Wyrdysm Games

By scrolling horizontally, do you mean scrolling the entire screen horizontally, or scrolling the tables horizontally? Because I think I'm just going to change the data displays so that less information is displayed at once, and you check radio buttons to change what data is currently being displayed, which might make a lot more sense than what I have now.

Keep up the good work!! I want to play this soon.

The individual tables. Also check boxes to display cirtain data would be good, and on_hover expanded tooltips of somekind

Damn, I wasn't able to meet my deadline; spring break ends today for me T.T

As a postmortem, unfortunately I was bogged down with the issue of formalizing emergent behaviors without losing the individual behaviors themselves. A good example is combat: Combat is done with exchanges of shots between individual ships. On one end of the scale, I could model individual ships and simulate a fight. However, even for a 4 vs. 4 battle, there are a total of 4^16 possible exchange patterns (there are 4 possible pairings for each of 4*4 possible pairs of ships), meaning I would need to construct a program, come up with balance, implement AI behaviors, etc... On the other end of the scale, I could model ships as masses with attack/defense values. However, it makes that same 4 vs. 4 battle unbearably boring. In previous rulesets I have gone with the latter, but assigned a lot of flavor values to individual ships, but the system was never put to a real-world test.

The two main issues affected by this were combat and economy. In hindsight, completing combat first may have been better than trying to complete economy first, as I am more familiar with combat, and could have used the lessons learned from combat in application to the economy. However, CF is designed to have a heavy focus on the economy, so I chose to tackle economy first.

Several issues arose with trying to implement a serious market economy, but actually the largest was trying to create a consistent system that would neither magically "gain" or "lose" money. If the system of trades was inconsistent, it would lead to undesired inflation/deflation and create serious and unexpected imbalances in pricing and trading. For that I needed to model not only how much money each individual sector of economy had (hence why I introduced development values), but how that would affect the flow of money. I also needed to grapple with the concept of credit (i.e. from banks), supply vs. demand (and how the act of satisfying demand would change the demand itself), etc... I suspect that in order to have created a consistent system, I would have needed to deal with linear algebra and linear differential equations.

Probably from here, I'm going to draft up an isolated set of combat rules and do a test of those. Expect to see CF: Unending War soon!