The computer always beats you in the land grant without tool assistance.  ties between computers are broken with the rank rule.

This is to make up for some of their artificial dumbness.

On c64, first place can still get a good personal event, though it's uncommon.

I have played on c64, and this is my experience.

1) the same personal event cannot repeat for the same PLAYER twice.  The same personal event can and will happen to different players.
2) the first place player CAN still get a good personal event on c64.
3) Mule goes crazy and pest attack only ever seemed to hit first place in my experience.  (it's why you should never be flapper!  Pest attack is ludicrously common on turn 1 on c64 (over 75% of the time on tournament mode), and if you are flapper it WILL hit you every single time, and the computer WILL buy out the store, and you will not be able to place a mule turn 2 or get any food, and you have lost all hope, since you won't get the care package cuz you are in first place still.)

One thing I noticed is the odds of "get a plot" and "lose a plot" happening on the same development phase seem to be pretty good in the original.

and when the lose a plot happens first, it will ALWAYS add the one that was lost to the lucky player, unless someone else claims it first somehow. At least this is how I remembered it.

I made a thread aobut race abilities.  Here' smy take on them.

Flapper: This not only gets 600$, but also a slower time bar. However while the slower time bar is an advantage the extra money is a nasty double-edged sword, which will usually put the flapper in first place at the start. and that's BAD. Implemented in original.  Suggest this race not count for ranking.

Humanoid: less money, smaller time bar. No benefits. it's intended as a handicap race.  The lesser money can be a bonus though.

Mechtron: no abilities but computers using it get more money. For those who wish to win without abilities.

All other races must be better overall than the mechtron.

Bonzoid: Some combination of ignores speed penalty in mountains, +1 production in mountains or +1 smithore.

Packer: +1 food production on all plots, +1 food requirement (except first turn) so you need to either not need the food, or use multiple plots to benefit. I think this is how the c64 did it.  With one property, no penalty. With two, you get a bonus. With three you feed the whole colony just about.

Gollumer: Wins ties in land auction and land grant. No drawbacks.

Legggite: definitely faster movement speed. Should only be slightly faster, but enough to add up. Alternatively, give some extra time (maybe 5-10 seconds or so), to simulate it. 

Spheroid: -1 in mountains (they hate sharp edges).  This is a significant penalty. To make up for it, they get something no other race will get. The ability to get a +3 production bonus.  No learning curve bonus, no economics of scale bonus.  Instead they get a bonus based on the number of different plots they have. If they have two each of two different mule types, their plots get +1. If they have two each of three different mule types, all plots get +2. If they have all four, and at least 2 of each, all plots get +3. Should be interesting.

I have a very simple rule that will probably be useful.

If you at any point in time offer more than everyone else's cash reserve for a land plot you instantly get it, no questions asked.  This would change things up a bit i think. Raising the price well beyond what everyone can afford, then pulling back below the line is just wrong.

If you're in 1st/2nd place and have only one plot producing food you leave yourself vulnerable to the pest attack or a mule going crazy.

Like production phase 1, if you failed to win a land plot in the auction?

As I said I was getting screwed by that so many times that I had to switch from flapper to another race just so the computers would get hit by the pest attack instead.

The meteorite only strikes plots with no crystite not on the river.

Also, very often the original game would mysteriously report high crystite on all the river plots, even though they can't be mined.

Well, it's still pretty stupid.

And in real life, production can't always be stopped and started on a dime.

So i think it's a pretty good fix, if we consider this smithore stuff undesirable. Make the boost in money now hamper development more, to give other players a reason to try and stop it.

collusion works differently for normal and land auctions.

Collusion for land auctions is simple. seller presses button until the desired buyer is activated, lowers reserve, player goes up and buys it. Very easy to implement in planetmule i think.

Collusion for regular auctions requires that both players press their button on the exact same frame, and it freezes the other players where they are. This one is hard to implement.

The only event that's a real issue is the pest attack. I've never seen lose a plot or mule goes crazy in the beginning of the game. This absolutely CRIPPLES you if it hits at the beginning.  It's the reason i stopped playing flapper in vs cpu games. it's that bad.

You get stuck without food, and are behind a round on development. and early on that really HURTS.

So here's my rules on what should be needed to make things more reasonable.

1) never let the same player lose two plots worth of production in one turn.
2) No targetted production loss events can hit you unless you own 3 plots. If this would force 3rd or 4th place to eat a bad one, a different event happens.

And, to placate the whiners a litle bit more, maybe.

3) No player ever gets the same bad event 2 turns in a row. Lost plot one turn, pest attack next is fair game.

To anyone who says this isn't going far enough, boo hoo.

