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From another thread:

In response to 2: It really depends on the land that is being auctioned in my opinion. I know you're a big advocate for buying land at high prices (at least I remember you saying something like that in another post). But I'm not. I wouldn't pay 800 for a desert plot in the first 3-4 rounds of the game. I might not even pay 500 depending on the circumstances. I would be more inclined to purchase the food and energy thus enabling me to pick up more valuable mountain spaces that could net me a fortune by turn 6 or 7. Its a matter of preference and play style I suppose. I personally don't value land a whole lot. I have no problem winning games with 2-3 less plots than some players.

A plot of land adds 500 points to your score, so when you bid $800 you only "lose" $300. $300 will buy you ~5-7 units of energy from the store, assuming no major price spikes. A plains tile (not even desert) bought on turn 2 will produce 33 units of energy over the course of the game, more if you have additional energy plots to benefit from production bonuses. Those 33 units of energy are incidentally worth a minimum of $330 if you sell them all, so even if the energy market is absolutely terrible from the get go that $800 plains plot will pay for itself and make you a profit of $30. That's being extremely pessimistic about energy prices, too; more likely, if you didn't get that plains plot turns 2 you would have had to buy at least 1 unit of energy at store price (or worse, monopoly prices) in order to keep your other plots powered for turn 3, then several more if you want to wait until turn 4 to start producing energy (or if you just want a buffer in case of acid rain/radiation killing your energy production.) So that extra energy plot on turn 2 can be saving you a couple hundred additional dollars.

Even that is not even beginning to scratch the surface of how valuable that plot is. Setting aside smithore shenanigans that will probably be fixed, at the end of the game your main goal is almost certainly to be producing crystite. If you have 10 plots, then at the very end you should have 1 farm and 9 crystite plots. At that point, assuming all of them are located adjacent to at least one other crystite plot, production bonuses mean your "no crystite" plots will be producing 4 units of crystite a turn in these last couple of turns for an average expected value of $800 assuming you manage to go full crystite by turn 11 (typically this means hoarding energy in advance, which is usually easy because the energy market will probably have crashed by this point; for 10 plots your target is 23 energy at the end of round 10, although you can try converting your river to energy in order to knock out a few extra units.) So if you buy another plot that's $800 in endgame crystite on top of the $500 valuation on the plot itself and a couple hundred dollars worth of energy savings and production early on. You could pay almost double that $800 land bid and still potentially come out ahead.

But it doesn't even stop there. If you manage to get two more of those $800 plots as the game goes on, you can now manage to get 12 crystite plots in addition to your river farm. Compared to the guy who doesn't buy any land and has 10 plots, your additional crystite plots give you +1 production to each and every crystite plot you have. So you've got +9 crystite on your first 9 crystite plots, then those extra three plots you bought are now each producing 5 crystite on average, thus the combined advantage of your 3 extra plots is 24 extra crystite a turn at endgame production for an expected value of $2400. If you bought those three plots at $800 each, you can probably make back your purchase price in one turn at the end of the game--and you can probably expect to get two turns of full production, plus you still have $1500 in equity, plus you have all the not-inconsiderable accumulated production from those plots prior to turn 11. This all assumes that none of the plots have any crystite, and that the two-turn best crystite price doesn't break $100 at the end. You could quite reasonably expect to get upwards of $7000 total out of those three plots, in the neighborhood of three times their $800/ea. price tag.

That's just assuming we're pretty much writing off the interim production, too. If you get an extra crystite plot on turn 3, 6, and 9, then by turn 11 if you get even 1.5 average production per plot out of them (and that's a conservative estimate, considering that for turns 9 and 10 at least you should be up to 3 average production minimum if not 4, even for no-crystite plots) that's another $2250. At this point you're looking at something like quadruple returns on your $800/plot investment.

