Comments on: Strategy Guide and Tech Talk http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/08/22/strategy-guide-and-tech-talk/ A tri-annual 48 hour solo game development competition. Sun, 19 May 2013 04:35:14 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: foobaz http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/08/22/strategy-guide-and-tech-talk/comment-page-1/#comment-24056 foobaz Sat, 27 Aug 2011 02:29:44 +0000 http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/?p=69538#comment-24056 I could be wrong, but I don’t think the random cage generation would make such a big difference. I think the binomial distribution is sufficiently concentrated that you would get close to your expected number of cages every time. I think that the variance on the number of cages on the top and right border is greater and, in my opinion, impacts the outcome much more.

Basically, on insane, I would just try to go straight to the exit by first finding a cage on the top or right side. This is to avoid running out of food (I haven’t looked at the code but it felt like visiiting cages yield an expected loss in _food_ (not just hope) at insane).

If you wanted a more consistent difficulty by altering the distribution of cages, I would suggest (also) fixing the number of cages on the sides. In fact, if this information is given to the player beforehand. it could make an interesting part of the game. (If they “saw” enough empty squares, they would know the remaining are cages).

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