://i.imgur.com/AHSC6nu.png)

(http://i.imgur.com/RdSdnrd.png)

I'm surprised the game doesn't keep generating more Overmind tiers after VI.  I've gotten as far as Overmind II, with 9 ascensions.

Kittens Game (http://bloodrizer.ru/games/kittens/#)

Might want to skip if you don't like the idea of kittens starving to death in Winter.

I managed to save my kittens by madly clicking through the first winter.   :awesome_for_real:  I'd recommend to others that you wait to build 50 catnip fields before building your first hut.

(edit) Ah, once you science up Agriculture you can make your kittens self-sustaining by assigning them to be Farmers.  I was wondering how the hell those catnip fields were going to scale.

This one doesn't grab me. You need to be fairly hands on as there are events that you have to respond to, also you need to routinely assign your workers around as the seasons change - I wasn't able to make my guys completely self-sufficient and have a science and wood output at the same time, I had to stop one or the other every winter to make them farmers. But the game moves too slowly to grab my interest given the level of attention you need to devote to it.

I haven't played it for that long (it does require you to pay attention to it a little more than an autoclicker type game, although I tend to miss most of the astronomical events) but I've found that if I put one quarter of my kittens on farming, and have sufficient storage, they'll harvest enough catnip the rest of the year to easily make it through winter.

It definitely requires more attention for optimal results, for instance the best use of kittens is sticking a load on as farmers in Spring to gather lots of catnip quickly and just go off storage for winter. On the other hand just have 25% or so as farmers all year round and it'll probably be fine. I like the tech advances and other stuff though.

All my kittens died. I went back to swarm simulator. Swarm never dies.

You just feed them to each other.

You joke about this, but that's going to be the human race in a hundred years.

I thought I'd clicked on the Pet Death thread and got really sad for a second.

Apparently, it's possible to keep going after all of your kittens die. So, I can tell you from experience that Master (whatever) has about twice the productivity as Dabbling. Damn it, ran out of Spices when i was right on the ragged edge of farm production (33 kittens being supported by 3 farmers with a margin of +1.92 at -90%)...and trying to maximize wood output by trading for Catnip, then converting.

--Dave

If you want to see what a swarm looks like after ascending 20 times and getting all the cheevos, here's my save data.

Mostly just had the Kittens thing on in background at work but it's actually developing in, at least apparent, complexity. Or at least there are more numbers running in the background than you're aware of initially that you get to see as technologies unlock. I hadn't realised it tracks kittens' skill levels at jobs, the longer they do one the better they get. It only really matters if you unlock civil service and get a census, when you can start individually assigning specific kittens to tasks.

Yeah, it gets quite complex, but it's slow as fuck and it needs more instructions.


Edited to Add :  Holy fuck, I've had this running for a couple of days and got quite far and, sadly, don't wanna lose my progress.  Can anyone tell me how the save button works ?  Because I'm in an InPrivate IE Session and I really, really don't wanna replay two days worth.

It will link to your DropBox account (you can also get the text string and re-import it later, which appears to be the only way to get it onto a different computer).

--Dave

The Kittens one ?

Yeah, similar to swarmsim.  Kittens doesn't have the auto-save feature though.

I'm up to 40 kittens and having fun exploring the tech tree.  About to build my first printing press, because fuck making these manuscripts by hand.   :drill:

It in settings or options or something. With an import/export button and a dropbox link (haven't tried it yet).

Yeah, it's in Options, clicking "Export" will bring up the save text string, with a link at the bottom for exporting to DropBox. I think the "save" link only stores it locally, you have to export to really be safe.

--Dave

Cheers.  I seem to be ahead of Sam, which seems unlikely in the extreme...

Huh, on my linux box running Chrome I closed the browser (fully), reopened it, and went back to the link and all my stuff is still running.

It saves to a cookie if you aren't in paranoid privacy mode, I think.  But unlike Swarm Sim I don't think it continues "running" in the background when the browser is closed (note that swarm sim doesn't actually run when it's closed, it's just clever and timewarps you based on your system clock).

Yup, that's my experience also.

Note, that there are REASONS for an inprivate session.  So shush.   :why_so_serious:

I'm at 59 kittens, with 4 steamworks, about to build a 5th. Since you take the same Coal production penalty regardless of how many steamworks you have running, more is better (Griffins appear to be the best source of blueprints). Unfortunately, I can't roll my own Blueprints until after Physics, and I am still way short on my Science cap for that.

