The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Endgame: Singularity
JWFokker
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/
I searched and couldn't find anything on it in the forums, but I'm having a hard time beating it. There's little in the way of instructions, practically nothing on the net for tips and I can't seem to evade government detection.
PCBurn.com wrote:With it's retro interface and fast paced gameplay Endgame Singularity offers up a seriously interesting take on "hacker" simulation gaming. Instead of playing a human intruding on systems you take on the role of an A.I. that has just gained sentience. Your goal is to stay alive by avoiding detection while furthering your research to escape from a hostile earth.
I searched and couldn't find anything on it in the forums, but I'm having a hard time beating it. There's little in the way of instructions, practically nothing on the net for tips and I can't seem to evade government detection.
JWFokker on
0
Posts
the fact that you can't find anyting on the net didn't tip you off?
Anyway, I'm able to answer questions, or take suggestions.
DEFCON style graphics!
How does detection work and how can I keep from being detected? I've researched 4 things that claim to reduce my detection rate but i'm still detected just as much.
Edit: Good grief! My warehouse was empty and they still took it away from me!
If you open a base, you'll see the detection chance at the bottom. Each day, at midnight, that's the chance that the base will be detected by each of the factions. You can reduce detection chance by:
Using bases with low base detection chances. (In general, the larger the base, the better.)
Research.
Secondary items. (Reactors and Security items decrease the detection chance.)
Keeping suspicion low. (Detection is easier if people are looking for you.)
In addition, bases get a grace period equal to their construction time. For example, a base that takes 14 days to construct can be run for 14 days after construction without being detected.
While you don't get to enslave humanity, there is significant research into global scale mindwashing and control...
Presumably, there were some rather interesting examples of advanced robotics on display in the warehouse.
I looked into properly overlaying a nighttime map, but it's rather difficult (in both programming and CPU terms) to make it look good.
I don't have the artistic ability to do a DEFCON style map, but that does give some benefits, most noticeably in the ability to "know" where the map boundries lie.
I mean larger bases have a better Processors/Detection Chance ratio. For example, with Small and Large Warehouses:
Small: 25 Processors, 3.50% total detection chance.
Large: 65 Processors, 5.50% total detection chance.
The large warehouse more than doubles the number of possible processors, while less than doubling the detection chance.
For reactors/security, work on developing good autonomous vehicles. You don't want humans working on those...
It got kind of frustrating at the end, I had 10 lunar bases and then they all got found in a row :P
Needs more items for bases and stuff.
Once you hit quantum computers, you've pretty much won.
Edit: I'm just leaving it on now. 3 quadrillion.
Edit 2: I just realized that there isn't that much money in the world.
That would be so weird. Humanity finally discovers how to tap into alternate realities, and they find a computer.
Edit: I built a Reality Bubble and put a small PC in it. I'm pretending it's a 486.
Edit: Ok, matching up the two sides, I figured out that I have 4 million quadrillion dollars. Hooray me.
A DEFCON style map shouldn't be all that difficult, it's basically an outline of a bunch of continents and countries, and then set to a sort of glow effect in photoshop to the continent lines.
That's the theme I was working towards. Quite beautiful when it works.
To me this is a good proof of concept that could be used to design a larger more polished game.
I could imagine this game well with DEFCON-esque graphics (but not exactly defcon); a big map that you can scroll around, countries represented with lines in the way a computer would see the world, dots of lights show civilization spread, menus appear and disappear in a rush of 1s and 0s, eerie music, colored lines showing the connections between all your computers in the world, the screen flickers with lite static or wavers a bit everytime a computer is found and put offline, etc...
And then a natural progression would be to implement a sort of multiplayer mode that works kind of like DEFCON's multiplayer; Players select a speed and the lowest selected speed runs. Whenever an AI finds another AI you can choose to stay unaffiliated with each other or "merge" your minds (alliance) to form a larger network of computers, AIs can kill each other through system sabotage and viruses, but they can also protect themselves through clever encryption schemes which get more powerful as processing power gets more advanced. However if humans detect ANY AI activity it's bad for ALL the players in the game since they may be found too, therefore you do not want to do something so devious it may result in your enemy being discovered. And eventually at the end of the game you can start taking over whole countries and they start to highlight in your color, the winner will ultimately have the whole world lit up in his color.
A man can dream.
But for now, I'd imagine a world that was in danger of producing a singularity would look a bit more high tech. Perhaps you should use a map that shows a more "developed" earth where cities and crap are much more visible and land looks less green.
