Planet M.U.L.E.

Another game update has been made today. This release modifies the Land Auction in the following ways:

    * Land Auction is now 28 seconds long unless players remain behind the auction line. If they do remain behind the line the timer will reduce more quickly.
    * A text is shown if the colony has no land for sale this round.
    * The leading player in the Land Auction blinks.
    * A starting price line has been added in the Land Auction to clearly show if players are participating with a bid or not. Players will remain in place over this line as long as they have not backed all the way down to exit the auction.

The update also fixes a few issues:

    * The colony will no longer auction a plot owned by a player.
    * The start of the land auction and goods auctions are better synchronized.
    * Player positions are better synchronized during auctions.
    * Fixed graphical glitches where players moved strangely in the auction.
    * Fixed an issue where an auction could be skipped by the host but not a client.
    * Fixed an issue which allowed the store to have over 14 mules.
    * Fixed a few other minor problems.

Feel free to discuss the changes in this topic in our forum. Please also report any problems you might encounter in our Bugs and Support forum.

Best Regards,
Planet MULE Development Team

yea guys, i think you have nailed it. only played 1 game but it looks very good thanks

just find a way for me to get more money so i can buy the plots and it will be perfect

really appreciate the time and effort you put into this to get it up and running so quickly

rodz

Seems good to me as well.  Not quite sure what the run up limit is on it, but it seemed about right to not have a lot of "ties".  The blinking works great.  There was still latency issues with last second run ups, but they did not seem as bad as with the timer that moves slower with people moving.

The reduced timer when everyone stays behind the line was a great addition.  Unfortunately the last update trained us all to press up all the time so we didn't get to use that function very much the first game we tried.  Maybe we will get better at waiting in the future. 

So what was the consensus on still having a chance for another auction if plot goes unsold?  I still think the game plays better with it left in the game. 

One last thing, and it may be irrelevant now but yesterday on the 1.3.1 version we had a game where we had 4 auctions in a row.  None of us could remember it happening before.  Is this supposed to be possible?

I guess the original developers did that to save time. If nobody wants to buy a plot of land it may be tiresome to wait to end 3 land auctions. But you could argue that the current plot was not interesting but the next might be (e.g. 4 crystite yield).


That's corrected now. The maximum is 3 land auctions.

Usually when a plot doesn't sell it's because no one has enough money.  Continuing a chance to have more auctions adds depth to the land auction choices.

For instance:  its round 4 and the land last turn sold for 1000.  no one can get their money above 940 this turn,  there is no longer any reason to have the largest amount of money since you know that if there is  an auction, the plot won't get sold and then no more auction.  It's that chance that there might still be more auctions that adds a little more depth and anticipation.

2nd common situation  It's round 6 and you have 1 land less than everyone, but you do have $4000 and the next highest person only has 1500.  The land on the auction on the turn before sold for $2800.  If plots stop being sold at unsold then you are forced to buy the land (whether its a good deal or not).  But, if you let there be a chance of future auctions then it is possible (although not likely) to get a better deal on a 2nd auction, or get 2 lands instead of 1 in case there were 3 total auctions that round.  This is a fun gambit to witness no matter what side of it you are on.

When the auctions commonly got run up over and over and each run up took 2 minutes everyone wanted to get rid of auctions after unsold.  But your new timing system seems to work really well on the land auctions and an unsold plot goes really fast.   

I just think that the chance of auctions each turn is one of the more fun random elements in the game.  The reprice system when a plot goes unsold works really well.  I just think the game plays better if the auctions continue.



By the way the run-up limit appears to be a little less than 2k on any given auction.  So the tie situations should be fairly rare, but they will still happen.  Who is going to win ties as it stands now?

But if the auction continues, the next plot's price goes down and this deviates too much from original. Don't have any objection to be this way in Mule 2.0 though.

I'm not sure why people keep assuming the developers ended land auctions to save time. I like watching a player hoard money to buy land, and then no land is able to be bought. They usually get stuck in first... it's a gamble. To guarantee land makes for too much routine. Routine is becoming too prevalent in Planet MULE games, but that's a different thread.


[I posted this in another thread, but I meant to post it here.]
Kroah's M.U.L.E. Decompilation document states (at least for the Atari version):

"The number of colony land auctions is limited by the number of lands still available and equal to the normal distribution of 1 with an amplitude of 2 for the Tournament level."

This gives the following probabilities:
Plots for sale   
0      31.126%
1      37.748%
2      24.303%
3      6.248%
4      0.562%
5      0.013%"

As we see, 5 plots could be up for auction in a round. One of my emulated C64 M.U.L.E. games had a 4 plot plot land auction, so I can confirm the possibility of greater than 3 plot sales.