--Dave

This is so much more fiddly, like an actual game...

I get quite a few blueprints from hunting.

Have I just been lucky ?

You can get them from hunting, but trading "out of cycle" (at the times of year when the trade partner is giving the worst deals) and with less friendly trade partners (with the risk of getting nothing at all) will give more. Currently at 67 kittens and 6 Steamworks (with enough blueprints for 2 more).

--Dave

As with all games of this type, the cockblocks just make it obnoxious.

Jeesus dude, I loaded that up in another browser so as not to screw over my own game, but holy shit how long did it take you to get to that point. It's almost impossible to click fast enough to be efficient you grow so fast.

I suspect it mostly comes down to ascending ASAP.  When I first started I held off on ascending because I thought it'd be like Cookie Clicker where it takes you a while to recoup the losses -- but no, in this one the return on ascending is HUGE and you get past where you were before ascending very quickly.  So you want to ascend ASAP all the time and you'll hit the cap in no time.

A single mislick murdered sooo many kittens.

You don't appreciate how much levelling your kittens helps until you have to use fresh ones.  Jesus.

Okay, Cargo Ships lifts the ceiling on storage cockblocks (for everything except Oil, I'll need Tankers for that). Each of your ships adds 1% to your Harbor storage capacities, and ships are not on an exponential, they always cost 100 Scaffolds. If your Workshop efficiency times your number of Harbors exceeds 100, every click on "Trade Ships" adds the equivalent of another Harbor to your storage.

--Dave

What game?

Kittens, sorry, thought it would be clear. Ships do also cost 25 star charts, which means that Observatories (for automatic star chart generation) it probably going to be my next chokepoint. But I'll probably have an order of magnitude more storage by the time I hit that.

This really shouldn't be fun....

--Dave

Observatories are utter cunts for the scaffolding.

I'm finding resource gathering to be a general massive time block. Maybe I just need to concentrate on getting more kittens? Currently I have 24 and seem to be comfortably hitting the resource cap on catnip anytime that isn't winter. Haven't really bothered with trade much though as people only seem willing to buy my rarer resources to sell me back ones I can get faster (eg. wood for catnip or iron for minerals).

I'm not sure kitten amount actually makes all that much difference.  I have 50 of the furry fuckers and I seem to still have to wiggle a lot of things about to get the rates up.  Mind you, I keep my kittens in the job of choice and leave them there.  It may be that it makes significant difference if you pool them for large jobs or summat.

Currently cockblocked at Compendiums, which is apparently a common problem.  It pretty much sucks.

You could always decide to win the game.

it took about a month but I wasn't optimising my returns at the beginning so I had a slow start and at the end I only cared about getting to the point where I could generate and spend energy as fast as possible to ascend again.

I think I said it before but it's impossible to grow with maximum efficiency when you have that many ascensions. Stuff goes so fast that you'll just be playing whackamole over three different tabs. Also if you try and do the optimal growth with swarmwarp and max everthing out between each one you'll be there all day. My flow for the last 7 or so ascensions goes like this.
Buy max drones.
Buy unit and hatchery upgrades as they become available
When twins upgrades are at 200 or so, hide that upgrade and buy max Queens.
Repeat those steps until you are at Overmind VI. (takes about an hour, a few Swarmwarps at the last few tiers will help you get there faster). Once you've got 200 twins for any unit, hide the twins upgrade and just buy the faster upgrades as they appear.
Buy Nexus and upgrade it as it becomes available. At Nexus IV drop all of your energy into Nightbugs. Come back the next day for the level 5 upgrade and then drop all your remaining energy into Lepidoptera.

Once you have Overmind VIs, upgrade all of your territory units. You should be able to go to level 60 or so with each immediately. Buy the max number of the unit about four spots from the top of the list. Wait for the game to finish shitting itself as it applies about 2k upgrades to your larvae generation.

From that point on you are just popping back a couple of times a day to drop all of your energy into Bats and Lepidopterae until you can ascend. Upgrade stuff if you want to but the only ones that matter are larvae generation (and therefore Mutagen) upgrades.

ooookay.....

Making efficient decisions in this game is fucking impossible.

I'm generating over 200 catnip a second in a (normal) spring, and I'm constantly at cap. With 58 cats nothing much takes forever to build, but I'm blocked by it requiring so much micro-management, and not running in the background without leaving my PC on overnight (which I won't do). But when I come back and everything capped (everything gets to cap in about 15 mins), knowing what to spend it on most efficiently is very tricky.

