Zillions of Games Discussion Forum: Stack Explosions

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Ronald W Brierley (Ronaldwb)
New member
Username: Ronaldwb

Post Number: 64
Registered: 2-2003

Posted on Thursday, November 22, 2007 - 9:14 am:

I believe that currently all the games involving the explosion of stacks of pieces use the four orthogonal directions of invasion first included in a game written in Basic in the days when personal computers had eight bit processors.
I wonder if anyone will use the more realistic eight directions of invasion which access all the immediately adjacent positions.
Invasions in the centre of a rectangular board would then involve eight rather than four surrounding positions.

Keith Carter (Keithc)
New member
Username: Keithc

Post Number: 143
Registered: 8-2000

Posted on Saturday, November 24, 2007 - 12:17 am:

Last week Ed released HExplocus which uses a hex field as the name implies and 6 directions. Explocus uses four directions and a variant that kicked things up to 8 would simply require programming the other 4. If there is a limitation it may be from a game design point of view. Cascading explosions are hard for the human player to track. In Explocus the AI is well nigh impossible to beat when only having to consider 4 directions. Eight? Whew!

As another consideration. Piece density might have a design impact. Explocus uses a 6x6 board with 24 starting pieces. An 8 stack to explode in 8 directions would require 1/3 of the pieces in the game. Having to accumulate such a large percentage of the pieces involved in the game might not make for a good game. Perhaps if there were more starting pieces. I will note that Explocus uses 24 pieces which is 6 times the explosion directions and HExplocus uses 36 pieces which is also 6 times the explosion directions. So for 8 directions maybe 48 pieces would work well.