Convoy From Europa

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FrankJones
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Joined: 30 June 2024, 00:24

Re: Convoy From Europa

Post by FrankJones »

Yahyra wrote: 18 May 2026, 15:30

Thanks to Victoria La (and are there other T Mars devs?) for the great work you do in developing this game here on BGA. In light of the fact that your work is unpaid / volunteer, I think it's outstandingly well done.
Many games here at BGA have only one developer listed.

For Terraforming Mars, there are three - Victoria_La, the lead programmer who handles all the coding.
Because of the popularity of the game, and partly because so many people don't know the rules, the bug forum becomes overwhelming to manage. xspuipuke and I are listed as part of the development team, but mainly we just manage the bug forum. Sometimes we advise behind the scenes regarding coding changes or improvements. We all work together to bring everyone the best version we can, and all praise and gratitude similar to yours is greatly appreciated by us.
:)
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StrandedKnight
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Joined: 11 January 2025, 02:19

Re: Convoy From Europa

Post by StrandedKnight »

My comment was not meant as criticism of Victoria and the dev team. I think you're doing a great job of listening to user requests and creating a mostly bug-free experience. I understand from the bug report that this is an issue that won't be fixed since it's complicated by legacy reasons and how BGA works in general. That's pefectly fine.

I simply wanted to point out that it's inconsistent with the rules, and that there's nothing that prevents it from being fixed in theory.
ArchDevious
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Joined: 09 October 2023, 23:05

Re: Convoy From Europa

Post by ArchDevious »

Yahyra wrote: 18 May 2026, 15:30 Here is where I don't know the exact rules; so those spots where you have to 'pay MC to X (bump a temp, place an ocean)', are they mandatory that you must pay and place the tile?

If so then that's the example that I think xspui is bringing up but now that I think about it, it doesn't 'make sense' since the spots where you have to pt a tile and pay MC to do something, are all land spots and not oceans?

Oh well.

Thanks to Victoria La (and are there other T Mars devs?) for the great work you do in developing this game here on BGA. In light of the fact that your work is unpaid / volunteer, I think it's outstandingly well done.
Im also unclear on this rule, anyone know how this is supposed to work
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xspuipuke
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Re: Convoy From Europa

Post by xspuipuke »

You are allowed to pay the cost at any point during the execution of the action (at least by the normal rules). BGA, though, won‘t allow you to select those spaces unless you have that amount of cash before you take the action.
Yahyra
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Joined: 06 January 2016, 03:33

Re: Convoy From Europa

Post by Yahyra »

Frank J you are a national treasure, thanks for your work. Ditto Xspui.


So (in the spirit of understanding everything going on) is part of the 'mismatch' between the T Mars rules and the current implementation the fact that tile placements are not 'validated'? Does anyone else remember when you could play lava tube settlement without power prod, but then before resolution the game would give an error saying 'missing power prod'?


In the context of ensuring undo's always work, coding 'card draws must happen last' into BGA seems to be effective and elegant. Would I like to draw the card before placing the ocean on Convoy from Europa? Sometimes, yea.

Maybe a clever-er implementation will be found in the future. Wish I had one... sadly I do not.
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BarnardsStar
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Joined: 02 January 2021, 02:41

Re: Convoy From Europa

Post by BarnardsStar »

Yahyra wrote: 18 May 2026, 20:48 Frank J you are a national treasure, thanks for your work. Ditto Xspui.
Hear hear!
FrankJones
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Re: Convoy From Europa

Post by FrankJones »

Digging a little deeper: Not all websites or game platforms have a cancel/undo feature. At BGA, we do, and most of the time this is a good thing. Generally speaking, anything that reveals new information cannot be undone. In a game like Wingspan, this never matters - after a dice roll or drawn card, you can just undo back to that point.