Of course, this is all just assuming you're playing a hypothetical future release where smithore has been nerfed and is no longer the predominate endgame strategy. In the current version, a 4-player game will probably include at least one other player interested in exploiting smithore; if you work with them you can almost guarantee all the smithore highs you want (especially if a third or fourth player jumps in), then you can use smithore instead of crystite, which generally gives you +1 production per turn and means you can assume an average sell price more to the tune of $200. Our estimate for turn 3-10 production jumps up to 2.5 units per plot per turn at $200 each, ballooning to $7500. We're no longer going to be able to guarantee maximum profits on both turn 11 and 12, though; if turn 11 is a price spike you'll sell at $230, then the price will drop to the low triple digits for turn 12. At the end of the game our net production advantage in smithore is 27 units/turn more than someone without three extra plots, so assuming prices of $230 and $115 for the last two turns that's $9315 in extra profit. Long story short, after you add in your $1500 equity value, those three extra plots are adding something like $18000 total to your score, and without the risks of pirates and price fluctations that crystite would run into (although the price fluctuations are more likely to help than to hurt, and pirates aren't astoundingly common, so it's not too optimistic to take these two factors and call them a wash.) If the other players let you get those plots at $800 apiece, those three plots are earning you back seven and a half times what you paid for them.

And if the smithore market can be manipulated so that the spike falls on turn 12, you can save all your production from turn 11 and sell it all off at $230. That brings your two-turn endgame profits up over $12000, approaching a ninefold return on your three $800 land purchases under the current version.



This is not theorycraft. There are some risks involved that I didn't get into, so I'm not really going to bid $5000 on every plot that comes up for auction even though I'm reasonably confident that three such $5000 plots will return a profit. And, as mentioned, once smithore gets brought back down to original profitability levels that number is going to go down quite a bit. There are also opportunity costs to take into consideration--you generally want to save at least a tiny bit of money for expenses. But by and large, the numbers do work. Time and time again I make "crazy" bids of $2000, $2500, $3000--I once paid over $4000, although that was mostly showboating--and turn a substantial profit off them.

There are other benefits to highballing land values, too. The thread this spun off from was about the advantage of players who are ranked lower on turn-by-turn scores. If you spend $1500 on a piece of land, the game only treats that as a $500 value, so you've just knocked $1000 off your score. Later on you'll earn that much and more back, but for now you're $1000 lower on the scoreboard and more likely to be in a lower rank where random events will start to favor you.

• Had the Store consider players' storage in the determination of total smithore supply

Er, yes. This is precisely what I was talking about. If the smithore supply was calculated in the same manner that food/energy supply was, taking the colony's entire supply as a whole into account, then you wouldn't be able to run up the price while stockpiling huge amounts and get an enormous windfall profit. You'd actually be considerably worse off compared to food/energy windfalls, because while players might try paying $300 or $400 for your food and buffer the market price up no one is going to outbid the store that much on smithore.

Bear in mind that not everyone is really on board with the concept of the game being a crystite-mining-colony simulator. There's already a difference of opinion between those who think that the model of the game with crystite as the colony's major source of income is ideal, vs. those who think that all goods should be capable of generating similar profit.

I'm in the former camp, but I think this idea may be partially redundant. The thing is, the prices of food and energy at least already take players' stockpiles into account--if you have 50 food and everyone else has 0 food, you'll typically see a hit to the price of food (although it will still remain elevated, so you still make a tidy sum.) Buying a giant pile of food at a lower, flat rate is not as realistic as buying the first few food at a very high price and then going down from there, but it is vastly simpler. M.U.L.E. is an abstract game; I think simplicity wins out over realism.

There's no room in a reproduction of classic M.U.L.E. for any change to the way smithore pricing works, but if anything were to be done for an alternate mode I think the supply/demand calculations for smithore should simply be updated to work more in line with how food and energy are done, so the store looks at the 300 units of smithore floating around the economy and says "guys, we don't need 150 more mules" and keeps the price of smithore from ballooning.

Would there then be six commodities during the auction phase (smithore, mule parts, mules, crystite, food, and energy)?  This would slightly lengthen an already long game.  However, I consider this problem very minor.