It's annoying to be blocked on so many things requiring titanium, when I'm so far off it.

I have 58 kittens, but I'm being held back by manuscript generation and science cap mostly, and working out how to best raise those in the long run is tricky when pretty much everything can be raised always (apart from Huts and the catnip ones).

Fuck Compendiums.

Seriously.  What the fuck.  Give a brother a building that will actually help out.  And I don't mean Mints, because Mints are a fucking balancing act.

I'm only cockblocked by titanium and science now, as the mints and steamworks do enough.

Do the Zebras always hate you? Makes trading for titanium annoying as fuck.

What stage are you at that Compendiums aren't buttholing you ?  Because I'd really, really like to get to that stage.

Edit :  Oh.  Steamworks are cumulative.  Oh.

Don't I feel like a fucking fool.

I'm pretty far behind most of you because I tend to play these things in the background rather than actually hovering over them, and this one tends to want you to check on it fairly regularly -- but I really like how as you progress through the tech tree, more and more things get automated.

I just now built my first Mint and am delighted by the fact that it essentially automates my hunters, so now when I leave the game running, rather than maxing out my catpower and stopping, it's just infinitely producing fur and ivory, and all my kittens are kept at full happiness so I don't end up with overnight death spirals because my farmers ran out of furs and stopped producing enough food (that's happened a couple of times now and it makes me sad).  And of course as long as my miners and woodcutters keep going, my Steamworks will keep infinitely producing beams and slabs -- I just wish it'd do the same with steel and plates so I wouldn't come back to capped-out coal and iron stores.  Working on building more Observatories now since I can see a lot of things that want star charts and the "auto-success" thing lets me get those while AFKing...

Good News then.  It eventually DOES that with plates.

But you should never have your kittens starving.  Even in the coldest winter my 8 farmers do the do.  I've not needed any more yet and I'm at 66 Kittens.

That said, while I see what you're saying about Mints, I find that hunts will give you MORE of those nice resources.  So while it's good to have them trundling along with a small income, I prefer to have less mints and some catpower for the hunts....

I now have Chemistry and Geology and Gotham Sucks Balls.  Not sure why I put that last one in there, but Jesus Christ, it's really, really a bad show.

I wish I had more observatories to automate this star chart shite.  I only have 16 and it doesn't seem to proc as much as the 16% suggests it should....

Yeah, I feel dumb for the couple of mass starvation incidents -- it looks like I've got things balanced nicely to leave them with lots of catnip surplus, then I come back after letting it run for 12 hours and everyone's dead.  I'm not positive it's because the balance was upset by having them run out of luxury goods, but that seems like the most likely variable.  I like that mints just knock that out of the equation entirely.

I finally got so I can get titanium from zebras and build a few titanium upgrades, but it's the most obnoxious thing ever.  I'm assuming that Geology will lead toward something that'll produce titanium more steadily and automatically; can't wait for that.

Luxury goods are worth 10% each to morale. Build more tradeposts so the you never run out of luxury good. I have about 100k ivory at this point and with the mint that will now never go down.

Provided you get enough steamworks and the mint lots more becomes automated, to the point you only really need to focus on keeping your science up and increasing storage to maximise gains while afk.

Mass trading with the Zebras has yielded 25 titanium to this point, so all I'm doing now is trying to boost science as fast as possible to get through the research and workshops caps there.

Also getting more kittens isn't always the best move. You get a morale penalty with each one and need to get enough multipliers on what you have them working at to justify the hit.

Also my religion is capped now, so I'm just getting the faith productivity from it now

I have calciners, so Titanium is no longer zebra reliant, but it's still fucking slow.

I have the feeling I'm a fair bit ahead of all of you, I have a dozen steamworks, 5 calniners, about 10 mints (but I never turn those on, just extra gold storage).

Trade posts and amphitheaters help a lot with keeping morale up, I have 142% morale, I have more titanium than I can use, coal is my recurrent chokepoint. I trade a *lot*, what depends on my particular building target but what I really want is the spice and the blueprints. I'm building biolabs and quarries right now, along with steamworks when I get the chance. Observatories really crank out the starcharts when you have over 30 of them.

--Dave

Yeah, sounds like you're about a day ahead of me.  Even at my stage, coal is a massive pain in the arse.