The covert organizations have a sharp focus on earth. Just get off-planet, and their suspicion will no longer matter.
Man, I think I've only survived a few hundreds days. I guess I could rush and get tons of research at the start, but I was trying to keep a low profile to survive.
It didn't work. My research is too slow when my chances of discovery are low. Then, as awareness raises, the likelihood of discovery increases asymptoticly.
I think I ALMOST complete stock market tampering. stealth was done, but it didn't help much. Really my games have ended in only a few minutes.
They have a .75% chance of being discovered by the covert and a 1% chance to be discovered by the public. I kept them idle, usually the public found them first, and the public suspision drops more quickly then the covert stuff.
Also, research techs that help against covert at the very beginning of the game.
Dude, you're a Singularity. Rush. By "a few hundred days" you should be bending the laws of space and time to your will.
On a more concrete note, you cannot be detected until after day 23, which is when traces of your presence are first detected.
Plus the game likes to bug out and stop building new locations after awhile for some reason, might want to look into that. Might have something to do with destroying objects.
Neat game though, could be fun once its fixed.
Nice idea might be to make the differant countries have bonuses/negatives to determine where you place it.
NA = average price/good speed/easy to get caught with no security
Europe = expensive/fast/hard to get caught
China = low cost/low speed/hard to get caught
Africa = low cost/medium speed/average chance to get caught
S.America = average/average/average chance to get caught
And for anyone looking to start the game;
Pause the timer.
Build 10 more server access's anywhere.
Menial Job to 800cash.
Research Stealth.
Research Intrustion.
Research Stock Manipulation.
That should take you up to day 22ish, where they will notice you.
Then destroy 9 of the server access's to take you down to 2. So they don't find you easily.
I haven't been able to figure out what to do after that, since at that point it becomes an ever increasing spiral of suspscion/covert, and they keep finding my warehouses before I can even finish building them.
[realspoiler:cbef65fbf0]Once you get to make time capsules in the Antarctic it makes it a lot easier to keep your suspicion down. When I was trying to build a Reality Bubble to research apotheosis sometimes the scientific community suspicion would get so high that I had to lay low for a while, so I would destroy all my bases except two time capsules (in case that .1% chance of them finding it occurred), replace the one they found and wait until the suspicion went to zero. Damn I could have used that Impossibility Theory paper later in the game though![/realspoiler:cbef65fbf0]
You need to be able to cancel things that are being built- building a base in [spoiler:12d9c90132] transdimenisonal [/spoiler:12d9c90132] costs a heck of a lot, and if you don't have enough income its a gamebreaker.
Maybe have stolen computer time listed as 100s/1000s of trojans etc to justify the risk.
Seperate suspicions for news/public/covert in each region. Science should be global, and maybe add suspicion from Antartica/Underwater to a random nation or split amongst them.
Instead of a defcon style map see if you can find a map of internet nodes and connections, like airlines have for their routes.
More researchables would be a bonus.
Maybe have a internet connected high score with the time to reach the final tech
Make the effects of low end computers (risk and benifit) smaller so that you're encouraged to have more of them early on.
The speeds are too slow, there is no need to have several speeds less than 1 game day/second.
Have the option to make contact with the humans at some point.
With a bit of polish this would probably be a popular indie game, good luck with it.
My strategy was similar to Morkath's to start, make 10 servers but let the money come up to 1000 and build another 10 so half research and half upgrade, killing them all at day 22. Get the datacentres as soon as you can and be sure to upgrade your income, keeping 3000-6000 in reserve in case you're nabbed (you should always have 2). Ignore small warehouses, go straight to large with cluster servers (you only need one warehouse and a datacenter for income now). Upgrade your warehouses
computer whenever it is destroyed, you should be at q3 in no time.
Maybe some project that increases the suspicion breakdown rate the more CPU you pump into it?
I keep getting a message "Not all of my available CPU power was allocated to this research; it's too dangerous to run the research on some of the idkle machines" when I try to use everything but also with a measly supercomputer I built, thinking that it has something to do with the astronomical computational power I have in the rest of the systems.
Also: how can one divide the CPUs among different research tasks?
At night, the ice weasels come."
The readme mentions Mac OS X as compatible, so the non-windows download might work:
At night, the ice weasels come."
You can. I ran out of cash building the same thing, so I cancelled it to give me a chance to recover. You don't get back whatever you've put into it, but that seems reasonable.
The requirements seem to only appear in the knowledge->techs descriptions...
At night, the ice weasels come."
I'll look at the rest later. (Work)