Yes, this is a major concern to me as well. Anything to speed up auctions would be a welcome addition to this mode.

Given that a mule should be worth more than a mule part, and a mule part worth more than smithore, the prices of the three goods will either rise at the same time, or they will fall at the same time.  In other words, they'd be very closely correlated.

Well, I don't think this would necessarily hold true. If there's a bottleneck then part of the chain might become disproportionately valuable; for instance, if there are sufficient mules for the colony, and sufficient parts for mules, but there are lots of parts plants sitting unsupplied, then the price of smithore may go up against the price of mules. And if there's a shortage of mules but a glut of smithore and parts with no plants to assemble them into usable mules, the price of smithore doesn't necessarily need to go up. But I'm not sure if this should be a factor in the store's pricing algorithm, or if that should be pegged to other parts of the production chain like you suggest, leaving it up to players to decide if one of the interim products is more valuable.

This is interesting.  Would economies of scale still apply?

Well, I think they should. My goal in proposing this is a mode where it is substantially harder for players to be self-sufficient, but not substantially harder to meet the needs of the colony. Two plants with economy-of-scale bonuses should generally be able to meet the needs of the colony.

When you say the risks of cooperating exceed the benefits, you're implying that an individual player should create his own smithore, refinery, and mule plots instead of specializing and then trading during the auction phase.

Sorry, I wasn't quite clear here--I meant that at present the risks of cooperating exceed the benefits, where the only benefits are saving yourself food and energy plots. When you have food and energy and parts and mules to worry about, then relying on other players to fill some of those needs becomes more tempting.

One problem I see is the potential for a production bottleneck.  You can't create a mule without a mule part, and you can't create a mule part without smithore.  Smithore is the limiting factor.  Therefore, if four players each create their own smithore, refinery, and mule plots, then the person who has the best smithore plot(s) will produce the most mules in the long run.

This is true, but I think it just goes to show what happens when everyone tries to build their own mules.

Bear in mind also that a lot of the factories are probably going to get torn down at the end of the game, since the colony has a limited total need for mules. However, due to production bottlenecks and player backstabbing it's safe to assume that there will be games where it takes longer to get enough mules to fill the map, so I think this aspect should not be too limiting given the need to provide a bit of leeway on timing.

One thing I'm worried about is that, by adding more steps to the process, people will be assaying and producing crystite later in the game.  Because crystite prices are randomly variable, it possesses a “time value.”  The earlier you hold crystite, the longer you can sit through the rounds where crystite prices are low.  Your crystite will grow each round, and then you can sell it all when the price is high (assuming you are not afraid of pirates).  Furthermore, it can often take several turns to convert all your plots from a certain good to crystite.  Performing this step earlier can result in a lot of added production.  Ultimately, I'm not so sure it's good to reduce the “time value” of crystite.

Personally I'd be more concerned about the reduction in the total value of crystite. Most of the colony's wealth comes from production in the last few turns where you can have lots of crystite plots churning out huge quantities due to production bonuses, where there's not really much change in the time-added value one way or the other; the profits you can skim off the random price on your earlier production are fairly small change in the long run. It is a valid concern, though. I'd expect to see all around lower scores with this change added.

Someone did mention the possibility of a map expansion, and this might be a worthwhile addition; that would provide some room for extra mules, offset the overall impact of having to devote several plots to making mules, and increase the colony's total output. I wouldn't make any drastic changes, but maybe an 11x5 map would work better for this mode than 9x5? Maybe even just 10x5, if you don't mind being slightly off-center.

It varies a bit. The problem is, due to lag it's often hard to tell exactly where other players "really" are at any given point in time because what you see on the screen does not always sync with the current server state. Sometimes you'll perceive a gap of $20 and start moving up to meet the other player, when actually the other player has already moved down to meet you and it hasn't updated on your client--so you start moving up and before you even seem to get there the trading mechanism kicks in and suddenly you've started buying. When you're hosting, or playing on a smooth enough connection, there's usually a bit of a delay.

