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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: [OT] Ace of Aces was: interactive fictions == adventure games ?
Message-ID: <G0n17n.554@world.std.com>
Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2000 21:04:35 GMT
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W. Top Changwatchai <no@spam.com> wrote:
>I owned a couple of those myself.  By the way, the mechanics of how the
>books worked did *not* originate with these books.  (It's a fascinating
>system too.  Hats off the person or persons who first worked it out.)  I
>believe the first books to use this system were the "Ace of Aces" series
>which originally had WWI aircraft in combat.

For what it's worth, Ace of Aces used a very simple
hex grid system under the hood, encoding a, um, maybe
4-radius hex around each plane.  When you made two
moves, it was possible that one of the moves would
take you out of the 4-radius (which led to page 223
I think?) whereas the other wouldn't, and the sum
of the two wouldn't; that's why sometimes only one
player would get a valid page.

I used a computer to solve the game as best as possible
for the set of books I had; there were a set of pages
(generally at somewhat long range) that you were
guaranteed there was no way the other player could
shoot at you in one move, so if you memorized the
list of those pages (biased towards the ones facing
in directions the enemy player could move to that would
get him or her shot; my program enumerated those
possibilities), a move to any of those pages was
perfect in the sense that it could only hurt your
enemy more than you.

Those pages weren't always available, so the next
subset were pages which led to head-to-head shooting.
I believe in all but two or three cases one of those
two sorts of pages was available, thus effectively
guaranteeing you at least a draw.

I guess I should turn this into a web page or something.

Sean
