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Argue posted:I have no idea how you can finish this game with a single expert once the Morse Code and Password modules start appearing; we'd often need 3 experts minimum so that someone could decode the messages/passwords while they futzed around with wires. I actually like getting Password modules. If you're on your game, they feel like one of the least time intensive puzzles, at least of the non-starter group. (Gonna spoiler module strats just in case) When you say "decode the messages,' I'm guessing you're passing on all 5 columns to the experts. It's a lot easier to pass on just the first two, because it's 1) less information for the expert to have to process and 2) less information to actually have to communicate in the first place. With the first two columns, the expert should be able to narrow it down to 2 or 3 word clusters that the defuser can check in the third columns. If the defuser has had a significant amount of time also being an expert, they can sometimes even get the word without any help. For instance, if you notice you've passed on T and H, immediately look for E and I in the third column because there's a decent chance you're going to get one of There/Their/These/Thing/Think. And if you don't that's five less possibilities for the expert to have to take into consideration. The same principle applies to Morse Code, but I find in Morse you often need a third letter. On really hard bombs, we tend to try to get Morse Code out of the way first, but it's often hard to find it before it actually starts, so when I'm experting I often end up trying to solve it using the middle of the word in hopes to save a cycle.
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Nov 23, 2015 11:44
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Maybe I'm terrible, but as an expert I definitely need a minute to work through complicated wires. It's not hard, but the venn diagram takes a level of attention to detail that is really time-consuming for me.
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Nov 23, 2015 14:59
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Propaganda Machine posted:Maybe I'm terrible, but as an expert I definitely need a minute to work through complicated wires. It's not hard, but the venn diagram takes a level of attention to detail that is really time-consuming for me. I've seen two strategies with the venn diagram that seem effective, and can be used together. 1. Turn the venn diagram into a tree, branching off at each of the four factors. This way you just follow through the tree and don't have to worry about "poo poo, am I on the right side of this circle?" 2. The wires can be done in any order. Do all of the wires with the star and light first, so the only questions you have to ask are "is it red and/or blue?" Then you do the ones with the star but not light, then light but no star, and then neither star nor light. This way you don't have to completely retrace your steps through the venn diagram/tree.
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Nov 23, 2015 17:15
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Phantasmal posted:I actually like getting Password modules. If you're on your game, they feel like one of the least time intensive puzzles, at least of the non-starter group. I don't know if this is a totally back-assward way to do it but as the expert I just read the defuser out the list of words in alphabetical order and if they can't spell that word we just move onto the next one.
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Nov 23, 2015 17:32
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Krysm straight up took the defusing manual and rewrote and reorganized it, removing superfluous information and streamlining what was left. I personally kinda feel like that goes against the spirit of the game...but the devs responded on Twitter and said that the only inviolable rule was "whoever has the guide can't see the screen, whoever has the bomb can't see the book."
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Nov 23, 2015 18:01
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I feel like parts of the manual were written in intentionally obtuse ways, and that's just part of the challenge.
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Nov 23, 2015 18:19
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WhiteHowler posted:I feel like parts of the manual were written in intentionally obtuse ways, and that's just part of the challenge. No one would construct a manual like the unmodified bomb manual unless it was deliberate. "Streamlining" the manual absolutely removes a large amount of the difficulty of the game in general. I certainly wouldn't use his manual, but people are going to play the game in whatever way is most fun for them. Not a drat thing wrong with it.
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Nov 23, 2015 18:31
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jivjov posted:Krysm straight up took the defusing manual and rewrote and reorganized it, removing superfluous information and streamlining what was left. I justify it by the fact that I take a lot of enjoyment from "optimizing" games, reducing the chaff into shorthand that I understand. Thats why while I may have my own version of the manual, it's designed for my own use and other people won't understand my shorthand. Also there's the very real risk that I mistype something in translation and end up killing you. 
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Nov 23, 2015 22:35
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Yoshimo posted:I don't know if this is a totally back-assward way to do it but as the expert I just read the defuser out the list of words in alphabetical order and if they can't spell that word we just move onto the next one. I haven't tried it personally, but I suspect this is really inefficient. Assume you and the defuser have an almost superhuman rate of checking a word every 3 seconds. If the password is 'Write' you're spending 105 seconds on a single module (going through all 35 passwords at 3 seconds each). Doing the 11 module in 5 minutes bomb requires you to finish a module every 27 seconds. Even if you apply just a small, single-column filter you should still be capping your worst case scenario outcomes to well below the average outcome of your system.