What if there was no plant to "produce" mules, instead there was a "MULE production phase" where players, walking up and down, could set the amounts of MULEs to produce (anyone for him/herself) and at the end of this "auction-like" phase, the amount chosen by each single player was added to the MULEs supply of that player and subtracted (after multiplying x2) from his/her Smithore supply?
Making MULEs commodities that one can own without a new type of plant/resource.

Well, yes, I suppose you could do that. My entire proposal is explicitly to add additional plot/resource types, though, for reasons I explained at length. Adding a "mule production phase" where players were able to bypass the store and produce their own mules at no cost would make for a simpler game than the present system, which is not itself a bad thing but would take out a lot of the strategy of smithore/mule manipulation without adding any appreciable depth to the gameplay otherwise.

One of the things you'd want to think of - what areas would be best for plants?  I'd say that the river and mountains are not conducive for plants, because of just how much area is needed.  The mountains and river would make the plant discontiguous, and thus make it much less efficient.  Plus the river would make the area smaller.  Desert or plains would provide the best production.

I did go into this a bit. I think in order to get a different sort of distribution for good factory sites, a simple pattern of "plains closer to the town have higher factory capacity" would be a very quick and easy system. It should not be too hard to get sites with 3 or 4 base production for factory products, because like Eik points out it does make the whole economy more fragile and it's important that it doesn't take too much investment to supply the colony.

Combining this and the buntenol idea would be interesting, but I think both systems are too complicated in their own right to mesh well--in particular, while I wouldn't rule out a seven-resource system, taking this six-resource system and adding buntenol would just be too much. However, I think a pared down version of both might be interesting, slotting in buntenol as the "sixth step" in place of the idea of a refinery/parts factory. This would be particularly interesting since buntenol would create demand for extra mules, so there'd be more purpose to mass mule production.

currently, the ranks are calculated each 24 hours upon the following data:

games won, ratio, games played, hi-score.

If anyone has a good idea how to make the ranking more fairly balanced or interesting for new players (like a weighted system between games won, ratio and highest score and probably colony score), we like to hear it!

Personally I think that using average score (total score / games played) would be a much better way to rank players than using highest score. Actual score numbers are very vulnerable to factors outside a player's control (random events, willingness of other players to cooperate), so taking all of a player's scores into consideration gives a more balanced view than just looking at their highest. Also, it provides an incentive for players to stick with a game through the end even if they're not winning in order to maximize their score, instead of dropping out or playing the spoiler card.

There's been some discussion about things to be added to an updated/advanced version of M.U.L.E. (as opposed to the emulation of the classic tournament mode; note that I'm not suggesting anything to be added to the default game), so I thought I'd toss out an idea I've had kicking around in my head for a while.

First, a preamble (emphasis on "ramble", feel free to skip down to the actual concept writeup if you don't care):

Lately with the arguments over smithore vs. other commodities there has been a lot of discussion about the need to add intrinsic value to food and energy as well--in other words, expanding the horizontal breadth of the economy, making each good an end unto itself. You can imagine one person making a lot of money producing piles of food, a second person making money producing energy, a third person making money producing smithore, a fourth person making money producing crystite.

To me, this doesn't really mesh with the spirit of M.U.L.E., though. From the beginning of M.U.L.E., crystite has always been the cash product; everything else is simply a necessary ingredient to produce more crystite. Sure, in the first half of the game there are frequent shortages that let you make a quick windfall off of food, or energy, or smithore--but playing the original, 9 times out of 10, the guy won was the guy with 12 crystite plots going during the last several turns.

I like this model of the game. Essentially it's a game of resource management: you must manage your supplies (food, energy, smithore, cash, land) as efficiently as possible in order to maximize your crystite production. It's the risks, the gambits, the bluffs you and other players undertake along the way that make the game exciting. Currently, the Planet M.U.L.E. version of the game differs from the original in a few important aspects, which mean there's much more money to be made in smithore than there ever was in crystite in any version, but presumably this will be corrected and future versions will look more like the original with its crystite-dominated endgame. So in expanding the game, I think this idea should be preserved: the idea that there is some specific endpoint to the economy, and everything else is simply a means towards that end.