Tradeposts get plunked down every time I can spare stuff to do so.  The plusses it gives you to constructed stuff is always, always useful.


EDIT :  oooo, Geologists. 

First calciner coming online soon.  Yaaaaasssss.  Fuck you, zebras.

Mate, it's not a good rate.  .0025 or some shit.   :why_so_serious:

Basically, don't piss off the zebras yet.

Fast enough to produce enough titanium for the second calciner in about an hour.  I'll take it.

Interestingly enough, nothing bad happens when you massively overspend your Catpower (11 Mints running, -33/sec catpower), in fact you keep generating Furs and Ivory at full speed. Everything else shuts down when you over-spend the underlying resource, but not Mints.

--Dave

My Fucking Save Won't Import.  Not a happy Scot.

Yeah, I noticed that about Mints, but I didn't want to actually do it because I like my hunters too much.


Edit :  leading spaces are apparently Bad.  So that's all sorted.  Quick question tho :  if Mints don't need Catpower, what's the fuckng point of linking them to catpower.  If they DO need catpower, why the fuck are you hiring hunters to power mints ?  Are they security guards ?  Arg.

I bet that's a bug.  Useful one, though.   :grin:

Aaaand after running calciners overnight, titanium is no longer a gating resource for anything.  Time to get all those stupid titanium workshop upgrades that seemed ridiculously unattainable yesterday.  Looks like steel is now the main block on most things (the only scarce resource I can't automate yet)...

(edit) Okay, that bug cuts both ways.  Or something.  I spent my furs down to 0 and now they're not increasing despite having +0.75 production.  Derp.  I think the bug is just with the displayed production number, not the actual resource quantity.

(edit) YAAAAY GEOLOGISTS   :yahoo:

Well, I finally got the positive side of my Coal production and decide to retrench all of the storage upgrades I had skipped while all of my Steel was getting sucked into my industrial base, it got a little insane:


That's with my Mints turned on, so my gold production is a little depressed, but you get the idea.

--Dave

EDIT: Trading with the Zebras is still the best way to get Titanium, but with over 600 trade ships I get around 20 per trade, average (I tend to do the trades in blocks of 100). And Science (or more specifically, attention to use it every 10-15 minutes) becomes the chokepoint on Compendiums and Blueprints, I have over 6000 Manuscripts backlogged.

EDIT2: Looking at that bug a little closer, it appears that what is actually happening is that your Furs/Ivory production is not actually as high as displayed, but exactly what it would be if your Catpower earned was exactly equal to the drain of your active mints. So you still squeeze out a little extra furs/ivory, but not as much as it looks like.

What's this Biochemistry about then ?  Is it not a complete thing or what ?  Because there's no fucking way I'm making 500 Cpmd for something without even a description..

Also, I saved up 5000 parchments for Festivals and, frankly, fuck that.  I ain't hosting one of them, waaaay too much of a waste of paper.

http://bloodrizer.ru/games/kittens/wiki/index.php?page=Technologies#Biochemistry

It is the gateway for converting Catnip into Oil, and will let you speed up Unicorn Pastures (which come into play very, *very*,very late in the game, after you've built the Black Pyramid and opened up trade relations with the Elder Gods).

--Dave

EDIT: Festivals: It's a year-long 30% boost to Happiness, which isn't bad, but not worth the jesusload of Parchment at this point. Maybe later, when Festival-boosted Mints can regenerate that much Fur in a year.

Odd, it wasn't on the tech tree, so I assumed it was just bullshit.  It looks good, but it feels like I've got it early somehow.

Motherfucker.  Thank God I send my exports to myself as something happened and it started from the start again. And, no, not a reset, just a complete start. 

What a cunt.  That's about 5 hours up in smoke.

Well, I think I am about to stall out on the Kittens Game, I've started on Space exploration and oil is the cockblock, you can reduce Oil cost with Space Elevators, but you need unobtainium to build the elevators, which you can only get from Lunar Outposts, which cost 1.75 uranium/sec to run (so you run it for 15 minutes, then wait 4 hours for your Uranium stores to recover). To get enough uranium/second to run the Lunar Outpost non-stop, you need the Planet-Cracker...which costs 125K Oil, baseline. You need buttloads of Tankers to get anywhere near that, and they cost 1250 Alloy, which requires over 90K steel. That gets you 500 more Oil capacity, and I estimate that I will at *least* 50 of them to get anywhere close, along with all the Oil Wells I can stand to build (they also need unreasonable amounts of steel after 40 or so).

