Planet M.U.L.E.

I *love* MULE and remember playing it for hours on and old Atari 800.

I had forgotten how *slow* it was to play a full game, though. We used to play a single game over lunch hour.

In today's world, there's no need for it. So much of it can be skipped. You need some sort of "speed mode". Here are the things that could be skipped with an appropriate click:
1. If you are playing a robot, a click should show what the robot did rather than make you wait through the bot's whole entire turn.

2. When preparing for your own turn, it should just show the event as a line immediately rather than scrolling it. No need to wait for it. At the very least, let me click to immediately go to my turn.

3. The countdown of 4 seconds to my turn should be skipped if I hit the space bar.

4. When there is no auction for a particular item because it is out, no need to go through the whole auction. Just say it's skipped somewhere on the screen.

5. The production process is agonizing; rather than do all players entering it, can skipping the production just be a setting at the beginning of the game for the player that initiates it?

6. It should be possible to opt out of an auction (up/down/left?). If all players opt out of an auction or only bots are left, just show the result rather than showing the auction.

Two other features that don't speed the game up, but help alot:

7. If I accidentally hit the return key, the game gets stuck in a mode where space and arrows only type those things in the chat box. That's agonizing if you accidentally do it during your turn. Chat should be turned off so you can't accidentally hit it when you're in the middle of an event where you're timed.

8. I remember the biggest annoyance with the original game is that when you clicked up or down to choose buyer and seller, then wanted to be first off the mark, you'd accidentally switch from buyer to seller or vice versa. That was not a behavior that should be brought over to this version. Somehow allow choosing of buyer or seller, with a *default* being determined by whether you are over or under. Once all players have chosen, *then* count down from 2 to the actual running.

Thanks so much for bringing MULE back. I missed it...

Tubby

I don't have the time to give my opinion on all this right now, but I totally agree with 8.

This was fine for an offline game, but with latency, it's awful. With a bad host, when the countdown reach 0 for me, the host's already selling things. Maybe you could, ie, press spacebar to confirm your position as a buyer/seller, then keep an arrow pressed to start running immediately after countdown.

Just FYI, in full screen mode there is no chat window distraction.

I think the slowness was what made some of the original game enjoyable. However, you make a few good points:
Agreed on that one. No need to watch them walk around. And especially no need for a countdown for the mechtrons...

I dunno, again I kinda like the drama of suspense.


Again, I'd vote for the look/feel of the original on that.

Otherwise, some good ideas there. See you on Irata!

-BC

You can use settings. There is an option for showing computers part or not. In a hostet game, the setting of host decide if this is shown or not.

I agree with the OP.
Especially in the auction phase there are few places where waiting is really really unnecessary.

How about these?

- In the midle of auction, press button to return immediatelly to your base buy/sell position.
- In the buy/sell position, press button to opt-out from auction - you declare you won't buy/sell anymore. When all players opt out, the auction ends immediatelly.
- Please skip last turn auctions, they are pointless now.

- An option to show random events in chat window and not as a scrolling text would be nice  ;)

Hi, there is and idea that would speed up the game considerably: Let auctions end before time if there is nothing left to trade (only possible when the store is empty on that particular trade item).

One of M.U.L.E.'s clones "Subtrade" implemented this feature and it significantly speeds up auctions.

This would only happen in the case that there are all Sellers and everyone's completely out of goods, or all are Buyers and the Store is empty. In all other cases, there may be a severe unlikelihood that anyone would sell beyond their surplus or buy above their shortage from someone who is price gouging, but the time should still have to tick off, just in case.

Since there is no collusion (users had to push buttons), auctions could implement a push button to skip remainder of auction sort of thing, all users push and auction will be skipped...

This early ending of auctions is not just a wild idea; it's experience. It works well in "Subtrade". Often, you don't have any Smithore or Crystite in the store and all sellers have run dry. This is where the auction should end. Since this is commonly the case, a full game of 12 months is reduced by about 15 (or more) mins in playing time. We have tested this some while ago with "Subtrade". (Ok, it's probably not THAT important for the new M.U.L.E. as compared to the old original where the clock ticked slower; but anyway, in my first games here, some people have already noticed the unneccessary waiting time.)

I vote for it.  But then again, I'd love to skip the auctions in turn 12.

Not sure why anyone hasn't already stated: According to the OPs question... This already happens. If the store has nothing to sell, and everyone else is on the buy line (which is automatic if they have nothing to sell) the auction is skipped ......

This is not what I meant. The auction is only canceled if there is already nothing to trade at the start of the auction. I was talking about the situation when the players have run dry, hence the auction has already begun and somebody has sold something. This happens usually in Smithore and Crystite auctions. Worst case is a single player having one unit to sell; he sells and afterwards everybody has to wait for the complete time to run through. If the auction is stopped when there is nothing left to trade, the game gains fluency. It's an idea taken from the M.U.L.E. clone "Subtrade".

Ah, I see what you're saying. Yes, that should save a few seconds here and there. 

What do you think, I know that I'd like it to move faster, or even better have options you could speed up the gameplay or eliminate some animations.

Thanks a lot and great game

I voted yes, but I think the game could be sped up differently then by eliminating the animations etc. adn it would be nice if we could get a full tournament game to under an hour (currently any game I have played is at least 1¼ hours long and closer to 1¾ hours long.