But, in Terraforming Mars, we could have a Hellas South pole situation in which the game gets deadlocked. Someone plays nuclear zone on the south pole, resulting in a card draw. (The player is Point Luna). The card is drawn first, but now the player cannot pay the 6 MC. Maybe the player thought the Nuclear zone would raise the temperature to the bonus ocean, gaining 4 MC of adjacency bonus. But the player miscalculated something, and now the game is stuck.

Options:
1) Writing code to shuffle the card back into the deck and cancel the action is possible from a coding standpoint. Would this work within the BGA framework? Unsure.
2) Another option is to just have the game be deadlocked and forfeited. But that's also bad. Especially in a 3+ player game.
3) Maybe there could be a rule addendum implemented by the game designer to implement option 1 and just do a reshuffle. But then you would have unhappy players complaining "I would have gotten that card!" Similar to blackjack players complaining when someone hits a 3 against a dealer 6, draws a face card, and then the dealer draws a 5. (Of course, these are all random cards and this could work to the benefits of the players if the dealer ends up drawing a bust card when otherwise it would have been a 5.
4) The South pole action could just be blocked if a player does not yet have 6 MC at the start of the action. But then we have players saying, "Hey, I should be able to do this because I will have 6 MC eventually before finishing the action."
5) A more complex solution would be to write a code block that creates a separate function that checks for maximum MC rebates from all sources, thereby determining the placement to be valid without 6 MC. Possible, but not easy. There are many ways this could occur. Tharsis could play an expensive city on that tile while having Spinoff department. This would draw a card, and trigger various rebates (Tharsis ability, Rover construction, etc.). I'm sure other scenarios exist.

Getting back to the reshuffle. What if the deck is down to one card. If we "shuffle" one card, it is still the only card in the draw pile, and now the next player knows what that card is.

So, it's an all-around tricky situation.

We could also, in theory, figure out which cards cannot possibly fail, and write a line of code that allows the card to be drawn first. Ocean placing cards (Large Convoy, Convoy from Europa) likely cannot fail, but other cases may arise with more promo cards in the future.

All in all, no easy task.
Yahyra
Posts: 159
Joined: 06 January 2016, 03:33

Re: Convoy From Europa

Post by Yahyra »

Excellent information, thanks for sharing. This reminds me of the time my dissertation advisor asked me, regarding my research program implementation, 'but can't you be sure this will compile, run and give us output?'.

I pointed out that it's been shown that 'determining, from a description of an arbitrary computer program and an input, whether the program will eventually halt (finish running) or continue to run forever' is impossible:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem


When we program, we write what we think will compiled, work and run... but then the computer science demon(s) (or are they angels) take over and, you know, stuff happens.

(Kudos to those of you with fancy data scrapers and websites who, perhaps, may think you will never write a line of code that won't compile or run... that hasn't been the case for me yet... perhaps one day!).
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Lytical
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Re: Convoy From Europa

Post by Lytical »

Frank wouldn't it be a simple if statement? If there is not enough mc you can't excute the draw, you have to fulfill the mc requirement before card draw for luna.

It sounds like to me that there is a fail before, because if statement wasnt set properly and now the devs just shovel all the card draw sequence to the back. I understand the quick fix, but that's not the final solution. It's time to roll back, and allow players to draw first ONLY if MC requirement yes, otherwise you have to perform other sequence first.

In the south pole situation, you can draw first only if you fulfill mc requirement, otherwise you have to do rebate first then draw, even for point luna.
FrankJones
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Joined: 30 June 2024, 00:24

Re: Convoy From Europa

Post by FrankJones »

Yes, we could write a simple if->else statement that only applies to those two effects: Card draw and paying the 6 MC.

Technically, that would be an incorrect rules implementation, but as it stands now, we have a similar but different issue - either way, sometimes the active player has to do [action A] before [action B].

But,

If Point Luna plays Nuclear Zone, for example, The "draw card" effect of Point Luna immediately is technically available. But at that point, the code doesn't yet know that a tile might be placed on the south pole. All the code knows is that Ppoint Luna has played an earth tag.
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