Auc blocking was not nearly as much of an issue in the original games becaue of slow movement speed.

Auc blocking hurts the colony, because is 1 2 or even 3 plots that will not get developed that turn.

Here's how i think it should go

either
1) lower speed back to normal levels. This makes it harder to auc block, and harder to pull out at the last second.

or

2) if you raise the price above what everyone else can afford, make the auction stop and immediately award you the plot.  This still allows price jacking, then pulling away and trying to stick other people with the plot. But if You actually go above everyone elses cash reserves at the time, you buy it that instant. Yu can still auc block by raisign it above what people are WILLING to pay,t hen back out. but if you actualyl force them out, the auction shoudl instantly end at that point.

Collusion does allow for some serious abuses.

The biggest one is ensuring that a 12th round transfer can happen, to perform a value boost and shoot into first place.

Without collusion, you can stop this by having the other two players go towards the middle on round 12.

This can be fixed by barring collusion on round 12.

Collusion is a tool to use and abuse. Here are some of the many uses of collusion.

Land auction collusion.

1) Selling a plot of land to the person you want to sell to. Fair.
2) setting up a land trade such that two people make a mutually beneficial arrangement without letting the last place player cut in. Absolutely Fair. The other two can set u trades of their own to catch up.
3) Selling ALL your land to the same other player when you know you aren't gonna win.  This is pretty cheap, and if you do that don't expect people to want to play with you or the person you keep helping.

Normal auction collusion.

1) locking the last place player out of your trade.  Cruel, but completely fair.
2) make a trade at the value you want before the other two players conspire to jack the price up.  Fair. one of the best uses of collusion.
3) locking out the person who got ahead of you with the buy-sell bar. Completely fair.
4) squeezing in a last second trade when the two of you aren't gonna make it in time. GREAT use.
5) Setting up abusive last turn trades and protecting them from interference.  There are two ways this works.

a) transfer a single unit at high price to boost the value of the goods.

Without collusion, the lead player goes to sell and moves to the halfway point.

b) sell low to 2nd place and buy very high from second place to push them above the first place player without interference. This works even in planet mule.

Without collusion, the lead player simply flops to the same as the 2nd place player and immediately moves to the halfway point.

If collusion were implemented, both of these are unstoppable.

Well you could move selection boxes with keyboard/stick instead.

Also we can say give a 10 second time limit for each phase, and if no one selects one in any of the 4 phases, the grant ends instantly, and if someone misses a chance, they can still try next phase.

The important concept is that all players chose the square they want to "hit the button" on, and then it advances till someone gets one, and then the remaining players get to change their mind after someone gets a plot, but they can't pick a passed property.

1) original AI NEVER fails to grab a plot unless there are less then 4 left. It will not go for a plot that will prevent it from getting a plot if it fails to grab it. EVER.

2) Original AI ALWAYS sells smithore to the store when it's out and a few mules are missing form the coral. ALWAYS. NO smithore gambit for you unless you can afford to buy it all from the computer (and one always get into it and produces a ton to spite you).

3) Original AI LOVES to buy out the store of food or energy at the beginning of the game if there aren't 2 sellers other than store.

Classic example. player is dumb enough to pick flapper. Gets pest attacked first round. the cpu WILL buy out the stores food, and you will be totally screwed for the rest of the game.

If you instead picked bonzoid or anything else, not only will the pest attack not hit you in tournament (computer got more money), but in standard you will be behind and get to buy from the store if you did get hit with it before the computer can. it's up to you whether or not you buy out the store.

We all know how uber powerful these are. Starve the store, turn mules loose, watch price shoot up, sell to store, make big bucks.

Her are some safeguards against smithore shenanigans that i believe to be within the spirit of the game.

1) If you don't have a plot to put a mule on at the start of your turn, lock the corral up. If you are gonna spring a bunch out, you gotta have a plot open to do it. If you open one up, you gotta wait till NEXT turn to spring mules.
2) If the store is unable to produce mules for 2 auction phases in a row, M.U.L.E. production shuts down.  It will take an entire turn after the store is resupplied or a coral slot opens up for it to start back up again. Sure you can starve the store, but if you then start an emergency, there's a very real chance of players missing out on development, which will mess with the colony.

This alone should fix the smithore gambit.  The only real problem with pulling a smithore gambit is that it doesn't significantly impact development at all.  The store goes omg! low mules, lets raise price so people will sell to me so we can make more, and then immediately makes them and whew! everything's ok again. In rea life it don't work that way. The store wouldn't have bottomless cash.  But that would change the balance too badly if we implemented cash limit in the store.  But also in real life, such starving would hurt development.

And that's what my fixes i propose would do. Give real consequences to the smithore gambit.