- One suggestion would be to make the auctions quicker buy ending them once sellers have run dry, buyers are out of money (or all players agree to skip auction by pressing buttons).

If you do the math, it's not possible to complete a game in under an hour, no matter what you do unless you remove actual elements from the game and change the way it is played from the original game.  Let's assume it's a game with 4 human players.  If each player takes approximately 60 seconds just to develop (not including any time from land grand, production, auctions, summary) that is 48 minutes right there over the course of a 12 month game. ...  And so the bottom line is that it takes a long arse time to play this game and it always will !!!  Trying to shave seconds off here and there isn't going to really make much of a difference overall.  I am not saying it shouldn't be done, just don't think that you're going to finish a game in less than an hour.   :P

There are a few ideas to speed up the game a little. One of them is cutting off all unrelevant delays (see other threads). A more significant one would be to let the players do their development simultaneously. If I see it correctly, the providing of MULEs is the only mechanism that would require a new form balancing then. So, how about that?

It is a valid suggestion for MULE 2010, but not for the current version, since it would change the rules.  The current versions goal is to be as true to the original game as possible.

The simultaneous development phase would, of course, not be an idea for the authentic M.U.L.E. but for an advanced version (what I thought this thread is for). However, I do not think it would alter the gameplay too much: Right now, the players' development phases do not interfere with each other except for the snapping up of somebody else's M.U.L.E.s. If you gave each player access to the number of M.U.L.E.s she or he would get in a regular turn (e.g. 2 MULEs for each player if there were 8 MULEs in the store) the game would pretty much progress the way it usually does. The only thing missing is the possibility to buy up additional MULEs and let them go free so that subsequent players couldn't buy them. I wouldn't miss that too much, and the gain in game speed would be considerable.

Not true.  For one, players frequently make decisions about what to develop based on previous developments. For example, if I see you stocking up on Smithore, I may decide to do the same to prevent you from monopolizing Smithore.  In addition, players would not be able to see the result of other players assays.

Moving this to the Feedback & Suggestions forum since it's not about altering mechanics, but improving the interface.

i agree with zack i want to see what the other person in the lead is doing before i take my turn.  1.5hrs with 4 players is acceptable

Zach didn't suggest that, I did !  ???

I absolutely agree concerning "simultaneous development", although that would be a nice option/gamemode for an extended MULE version.

Movement speed on the map as well as in auctions and the development timer should also be tweaked to be as close as possible to the original. For the "extended Version" all that stuff can/should be tweaked differently of course.

Hum... same form avatar.... booo  :'(

I agree that the speed of the game can be slow sometimes, but I think making big changes will only rush the experience.  I mean you could forgo all animations and just click on what you want (click MULE corral and click Energy and you've outfitted your MULE in 2 seconds) and speed the game up by 50%, but then you lose the feel of immersion. 

Making characters walk faster will only make it more difficult to be accurate in your MULE placement and whatnot.  The parade is a wonderful chance to see who's in first place, etc in a slightly suspenseful, whimsical way that adds what, 4 seconds to each round?  I say keep it.  Skipping auction 12 is silly.  True, most people wouldn't do anything during those auctions, but they should have the option to.

All that said, I do think that if the pirates stole all the Crystite, just skip the Crystite auction altogether.  Don't bother setting it up and then saying you're going to skip it. 

It's great that we no longer have to watch the Mechtrons take their turns in real time.

And any opportunity to have all the players press the button skip ahead is an opportunity that should be taken.  If the acid rain cloud comes and everyone wants to skip it, let us skip it.  God, remember how long it took for the old Atari spider to eat all those food units??!!? 

I think the game could be sped up slightly, but I don't like the idea of not letting the game play out.  It's like when you're playing multiplayer and one of the players says, in round 9, "Good game, Joe.  Congratulations on winning.  Too bad Sam will come in second."  That irritates the crap out of me.  I understand that great chess players can see the whole game play out from one single move and the rest is just tedious for them, but I, for one, enjoy playing the game and seeing it through to its conclusion.

They should have the option IF these option could actually change the outcome - otherwise it's just confusing because players think they can do something useful, but actually they cannot.

In training mode, when playing against ONLY robot players, please add a key to let the game know that I'm finshed and if all the robots are finished to immmediately move on to the next screen ASAP!

I want to play the game faster in training mode!!!!!!!!!!!!

Most of the suggestions in the first post are great, I would also like to have round 12 auction skipped - it's completely pointless and just makes you sit there waiting for the scores to come up.

I would more like to see that auction 12 isnt piontless...  :)

In the original game, it is not pointless.  Only the computer players think it is.  But the human players have the opportunity to change things up in round 12.

If you really wanted to shrink a game from 75 minutes to 60 minutes, you could just increase the speed of everything by 20%... Obviously, this wouldn't be in the spirit of recreating the original M.U.L.E experience - but I don't think it's completely absurd. Characters would run faster, goods would be traded faster, the results screen would pop up faster - a good ATARI/C64 emulator will let you try this yourself already, if you want to see if it's any fun.

Some parts (like the Land Grant) might be too fast at 150%, while some parts (like Land Auctions) might actually be able be sped up even further. Maybe they could tweak it, keeping the important parts slow and speeding up the other parts, so you can get a faster game in. And then, just have "Fast Play" as an option, without fundamentally changing M.U.L.E