So, my concept:

Currently, production of mules happens automatically at the store for free. What if mules were yet another commodity that players had to produce for themselves? Mules could be outfitted with a new "mule assembly" designation; assembly plots would produce mules from your stored smithore. These assembly plots would follow the same production mechanic as any other form of plot, except they would also consume smithore for each mule produced (once you run out of smithore, production stops). Base production value for assembly plots would be based on distance from the store--I'm imagining essentially the same distribution pattern as crystite, except with two fixed "high" spots on the plots immediately left and right of the store (the river would not be suitable for assembly plants.) Make it slightly more generous, though, and start it at 4 BPV for those plots, then 3 BPV for the plots orthogonally adjacent to them, 2 BPV for the plots diagonally adjacent, and 1 BPV for all the plots around the edges of the map.

Mules would be their own commodity with an auction phase just like any other good. The store would no longer produce mules from smithore on its own, but you could sell mules to the store during the auction phase and other players could buy mules from the store, etc. You'd no longer be able to buy or sell mules at the mule corral; instead, that's just where you pick up mules from your personal stockpile.

Obviously, there have to be some mules present at the start or else you'd never be able to produce anything. So each player would start with 2 mules in storage, and the store would have an additional 8 mules for sale, similar to the starting food/energy supplies. That gives the colony as a whole a starting supply of mules roughly equal to what it currently gets.

If desired, this concept could be extended even further by inserting an intermediate stage of production. Instead of assembling mules directly from smithore, perhaps the smithore would have to be refined or processed into machine parts first. There would thus be a sixth type of plot that would produce its own commodity, "parts." One advantage of this, aside from extending the production chain, would be that the "2 smithore = 1 mule" production rule could be split to work on 1:1 ratios: a refinery/machining/factory plot (not sure what the best name for it would be) would consume 1 smithore per 1 unit of parts produced, the mule assembly plot would consume 1 smithore + 1 machine part per 1 mule produced.

I'm not sure how the BPV for refinery plots should be calculated, though. Perhaps it could be the inverse of the BPV for the assembly plots, going higher as you get further from the town, on the rationale that smelting smithore is a messy process and your polluting refineries get smacked with environmental regulations hampering their production if they're too close to town.


Some of the repercussions of this system:

Obviously, the game becomes more complex and more difficult. This would not be a mode for players new to the game!

In particular, though, self-sufficiency would be considerably harder. At present, 1 good food plot and 2 good energy plots can see you through the game with little difficulty. If you get several extra plots and have lots of mining going on, you may need to run a 3rd energy plot for a while. This means that once you get past the early stages, serious food and energy shortages are rare. And while there are some benefits to cooperating--being able to ditch those 3 required plots for 3 additional crystite plots adds up to a lot of extra crystite--the risks generally outweigh the benefits. Although during the late stages there's often some excess food/energy in the economy anyway, so you may be able to hoard up and shift everything to mining for the last few turns anyhow.

If you took this concept to its more extreme version with separate production plots for both mule parts and mules themselves, you'd have the same food/energy requirements, plus you'd need your own smithore plot (and it would have to be a good one if you wanted to make sure you got 1 mule per turn, let alone 2 for land auctions), a refinery plot, and an assembly plot. That leaves you with very little room for making cash products (crystite). It also means your production is very, very low overall due to lack of economy of scale/learning curve theory bonuses, and there's also likely to be some wasted capacity (you're only using 1-2 mules per turn, but you may be capable of producing more of them.) By making more things to do, it becomes vastly harder to do everything yourself.