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Nov 23, 2015 22:49
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Kamikaze Raider posted:No one would construct a manual like the unmodified bomb manual unless it was deliberate.
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Nov 23, 2015 22:50
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The manual my group uses has the pages in three-ring plastic sleeves, so we divvy them up according to skill and experience, and with the plastic we use dry-erase markers to mark them up and take notes. So with crossed wires, I'll draw out and erase each instance as we go and use tickmarks under the blue/black/red columns to keep track. It's about as cheap as I'm willing to go with it, but it's still within the realm of reasonable.
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Nov 23, 2015 23:23
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quote:Manual talk. I think if it actively detracts from your game, fix it. Like I see a lot of people who don't get a certain instruction without having to Google it, then by all means fix that. Personally I'd follow form and either write in the margins or stamp a giant "See Appendix A" on the manual pages and put a new one at the end. I think power-gaming and writing your own optimized manual is unintended, although if that's what your group is into, then enjoy. Like if you're doing one expert on the later levels, there's no way I'd use the default manual. Then again, if I was on a real-life bomb team, we'd have our own systems by then anyway, so that's a fine flavor for the game to have. I mean at that point you need to have fingergloves and backward SWAT baseball caps, right? Unironically, that could be a lot of fun. Propaganda Machine posted:The manual my group uses has the pages in three-ring plastic sleeves, so we divvy them up according to skill and experience, and with the plastic we use dry-erase markers to mark them up and take notes. So with crossed wires, I'll draw out and erase each instance as we go and use tickmarks under the blue/black/red columns to keep track. It's about as cheap as I'm willing to go with it, but it's still within the realm of reasonable. Things like this. 3-ring binders and dry erase are great flavor.
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Nov 23, 2015 23:35
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You don't need a custom manual to do single expert on the later bombs, but you do need to steamline your processes for different modules in a way that's similar to making a custom manual. The biggest example of this for me was the Knobs needy module (spoilering again for people who want to stay pure and figure this stuff out exclusively on their own): For anyone unfamiliar with Knobs, it's basically a module that pops up every minute or two and will explode if you don't set it to the correct position before its timer runs out. The only other display is two groups of lights situated like this XXX || XXX XXX || XXX Our initial approach was to just read it out in binary, have the expert write down the pattern, and then match it to the manual. But this was time consuming for something that popped up multiple times per bomb. I wanted a more concise way to convey the necessary information so that we'd have more time available for the actual modules. What I noticed is that you only need the left half of the lights. Each configuration is left half unique except for two, and they're both go to the right position. The extra bonus to this is that if the defuser sees this 'U' pattern 101 111 they know the setting is right and never even need to interact with the expert at all. So 25% of the time no communication is necessary, and 75% of the time we halved the amount of information we need to convey, which then also makes it easier on the expert because they're pattern matching using smaller patterns. But recently I noticed you can even go further than that. If you simply do a light count for each side such that 101 || 111 111 || 010 is 5-4, that's enough to always have a unique configuration. This alone might be less efficient for the expert (unless you write in the counts in the manual), but it gets better. With a relatively easy to memorize heuristic, all you need is the # of lights in the left side to solve every variant of the module. If U-shaped then 'Right' If 1 or 0 left side lights then 'Left' If 4 left side lights then 'Up' Else 'Down' If your defuser can remember this then you never even need to communicate for Knobs and can simply do it while the expert is looking up a different puzzle. It's a pretty extreme example, and some modules don't lend themselves well to this. Who's On First, for example, doesn't have much streamlining potential. Making your own manual is a interesting twist, but I'd definitely warn against is just downloading someone else's custom manual. The fun part of the latter half of the game is coming up with your own streamlining strategies, and just downloading someone else's wholesale would really suck out a lot of the fun.
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Nov 24, 2015 06:22
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As someone who defused all the bombs with one other person(except for two of the exotics), streamlining the manual goes from not necessary at all to practically required for a few of the later bombs. There's just not enough time to decode the crappy manual and do all the modules. Complicated wires especially have to be streamlined unless you want to memorize all the wire configurations. Just making a list of which wires you can always cut speeds up the process considerably. Listing words in alphabetical order also helps for who's on first and password decoding. I definitely wouldn't start streamlining until things clearly become impossible or extremely luck based to clear without altering it though.
