Planet M.U.L.E.

I was looking the log file of my (so far) only game on Internet, and witnessed something that looked strange to me regarding food and energy valuation on last turn.

As is explained elsewhere, the formula to calculate the new price is something like this :
new price = old price x (0.25 + 0.75 * (D/S))

Consequently, the worst that can happen is for the price to be divided by 4, which does happen when D(Demand) = 0.

This is just what happened on my game, and i guess for all games at large :

  INFO [Shop.calcBuySellPrice]                       Current Food price $154
  INFO [Shop.printPriceFactor]                       Food shop: 2, total: 14, needed: 0
  INFO [Shop.printPriceFactor]                       Food is decreased to 25%
  INFO [Shop.printPriceFactor]                       Food buy price $24 sell price $59

That point towards a massive devaluation of food price on last turn, since needed=0.

Ok, so let's say, there is no turn 13, so it is normal. ok. But now, what about Energy :

  INFO [Shop.calcBuySellPrice]                       Current Energy price $120
  INFO [Shop.printPriceFactor]                       Energy shop: 0, total: 78, needed: 36
  INFO [Shop.printPriceFactor]                       Energy is decreased to 60%
  INFO [Shop.printPriceFactor]                       Energy buy price $57 sell price $92

Hey, for energy, needed is not 0 ! It is the normal rule, one per producing land.
So Energy price do not plummet on last turn.

I was wondering : hey, why such a difference ?
It would feel more logical if the rule would be the same.
So maybe there is a bug for food ?
The normal is supposed to be needed=5 per player, for a total of 20.


Regards

As a quick complement :
i've just checked the original (C64) version of M.U.L.E

and the food price does not plummet on the last round !

It's correctly valuated, as usual (5 per player) resulting in hefty prices if too many players stop producing food on last round.

I've complained about this before. Live with it.

Same goes for the price updating the game does just right after the production phase. This screws food price even when players are starving. It was not that way in the original version either.

Many of us have voiced a complaint about this issue, and Admin's answer at this point has been, in regards to this and other "minor" bugs that make this version differ from the original, that...

"We may get back to perfecting Planet MULE someday, but we are focused on other projects (I.E. MULE 2) and other newer productions for now."

Thanks for the explanation. This is crystal clear unfortunately, as could be feared.

A pity that developing mule2 implies dropping support for platemule, since this bug is as simple as it can be to be corrected, and its impact on gameplay is really sensible, deeply affecting all end strategies.

Not all bugs are created equal, so a new release should not target at solving them all. While some bugs might be time-consuming to solve, on top of having no effect on gameplay, this one is really not in this category.

There is always the possibility that we might be able to release pm1 as open source, so anyone willing to invest some time could improve or totally rewrite this.

I personally hope that this be possible.

But even open source isn't the solution. There is a centralized server. Someone has to "bless" some specific set of code as the official one supported by the server.