[much]

Imo, this remake (up to 1.2 anyway) completely changes the dynamics of the real Mule.

In the Atari 800XL Mule:

• Land Grant at tournament level is much faster. As in, really very much faster. It's not uncommon to miss the plot you want because you click too slow.
• The AI does a much better job at picking its land. It surveys for Crystite all over the place, reaches for High/Medium Crystite spots, and generally prefers adjacent spots in order to take advantage of economies of scale.
• The Mountain Wampus is hard to spot on the screen. It's a mere dot, and you really need to pay attention in order to find it. As much as I like the critter's graphic, it's far too big.
• The Mountain Wampus shows up on any mountain, including those that have an owner.
• The Mountain Wampus changes mountains. Several times in each turn. This makes him very hard to catch.
• The Mountain Wampus never, ever shows up on the mountain that you're onto. In particular if you're clicking on it. (This is per manual, btw.)
• The AI never goes after the Mountain Wampus. Ever, ever. (Also per manual.)
• The AI loves to produce Smithore and Crystite. The attached map (I'm blue) should make this rather obvious. The only thing that Green is producing is Crystite. The other two switched to mass-producing energy and food, in instead of Smithore and Crystite, because we experienced shortages and they had enough food to switch their mules.
• Also note that it takes advantage of economies of scale, etc.
• Clicking when you're on any pixel of your spot of land does NOT settle your mule. You need to click when you're on the little house. This makes losing mules very common when you try to place too fast.
• Best I remember, I've never seen any spoilage of Smithore in the real thing. And in the attached map, purple completed a turn with 51 Smithore without a hiccup. (I did get Crystite spoilage, however; at 50, just like you've implemented.)

My biggest griefs, though, have to do with auctions. Basically, the players move much slower in the "real" thing, and when they move they don't make the timer slow down as much as in your remake. The way it's currently implemented completely changes the gameplay. Specifically:

• When you're auctioning a plot of land, you can increase its price by about 2,000 before the timer stops. If you increase it by that much, you're basically stuck with a pricey land -- since the time's out.
• Likewise, the timer is faster and players are slower, during auctions for resources. Also, players don't have such a dramatic effect when they move up or down: the maximum price increase probably is around 500. (I've never seen an AI go that high, but it seems like the max based on how high they go as compared to the remaining time.)

As to AI behaviors during auctions:

• AIs do their best to increase the price when they're competing with you for of a plot and it's clear you want it. They'll take it all the way up to 1600+ and let you deal with the pricey plot if thereafter.
• AIs buy as high as 350 for food when they've a severe shortage, and they'll actually buy Smithore at 45 and Crystite at 60.

Yeah, but... Fast forward in a few years, and picture a Mule club that gains momentum on a university campus. In this case, having multiple players playing against each other in as many whereabouts, all behind the same IP, becomes a certainty. That alone should rule out restrictions based on IP addresses.

Plus, no amount of safe-guards will ever prevent two friends from taking turns at giving each other a massive beating.

Seriously, if the concern is about users who cheat for rank, fix the ranking system instead. To do that, consider Go as a source of inspiration, rather than the hopelessly broken ranking algorithms that are used in online gaming communities.

Go ranks have been around for almost 2,000 years, so you'd be hard pressed to find anything that is more tried and tested. They're not about Joe is 1st, Jane is 2nd; rather, they're about Joe is 2-dan, Jane is 1-dan. Joe's Go rank basically asserts the probability that he'll beat Jane in an even game.

On the lower-end (kyu), Go ranks are mostly self-assessed. On the higher-end (dan), the consistency of the outcome in games vs varied opponents of similar (i.e. dan) rank is what counts.

In other words, if you're beating 1-dan players 50% of the time, you're 1-dan; if you're beating 1-dan players 80% of the time, you're 2-dan. By contrast, if you're beating self-assessed 1-kyu players 80% of the time, the best you can do is self-assess that you're probably 1-dan: you'll need to play confirmed dan players in order to confirm your own 1-dan rank.

Note that the Go ranking system kills cheating at its inception, too. No amount of trampling phony users with a kyu rank will let you cheat your way to a 1-dan rank. And if you take the time to grow enough phony users to 1-dan rank in order to artificially boost yourself to higher dan ranks, you'll have played so much that you'll probably have achieved that higher dan rank anyway.

TCP/IP is not a US technology. It's how networks communicate over the internet in every country, even in Europe and Asia. (...) I've never heard of an ISP giving out a single IP address to an entire neighborhood. (...) It's false unless someone can show me credible documentation of such.

I sincerely don't mean to be anal, but TCP/IP as we know it descends from technologies used on the Arpanet, a 100% US technology. Best I'm aware, IANA is still US-based; it's still largely influenced by the US gov in spite of RIRs; and the indirect oversight of the US gov in way IP addresses are allocated is still a source of tension with quite a few countries during WTO negotiations.

Tease left aside, I think that you're misjudging how scarce IP addresses can be outside of the US. You work around the scarcity by NAT'ing the daylights out of your customers. I haven't worked in a telco in the past 5 years, but I sincerely doubt that things have changed much since.

All I am saying is that the games shouldn't be RANKED if the players are from the same IP.

I'm not even sure I'd agree to that... What's wrong if friends and I decide to toss in a Mule party while sharing a pizza?

The easiest one to implement is the IP based restriction.

... but a much better and reliable one to implement is a MAC-address based restriction. *That* is unique.

D.

Without giving a full blown lesson in TCP/IP, let me just simply say that this is not true.  If multiple users are connecting from the same IP they are in the same geographical location (i.e. same house or building).

Again, this is only valid in US households.

If you're in a corporate network with a VPS, two employees from NYC and LA can end up with the same IP address. I've seen it happen. I've actually sold this, at one point.

As for ISPs, some in Europe give the same IP address to an entire neighborhoods. It's even more pronounced in Asia, where ISPs have even less IP addresses to distribute than we do.

IP-based restrictions should not be enforced in any way. Most ISPs outside of the US give the same IP address to hundreds or thousands of end-users in different premises, in much the same way as anyone playing at work in a large corporate network will have the same address as his fellow co-workers.

D.