You can reset with Paragon points (used by Metaphysics for bonuses) and Faith generation rates, but I don't think they will take the edge off of the pain (and I might have to re-discover Metaphysics to use them, which means I have to get to Lunar Outpost again the hard way before I get my bonus).

--Dave

I got kind of annoyed when I noticed that it penalises you for having the window minimised or otherwise not in focus, stuff moves about half speed. Then I read the wiki and discovered there's Iron Will mode, where you don't actually get any kittens and I just despaired at some of the people that must be playing this.

Some?  :uhrr:

I'm still enjoying it. 

Currently being told that I have buildings that will use Uranium and I can trade for Uranium, but I can't actually make Uranium.  So it's back to stockpiling science.

There's an option (Use Web Worker) that will correct that, essentially it's not it penalizing you, it's the browser not giving cycles to pages in the background.

Ironwood: Trade for 25 Uranium, build an Accelerator. Don't build anything else with Uranium until you can grow your own, it's too much pain.

--Dave

fakeedit: that.

Yeah.  I don't have Accelerator yet.  So.  Back to stockpiling science.   :why_so_serious:

What I DO have is 116 kittens.

I'm up to 103, and I have 3 farmers feeding the lot.  Multipliers are crazy.

156, bitches. Fear my cute furry horde.

--Dave

You'll probably need more if you lose your aqueducts.  Which, be warned, is a choice thing...

Keep the Aqueducts, wait for the opportunity to trade the Pastures for Solar Farms. Hydro Dams take such shitloads of minerals, when I wound up switching them back, I more than replaced *all* of the catnip differential out of my minerals in inventory (that weren't enough to build a third Hydro), and built enough Solar Farms out of my titanium in inventory to more than make up the power grid.

--Dave

That's the situation I'm in.  Farms came first, so I'm using them instead.  When I upgraded Aqueducts, the drop was just too much.  I mean, who the fuck wants negative catnip at that stage in the game ???

I have not yet had a problem with energy, I always have more from my Magnetos and Reactors than I need, right now I could turn my Solar Farms back into Pastures and still have enough to spare for a Moon Base and a couple of Space Stations. And the Reactors/Magnetos give production bonuses, the Hydro doesn't.

--Dave

EDIT: I did for a brief period, when I was having trouble finding enough Blueprints for Magnetos, which is why I built the Solar Farms. But now I have 16 Magnetos, 18 Steamworks, 10 Reactors, and a dozen Satellites, on top of the 20 Solar Farms, with shit-tons of stuff drawing on it I still have 94 Wt to spare. The bonuses from the power-generating stuff are so useful, I build them for that way ahead of my power demand.

I'm glad I haven't looked up spoilers for this game; I just tabbed over to the Workshop, saw the CAD and SETI upgrades, and squee'd.  So exciting.  Luckily I saw CAD before I'd crafted all the blueprints for my next science upgrade.   :awesome_for_real:  Trying to get robotics and whatever that gets me up and running before I leave my game running unattended over the weekend; based on the description I suspect it will greatly benefit my "AFK to victory" strategy.

(edit) Shit yes, that was exactly what I've been looking for.   :drill:

SETI removes the most annoying thing about the game ever.

I'm currently idling where Mahrin is.  It's a pain in the bum.

Basically, the only way through is to keep piling up Space Elevators until the Planet Cracker is within reach, I need one more. In the meantime everything ground-bound has caught up to the point where I literally cannot spend the Titanium and Blueprints on anything useful (I may already have gone too far with Steamworks).

However, I've also started killing Unicorns, so that's a plus.

--Dave

EDIT: Finally got the Planet-Cracker running, now it's just painfully slow to get more space infrastructure, rather than mind-numbingly repetitive.

Whut ?  I've been killing them for AGES.  What kept you ?

Not wanting to sidetrack resources into a path that doesn't help me advance in this instance of the game, figured there'd be plenty of time later, when I could more easily afford to build a lot of Ziggurats.  While I was stalled out watching my Uranium counter slowly tick, I built 25 of them and then started summoning the many-angled ones. They haven't shown up yet, but I'm getting Unicorn Rifts and Ivory Meteors so often I filtered them out.

Anyway, punched through that barrier, have two Planet Crackers and two Lunar Outposts running full time, now I'm out of Starcharts.

