I'm thinking, as long as we want to include people from the other side of the globe in the rallies, wouldn't it be better if the next rally was 25 or 26 hours after the previous one? That way, the rally, which for me starts at midnight, would slowly work it's way through the morning hours, and, eventually, when I signed on in the morning, there would be a rally soon starting which I could join.

Also, can we have a bit more of an initial pot? I've got a 4-cig entry fee, and a 3-cig pot. (I like gambling on the island. Real.)

Notice that the next rally is 24 hours after the last one ends. I've not done one yet (They currently start around 5am my time), but they must surely take around an hour or so?

Is there some way that you can find out when the next rally is without going all the way to CC? Maybe a report in the comms tent ot council offices or something? I'm not likely to go all the way up there unless I've got a good idea that there's a rally reasonably soon, at a time which is reasonable for me.

Isn't that the whole point? Getting people to drop by CC more often?

The pot goes up with every person who joins, and I don't think you'd ever end up with a rally with only ONE person in it. So the pot will usually give you at least a 2-cig profit, I'd think?

The rally takes a good... two hours-ish if I remember right. It's not something you'd do every single day, fun as it is. So I guess going to CC to see when the next one is and staying there until the next one is encouraged, as you wouldn't plan on doing it every single day.

Hm, I was under the impression that each rally started 24 hours after the previous one started, and that, at any given time, there would be two rallies going on.
I guess, as long as the rallies cycle around the clock, I'm happy.

Clearly I need to rewrite that flavour text!

(to be fair, I wrote it at like 5am)

(also, seeding the jackpot with 20 cigs or so probably wouldn't be a bad idea...)

Actually, one of the (few) things I like about the game Monopoly is how so many people play by the unofficial rule that any taxes paid (Income Tax or Luxury Tax) go into the center of the board, and anyone who lands of Free Parking gets the pot.

What if every time a player loses a cig to the Spring or Pinata or whatever Random event that can take away a cig, the rally pot increases by 1? The pot would start becoming substantial, but then you could have a higher entry fee?

Huh! I kind of like that idea. But then it would be a ridiculously huge pot after just a while, and if the entry fee went up proportionally, people who hadn't been around long enough to amass piles of cigs wouldn't be able to play.

Is there a cig-losing random event that has to do with traveling? Can't think of one... That way it'd tie back to the Rally a little bit more. Otherwise, perhaps it should just be the cigs lost from one particular event, so it wouldn't bump up the pot as much as having every single cig ever pinched from an unwary contestant's back pocket added in.

Alternatively, you could have a 1 in 10 chance for any lost cig ending up in the pot? Or even 1 in 100. I'm not entirely sure how many cigs do get lost that way.

Yeah, me neither. I guess the chance pretty much has to depend on how often cigs get lost, which could easily be very high considering how often I lose a cig here or there and how many players there are.

We're talking a lot of programming complication, here, across a bunch of modules, for an effect that could be achieved just as easily by applying a bit of variability to the initial size of the pot.

And, hey. Plausibility, guys... Cigs that are lost to the pinata or other events are lost. Sometimes you do run across a cig that someone else probably lost, but there's no story-reason for any of them to wind up in the CC404 rally pot. You want some mechanism that's actually connected to the rally. Any extra cigs that wind up in the pot can be better explained by -- oh, for example, a random number of NPC inhabitants of the Island deciding to enter the rally, and then not competing.

I was thinking that if an NPC took a cig from you... Well, you're right, it's kind of silly.

But isn't there a problem with bumping up the initial pot size in that if only one person enters the Rally--say, if they entered, then CC was breached and no one else could get into the outpost to register--they automatically get a cig profit, since the pot is bigger than their entry fee?

Well, sometimes people do just get lucky, you know. Ill winds, and all that. They'd still have to complete the rally to gain the prize, and that's not automatic, it takes several game days. The game wouldn't necessarily have to block it from happening ever. It would only be a concern if it happened too often and started to throw the economy out of balance.

If it did turn out to be a problem, though, it wouldn't be hard to cancel a rally with only one entrant. (Send a distraction that says the robot who runs the rally comes up to you, apologizes politely, and returns your entry fee. Or half of it? ... No, if the rally's cancelled return all four cigs, because you don't want to make people hold back from signing up for fear nobody else does.)

Hm, good call on the initial pot. (I think Dan's lottery is essentially dead for the same reasons, as, after the last jackpot was won, it seems (almost) no one entered again. There is a 1 in 10,000 chance of winning, and the payout is about 10 to 1.) I'll have to check the rally again, I'm working (on starting) on a piece of software to graph rally points and display the shortest path to the nearest few. (It would also do towns.) Since this is an impossible problem* to compute, I'll have to settle for merely solving the micro.

I'll hopefully enter a race in the next week or so, when I have a chunk of time on my hands.

*Well, maybe there is a solution out there, but the odds are those guys at Harvard or Yale will find it before I do. (On The Island, though, I'm sure I could find the solution on the second or third scrap of paper blowing in the wind. )

Shortest is one thing, but what I like about the Rally is that it takes a lot of factors into consideration. Like stam costs over different terrains, and using the trains... there's a lot of different things that work into the "shortest" path, time-wise.

I tried to graph it at first. I couldn't even get the points to format correctly so Excel could take care of it. I ended up hand-graphing it. (Hundred points. Manual graph. See something wrong here? I made a cripeload of mistakes too.) I feel like it's actually more effective that way--you the player can judge more accurately what the best path is than a program can.

To be honest, the best my program could do is _perhaps_ give you the shortest route to a given point. Waypoint pathing is a problem computer science hasn't solved yet, in general. You'd have to compute 1,000,000,000,< insert 90 more '0's here > paths, and we simply don't have that sort of power available. (Although, given the full power of the improbable island distributed supercomputer, and significant advances in technology, we could maybe crack a rally in a couple of decades. ) Mostly, I want the shortest route between cities. I think I have figured out most of the 'best routes', but I'm just not sure about CC404. Has anyone else done work on this?

And:
Holy smokes, you charted all 100 points by hand? I'm impressed!

I don't know if that counts as humanitarian research... But maybe if we manage to cure cancer they'll let us borrow it?

Again, is it shortest or most stam-effective? Or even most monster-free? It's complicated! I've always wanted to sit down and calculate this, actually, and never got around to it. If I come up with any numbers I'll share. I suspect it'll require a lot of stabbing at a 4-function calculator.

(Graph paper and dedication, my friend. I realized just as I finished it what a stupid idea it was, but of course by then it was too late.)

It depends... not only on where you're starting from, but also on what your personal stamina costs are for each terrain type.

Those can be improved -- for some terrains -- with the right mount. Travel experience changes the stam differential between terrain types. Monster encounters, for a robot, translate into another sizeable stamina cost; you might want to choose a different path on days when you've used monster repellent. It's not only difficult, it's individual: the 'best routes' are very dependent on your character.

Can we submit the II Rally to a CS department somewhere to add more confusion to the Traveling Salesman problem?

---

Isn't sanity just a one-trick pony anyway? All you get is one trick: rational thinking. But when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh, the sky's the limit.

Obviously, we need to submit it to the WCG. Go, little supercomputer! Mapquest that rally!

---

Goat Collector