Thank you again for making this; it’s been enlightening to play one of these for a change.
Reflections on my attempt:
It appears my obliviousness to Encounter Frequency concerns didn’t damage my plans as much as I feared. It’s hard to say how much of my better-than-random result was down to good analysis vs careful management of unknowns vs sheer good luck: if damage from Pirates and Harpies weren’t dependent on things that happened earlier in the voyage (an effect to which I was also oblivious), or if the Atlanteans had been in a different position on their route (a journey to which I was also also oblivious) or if the Maelstrom (a phenomenon to which I was alsoalso also oblivious) had happened to be along either of my chosen paths, I might not be looking quite so clever right now.
In retrospect, once I’d found the skeleton key of “the Admirality treat every ship that isn’t a Dhow as interchangeable, so their ability to survive journeys is an unbiased estimator”, I could and should have gotten much more mileage out of it. For example, it could have easily let me infer that nobility mattered and that Scottish-sounding names (conditional on non-nobility) didn’t. I guess the lesson here is “if you run into a perfect regularity while working on a wicked problem, make sure you mine everything you can out of it”.
(. . . well, that and “your mental algorithms have a tendency to overfit”. While some of my inferences and suspicions were confirmed, it’s disquieting how many of them ended up not holding water.)
Reflections on the challenge:
For what it’s worth, I very much appreciated this scenario’s complexity while investigating it. The ability to thrive in a system of arbitrary rules you’ll never fully understand is an important life skill known as ‘living’; I’m glad of the opportunity to practice without risking anything in reality.
Insofar as the level of detail bothered me, it was while reading the ruleset afterwards. I’d hoped – naively – that I’d get to see the hidden simplicities that had emergently created this complexity, but with few exceptions (turns out simon was right about where kraken live) it turned out to be epicycles all the way down. I don’t know how or if it’s possible to get the former benefit without the latter cost.
Thank you again for making this; it’s been enlightening to play one of these for a change.
Reflections on my attempt:
It appears my obliviousness to Encounter Frequency concerns didn’t damage my plans as much as I feared. It’s hard to say how much of my better-than-random result was down to good analysis vs careful management of unknowns vs sheer good luck: if damage from Pirates and Harpies weren’t dependent on things that happened earlier in the voyage (an effect to which I was also oblivious), or if the Atlanteans had been in a different position on their route (a journey to which I was also also oblivious) or if the Maelstrom (a phenomenon to which I was also also also oblivious) had happened to be along either of my chosen paths, I might not be looking quite so clever right now.
In retrospect, once I’d found the skeleton key of “the Admirality treat every ship that isn’t a Dhow as interchangeable, so their ability to survive journeys is an unbiased estimator”, I could and should have gotten much more mileage out of it. For example, it could have easily let me infer that nobility mattered and that Scottish-sounding names (conditional on non-nobility) didn’t. I guess the lesson here is “if you run into a perfect regularity while working on a wicked problem, make sure you mine everything you can out of it”.
(. . . well, that and “your mental algorithms have a tendency to overfit”. While some of my inferences and suspicions were confirmed, it’s disquieting how many of them ended up not holding water.)
Reflections on the challenge:
For what it’s worth, I very much appreciated this scenario’s complexity while investigating it. The ability to thrive in a system of arbitrary rules you’ll never fully understand is an important life skill known as ‘living’; I’m glad of the opportunity to practice without risking anything in reality.
Insofar as the level of detail bothered me, it was while reading the ruleset afterwards. I’d hoped – naively – that I’d get to see the hidden simplicities that had emergently created this complexity, but with few exceptions (turns out simon was right about where kraken live) it turned out to be epicycles all the way down. I don’t know how or if it’s possible to get the former benefit without the latter cost.