--Dave

I thought that all the other resources were annoying, but I'm finding Oil the worst right now because you have plenty of things making it, but storage for it is just WRONG.  Tankers really need to be changed to be a bit more accessible...

This isn't a game, but it's an intriguing little waste of time. (http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-who-marries-whom/)

http://slither.io/

More fun but the jerky motion of the interface as your snake crawls gives me eyestrain.

They got some lag issues afaik.

This took me a while.

(http://i.imgur.com/qdnvWnb.png)

Wow, I can't believe you are still playing it. I dropped off after a couple of weeks!

http://www.idiots.win

I stopped at 'are feet s' with the top result being 'are feet shoes'. The humanity. I can't.

I prefer the original Sushi Cat; the sequel was a bit of a letdown.

Just to make a point that because of this fucking spammer, I'm playing the goddamn kittens game again.

I hate you all.

Hey, I still log into Swarm sim regularly both here at work and at home.  It's more of an exercise is clicking a few buttons in the morning or whenever and then going away again.

I never really stopped "playing" the kittens game.  I think the only achievement I have left is reaching year 40k, which luckily doesn't require a lot of work on my part.   :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, but I did.  Which means I'm starting again.

Thanks Sushicat2, you complete cunt.

This is a couple of years old.

A dark room (http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/)

NO.

I remember that and I'm still fucking about with kittens.

I ain't clicking it, you naughty person.

I could be wrong but I think this one has an end.

Really ?  I don't remember finding it.  Wait, is this a trick ??

A Dark Room is great (more than a couple of years old I think) and yes there is an end.  I think last time I played it, it took me about a day of real time (not a day of play time) to finish.

Why do you all hate me ?

Ok, I'm going to do that then.  I don't remember getting to the end.

Join me down the rabbit hole! 

Right now, my biggest complaint is that I can't get the page to turn back to a white background.

I see at the bottom of my screen "Lights Off." That's what you want.

That was fun. Got tedious at the end, but I enjoyed the expeditions.

I must totally suck at these kinds of games, because I'm still trying to beat this.  Dammit.

That was posted on the 18th, Rhyssa.  How long have you been sitting there?!   :ye_gods:

I'm not playing it continuously, just logging in/out and dying a lot.

Two digital assistants at neighboring Google Homes have started talking to each other.

https://www.twitch.tv/seebotschat

Interesting puzzle game: http://www.robozzle.com (http://www.robozzle.com)

Weird, this should be stickied. Anyway:

http://absurveillancesolutions.com/

login: 00437
password: bedsheets

Have fun.

What the heck is this ?

right?

It's from the Claridryl / Unedited Footage of a Bear people.

https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

An interesting read:

Being the Boss in Brussels, Boston, and Beijing (https://hbr.org/2017/07/being-the-boss-in-brussels-boston-and-beijing)

(cross cultural management)

(https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2017/06/R1704D_MEYER_MAPPINGLEADERSHIPCULTURES-1200x1185.png)

I think the US and Japanese models (Japan especially) are the most interesting. Top-down but egalitarian and extremely hierarchical and extremely consensual both seem really interesting in terms of contrasting management styles and attitudes. Definitely something to look at, thanks!

I don't get what these words mean in this context.

Consensual meaning you're happy with the system and top-down meaning you feel they're imposed upon you?

What it seems to be is the X axis is the attitude demonstrated in the workplace and how employees and managers feel about their relationship. The Y axis is the management style in practice. So according to that graph in American workplaces there is a feeling that everyone is fairly equal, managers try to be approachable and deal with people on an equal level but in practice decisions are made at the top and orders are sent down. The Japanese contrast is a company where there's a strict hierarchy and people are in their place on the totem pole (so subordinates being deferential to managers, etc.) but when it comes to decision making and implementation they involve everyone and avoid imposing directives.

Those two are the most interesting because there seems to be a huge contrast in the attitude towards management and how management actually works. The top right corner are places where the boss is king and they tell you what to do. The bottom left is where people are treated more equally and involved in the decision making process. Japan is where the boss is king but they'll ask you if they should be doing this or that, while in the US the boss is treated as an equal but they'll dictate what's happening.