In turn, of course, this makes player-to-player trading considerably more important; since you're not meeting your own needs as quickly or as easily, you have to rely on other players to make sure your needs are met. These means that sellers have a lot more leverage; currently, if you're Energy Guy and you refuse to sell your hoard, everyone else can just convert stuff over to energy and make all the energy they want. But if the stuff they're converting are the smithore mines and refineries and assembly plants the colony needs to expand, then your refusal to sell energy is a much bigger blow to the colony, and there's a much greater impetus for other players to buy at the prices you're charging (but bear in mind that Mule Assembly Plant Guy can, in turn, hold his prices over your head too!)

Paradoxically, even though this scheme does not add any intrinsic value to food or energy, the net result is that food and energy do become more valuable, because other players are less able to afford to produce their own. The end product of the economy is still trying to produce crystite as a cash good, but since there are more steps in the production of crystite, the importance of each individual step to the whole process (and the colony's success as a whole) is increased.

I would agree with Stormdancer that the move rate up and down seems slightly faster than the original. May either need to slow that movement down slightly or speed up the timer while moving a bit.

The movement speed is considerably faster; moreover, while moving the timer slows down considerably. In the NES port (the closest thing to the original versions that I'm familiar with) you'd only have time to go up about $200 tops in commodity auctions, or maybe $800 for land auctions (which use a $4 increment instead of $1.) Here it's easy to get into the four digits for commodities and you can probably get close to five digits on land auctions.

I do appreciate the faster speed--one of the things I hated about the original was when you'd have lots of money that you could never spend, because the auction speed was so slow you couldn't drive the bid up to what you actually wanted to bid--but I agree that this may be overkill.

This isn't specific to energy; the AI generally seems to weight production bonuses very heavily, so it will often keep on expanding in whatever commodity it's already producing.

A plot value, is 500.  All plots with a price less than 500 is like a money gift.  Most plots with a price of 700 have fair price.  800 to 1000 can be a plot overrated, but can be interesting if the plot could be too beneficial to other player, or very beneficial to yourself. A price >1000 is often a bad idea, but can be interesting if I have more than 6000$.

Everyone listen to this guy and do what he says! Ignore the fact that a plot can potentially generate profits in the neighborhood of $10k, let suckers like me buy them for $1,200-1,500.

It seems to me that if the store doesn't take stored smithore into consideration when it sets its smithore price, it should also not take stored food and energy into consideration when setting those prices. So if someone has a large stockpile of energy and someone else has an energy shortage, the store should jack up the energy price very high to encourage the stockpiling player to sell.  This would give food and energy magnates the same playing field as smithore hoarders.

Conversely, the store could start valuing smithore based on the amount that smithore producers are waiting to dump on the market. I do not believe it is useful or necessary to have all goods be valuable in their own right as bulk products; it blurs the distinction among the different goods and undermines the purpose of having a cash product (crystite.)

The topic of this thread is Gameplay Ideas.  By its very nature it is asking what could be added to a "MULE 2" as it were.  There is no need to call for status quo in such a thread.  Doing so might even classify someone a troll.

I guess you can call me a troll, then, because I must reiterate that I find this proposal unappealing compared to the status quo. Even a modestly laggy 200ms ping plays havoc with the game's netcode in auctions and I'd really rather not play a game where such a fundamental feature as the land grant is based on an even more action-heavy sequence.

Would be interesting though to see food and energy be more valuable by making the need higher I guess.

Well, I think the consensus is that the game needs to retain a "classic mode" that would preserve the core mechanics of the original. This would certainly make for an interesting alternate mode, however.

Another possibility for such an "advanced" mode would be to add additional resource requirements and increase the number of stages in the economy. I'm partial to the concept of having one primary cash resource, but increasing the number of different resources makes it harder to be self-sufficient, which makes being able to sell supplies more valuable. Requiring additional resources for production would be similar in effect to raising food/energy requirements, except that diversifying resource requirements instead of simply raising them would mean it would also be harder for the food/energy suppliers to be self-sufficient, and would make for a more difficult game all around that would require more cooperation to succeed in.