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Nov 24, 2015 22:25
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I'm totally down to play this with goons sometime. Played with a friend over the weekend just us two and we got progressively more shitfaced as we progressed through the campaign. Got all the way up to the bomb that has one of every single non-needy module which eventually defeated us. I do like how the game forces you to develop a system on the fly in order to fully coordinate. Also the Gas Venting module is absolutely hilarious. Occasionally it will ask "Detonate?" and if you click Yes you instantly explode. My defuser ran into this a couple times and we couldn't stop laughing. Relyssa fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Nov 25, 2015 |
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Nov 25, 2015 01:23
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Played with friends for a few hours with my new shiny Gear VR, game is still amazing. (gently caress morse code though, that was not easy when drunk, but hilarious)
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Nov 29, 2015 00:53
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To hell with producing streamlined manuals for this. When I buy this for my friends I'm producing a hard-mode manual with coffee stains, unhelpful notes in the margin, and pages printed upside down.
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Nov 29, 2015 16:25
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Whybird posted:To hell with producing streamlined manuals for this. When I buy this for my friends I'm producing a hard-mode manual with coffee stains, unhelpful notes in the margin, and pages printed upside down. It should also smell like stale cigarettes and old aluminum filing cabinets. E: mimeograph it. McSpanky fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Nov 30, 2015 |
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Nov 29, 2015 18:24
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I finally had a chance to try this yesterday, with VR set and printed + laminated manual. We had 4-5 Experts and two manual sets. It was quite good, but we didn't quite have time to get to the more complex levels. Somewhat because we rotated who was in the hot seat rather often. The only distractions any Defusers had to battle with were the alarm clock going off and a water level on the bomb that turned off the room light. Also we only had Complex Wires once and Who's On First twice. I'm definitely up for trying this on a Skype session some time.
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Nov 29, 2015 18:32
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Whybird posted:To hell with producing streamlined manuals for this. When I buy this for my friends I'm producing a hard-mode manual with coffee stains, unhelpful notes in the margin, and pages printed upside down. "Ok I have wires, squiggly symbols and simon says" - I can do wires" "alright there's 6 wires, 2 yellow, 1 red..." - WAIT, wait I need to find the instructions.. "ok....6 wires, 2 yell-" - oh gently caress, there's a bunch on the floor. ok. is it complicated wires? no hang on, wait
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Nov 30, 2015 17:05
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I take it there's nothing new coming out for this then?
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Mar 10, 2016 18:25
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Yoshimo posted:I take it there's nothing new coming out for this then? I was really hoping for some big updates with new manuals or something...but yeah, devlopment seems to have completely stopped on new stuff. Still a fun game though.
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Mar 16, 2016 20:28
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Hopefully they're taking the main idea behind it to a new concept, or a sequel. The social aspect of the game is fantastic
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Mar 21, 2016 09:32
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I have a great idea for this game, but I have no idea how to implement it. I work as an ESL assistant in a public secondary school in Europe and I've been thinking about using this game as a speaking activity. Obviously this would be for advanced students, and I've seen videos of non-native English speakers playing this game with the English manual and the results are hilarious. Anyway, this idea only works if my students don't switch to their native language, so is there a script or a cheat code that allows me to blow up the bomb on command? The only way I could effectively make this work otherwise is having my students form teams and making the manual reader position a hotseat with the non-defusers alternating whenever they blurt something out not in English. What do you think?
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Mar 21, 2016 12:12
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Only way you could do that with without coding something would be two monitors with the game on one and task manager on the other. And I don't know if that'd work with your class size.
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Mar 21, 2016 12:41
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You could have a stopwatch ready and tell everyone to stop reading/defusing for x amount of seconds whenever they say something in their native tounge.
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Mar 21, 2016 13:29
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https://www.reddit.com/r/ktane/comments/4mv2lj/have_the_developers_ever_hinted_at_further/quote:Dev here. We generally avoid discussing features until they are in a state where they are nearly ready to release.
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Jun 8, 2016 03:54
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Gonna bring this back up from the dead because sometime not too long ago this game got patched and includes workshop support! Modded modules are now a thing.
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Aug 14, 2016 23:00
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I'm sad this thread isn't more active. I just picked up this game on the fall/Thanksgiving sale yesterday for half off, and I thought for sure there would still be plenty of people playing it. I've watched videos of people playing it so I have a general idea of how things work, but I haven't actually played it myself. (Sorry for the thread revival if there is nobody interested.)
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Nov 25, 2016 03:01
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