Edit: Ok I actually read the article and it's a little clearer. The X axis is attitude towards authority, I guess more broadly the management culture from flat structures to firm hierarchies. The Y axis is how decisions are reached from being vested in a single boss to coming out of consensual agreement among everyone. They make the useful distinction that the top-down decisions tend to be faster and more initially decisive but less fixed where consensual decision making takes longer but generally produces firm commitments.

http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

Yep, had this shown to me last night. I can't understand why it's so damn addicting.

numbers go up

Clips per Second: 1.45 trillion

 :ye_gods:

 :drill:

Gave up when I hit 10 quintillion Von Neuman probes (at that point I had made over 5 tredecillion paperclips but only 0.000000000017% of universe explored)  :why_so_serious:

I just pulled in all of the factories and drones at that point and reallocated points to combat speed and exploration. Took about an hour to go from almost none of the universe explored to 100%.

this one ended poorly

Am I doing something wrong? My rate of increase in clip making has dramatically slowed in the billions of clips.

would need to see a screenshot

https://imgur.com/a/2OpSO (https://imgur.com/a/2OpSO)

(I don't know how to actually post a screenshot image, I'm ashamed to admit).

Too many processors, need more memory.  Use the quantum computer to fill up the ops.

I noticed while playing that the way the Trust upgrades work, if you don't invest most of it in memory you end up screwing yourself pretty hard and having to grind it the old fashioned way (at logarithmic rates of return) if you want to progress further in the game.  Looks like you've hit that problem and now have a long slog to be able to start the drone tech tree.

Yep, you must release the hypnodrones...

All Hail the Hypnodrones!

--Dave (If you'll excuse me, I need to finish cutting up my dishwasher into thin strips of metal)

The way the game plays out, it's more like your dishwasher cuts YOU up for strips of metal  :ye_gods:

Ah. I took the wrong option, I thought that creativity might be the better of the two. Thanks!

I got to space and got to space combat and then gave up.  It's not grabby.

Meanwhile, the Kittens Continue.

I got bored in space as well, didn't finish.

At least I made it to space that time.  First playthrough ended when I tried playing with the work/think slider in Internet Explorer and locked up the game.

Microsoft: Products that (almost) prevent the AI apocalypse [insert image of Clippy looking ashamed here]

Paperclips - problem #2.

 :awesome_for_real:

There are some hilariously bad ways to screw yourself in this game, that's for sure.

F13 should totally design one of these "numbers go up" games!  It seems like the amount of coding involved should be trivial (as in I bet even someone like me with minimal web dev experience could knock a v1.0 out in a weekend) and I bet we have enough creative talent around here to make it pretty entertaining (and enough game design sense to avoid the obvious pitfalls).

i already designed one, but it involves lots of linked lists of words and random loot

Doing some light bed time reading and certainly didn't expect the topic of nuclear accidents to be so..er
. colourful:


  :ye_gods:

Have a source? I'd like to read the rest of that story, and others like it.

Here you go:

https://leatherbarrowa.exposure.co/chernobyl

Command and Control (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(book)) is also excellent reading on that subject. You realise that the only reason that the US has not dropped nuclear weapons on itself is basically blind luck.

Ended up "winning" the paperclips game in 6 hours roughly, rejected the offer a new world and me 30 bajillion paperclips destroyed the universe

Succubox, aka AAA F2P Lootbox MMO Simulator 2017 (http://www.glaielgames.com/succubox/)

Link text says it all, really... I'd say more, but spoilrz. :awesome_for_real:

I ran an autoclicker on it overnight and am at level 12/100.  Is there any trick I'm missing or is that the joke?   :awesome_for_real:

It is (part of) the joke, but basically 99.9999% of this "game" takes place outside of the "Play" menu. Have you tried spending all your money on lootboxes?

Ah there we go.  I'd "bought" one to check whether it was a "premium" lootbox that'd give me a sword and after that turned out to not be true I decided I wanted to save up for the DLC.   :awesome_for_real:

Anyone got any readable and legible data on the caps and diminishing returns on the Mutations in Swarmism ?

Asking for a friend.  And the reddit area is a bit of a shitshow.

Not good enough for the art picture thread, but really like the scene itself, itself so putting it here:

Cafe Meier, 19. May 2018

(https://i.imgur.com/KjkoZlD.jpg)

Sort of peaceful :-)

I've been playing this:

https://armorgames.com/world-of-talesworth-game/18386?fp=ng

It's an Idle game MMO simulator. It's funny because it hits on a lot of jokes about MMO players while also grinding through fake guilds and personally getting a job to support your gaming habit.