memory is that typical ‘all out’ decwar games, san marcos 83/84, were around thirty to forty minutes, and an ideal afternoon would be two or three intense games complete with ‘report to slave planet’ or ‘the galaxy is saved’ messages. then go swimming/tubing in the san marcos river. as project utexas and robots have gotten smoother over the last few months, this has led to conscious ‘tuning’ of the game length to be thirty to forty minutes with ten robots playing. with decwarjs now coming online, this topic is getting deeper. what are the ‘knobs’ controlling game length?

right now the robots are in defense mode when young and attack enemy ships, then switch to offense when older and attack enemy bases. victory condition is simply ‘enemy has zero bases’ but this is not right. historical victory condition is ‘zero planets and enemy has no bases’. the control knob is then the initial number of planets. the default is sixty, but there’s strong evidence it was varied between twenty and eighty to control game length. twenty planets would mean a short game.

what’s needed in project utexas is for the robots to be a bit smarter. they should take out planets by either building them into bases or destroying them. probably this behaviour should be active on both defense and offense. game length could then be tuned via the initial number of planets.

memory is that fifteen year old beginners basically only cared about planets when number of bases got low. then there was a rush to capture and build planets to get number of bases back up. with fewer initial planets, they would ‘run out’ earlier and prevent building bases. then the end would come quickly. but there’s also a much dimmer memory that there were times when a general ‘planet hunt’ would break out, and planets were destroyed as quickly as possible. this would make sense if the enemies base count was low. get all the planets and the enemies last base. and there’s even a very dim memory that the smarter and more strategic players would lead these ‘planet hunts’. something like a rallying call over the radio to ‘take out the planets’. these memories are very slowly returning now. could be dreaming them, but do suspect they’re real.