How To Design An Unsolvable Problem

[@ArchitectofGames]

Plz i need tax revenue to buy a big statue of me its more important than electricity i swear: www.patreon.com/ArchitectofGames Want to tell me directly just how terrible I am at these games? Go twoot in my direction!!: twitter.com/Thefearalcarrot

[@psorek139]

Quick question. Favorite problem-solving unsolvable game, and why?

[@ArchitectofGames]

@@psorek139 Factorio! It's got the perfect balance of all the things I love in a problem solver with minimal amounts of the fiddliness they tend to have!

[@psorek139]

@@ArchitectofGames damn it! I thought I'd get a new game recommendation from this question ;) I'm honestly waiting though for a game to deconstruct Factorio into something entirely new and different but equally (more?) Fun ;)

[@ancient-relic]

um not going to judge but really R34 of waluigi at 3.15 . um ok

[@zarnox3071]

@@ancient-relic Hah, I hadn't even noticed that.

[@fivetd3522]

16:59 I love that his solution to Sim City was - and I know this gets said a lot - literally 1984. The rows of identical gray concrete apartments, filled with horrid living conditions and citizens who don't even know how bad they have it, are exactly what I visualized when I read the novel. The massive police state doesn't help the image either lol

[@mfmageiwatch]

Basically cyber punk.

[@goldkat99]

Well 1984 was based on current political trends and educated guesses about the future. So it makes a lot of sense, the book was like that because it’s based off a “winning” strategy from the real world, and the game is for the same reason. Art imitates life.

[@GregHuffman1987]

What is the population of that city?

[@verdiss7487]

Something that seems to be in common with al lot of these games like city builders and factorio is that decisions you make now feed back into and change how decisions you made earlier impact your game state. Building a new suburb now means the highway you put in five hours ago is no longer sufficient. Adding a new smelting array means your old defenses need to be upgraded. It's not merely that you have to go back and touch up old things - a simple deterioration over time wouldn't have the intended effect. It's that your progression is the thing that renders old choices obsolete. By doing this, a feedback loop is always created where every decision you make demands further action to bring things up to date.

[@safe-keeper1042]

You're just repeating what he said in the video.

[@ZarHakkar]

Tbh it gets kind of exhausting sometimes

[@mainBaisch]

@@safe-keeper1042 a lot of "learning" , "understanding" and "building" things in the real world are based on saying the same things in different ways, don't be stupid.

[@roax206]

More specifically a trick that a lot of good city/factory builders I find use for progression is the idea that each solution creates the next problem to be solved. Factorio: You use power to automate things but that causes biter attacks and fuel usage. Satisfactory: You can automate power using a relatively rare resource leading to exploration. ONI: You can turn algae into oxygen which quickly burns through the initial supply forcing you to move onto other sources, recycling, and manufacturing algae.

[@safe-keeper1042]

@@mainBaisch others in turn start mansplaining before watching the vid, and end up repeating what the vid says so that they just look pretentious.

[@superschoolbag1761]

Dear Adam Millard, thank you for your videos, they're always a pleasure to watch. I have one little request : may you please put on screen, in a corner, the name of the game you're currently showing? I know it is extra editing work but it would be really helpful for me as I watch your videos on tv without access to the description.

[@DingleDee]

I second this.

[@SkySpiral7_Lets_play]

Ditto. Also the description isn't super helpful anyway since it doesn't give timestamps. So if I want to know what game is in the middle I'd have to count the games from the nearest one I recognize.

[@mariacargille1396]

+!

[@teslobo]

Is your love of futility and unsolvable issues why you moderate discord servers

[@ArchitectofGames]

soul-crushingly true

[@teejay9189]

discord anarchy! >:D

[@AizenMD]

Double like 👍

[@Dominik-K]

As a Discord moderator, can agree with this

[@Dark_Peace]

I'm a Discord mod for a ytbr and I have to say that I've been able to single handedly solve conflicts such as "how far can humor go" with logic and without force. There's no unsolvable issues when you have the argumentation expérience of the whole Ace attorney franchise.

[@QuantumHistorian]

Great video, kind of mind blowing. I was trying to work out why I liked some city/colony building games but not others, and you've basically hit the nail on the head. The fun is in having the freedom to decide what "best" means for me in in this run, and finding the best solution I can _for that set of circumstances_ . Rather than in the detail of how to assemble that solution. Games that have a long shelf life are those were there are many genuinely different good solutions, and what those are differ drastically based on the circumstances. They becoming boring (to me) once I've found cookie cutter solutions that are easily adapted to any particular run, eg: a handful of optimal build orders in Civilization, or ideal decks in Slay the Spire. I would say, calling such problems "Unsolvable" is not a great choice of word. "Un-optimisable" would be better. It highlights the deep connection to some branches of maths too (for the nerds, something like the problem having multiple metrics for success, finding solutions to any of them being in NP, and the solutions changing chaotically with the problem parameters).

[@psorek139]

I don't agree about slay the spire. First level of mastery is "how to win at least once", but the real difficulty comes from "how to try to win every single time". The second one being infinitely more difficult and far from cookie-cutter.

[@QuantumHistorian]

@@psorek139 I know what you mean, but I got bored after reaching ascension level 5 or so difficulty and winning over half the time there. What you're describing is, to me, more the problem of _"how do I realise this solution?"_ than _"what are the good solutions?"_ . Once I'd found that 3 or so decent core strategies per hero, all that was left was getting better at the implementation. But I much prefer the discovery stage.

[@musicexams5258]

@@QuantumHistorian That said, there is then the problem of "well what happens if you don't find the solid damage cards that will get you through act 1, or the defensive/offensive scaling that will get you through acts 2 and 3". Then you end up finding solutions that are surprisingly effective (e.g. Dropkick infinite, discard engine, Plasma shenanigans)

[@musicexams5258]

@@QuantumHistorian Also the first ascension that starts massively fucking you is ascension 10, where you start with an unremovable curse then ascension 11 makes you lose a potion slot then ascension 15 makes the events less favourable then ascension 20 makes you fight two act 3 bosses

[@r3dp9]

@@musicexams5258 The issue with Slay The Spire is that the RNG and mathematical complexity means that it takes many, many failed attempts before you'll find a new, novel solution. Most of the time you're aiming for what you know works, getting screwed by RNG, and trying something at a random. This can be fun in small doses, but it isn't the kind of torture I'll subject myself to for more than one run in a row. (Or two runs in a row. Or three. No more than three runs in a row, okay?) Jokes aside, a lot of the strategy in STS comes from knowing card drop rates, odds of getting events, odds of getting specific enemy combos, knowing how much cards and relics cost before deciding to visit a shop, and so forth. There's a huge metagaming layer that simply isn't interesting to me, so I don't bother learning it, which leads to everything feeling like chance when it can in fact be calculated. I recognize the beauty of high ascension STS runs, but I also recognize that it's not my cup of tea most of the time.

[@Some_Really_Random_Dude.]

To quote Rogal Dorn, from What if the Emperor had a text to speech device. "There is nothing more enjoyable than the overseeing of development." Now this applies to city/colony builders specifically. But could also very easily be applied to every other game ever. We like knowing we've improved, we like seeing numbers go up, we like seeing something we've worked towards reach completion. This is all the joy of having seen the development and being proud that you made it happen.

[@0cellusDS]

Zachtronic games are amazing. They still have all the elements of a puzzler, but instead of the solution being something you have to discover, it is something you have to invent.

[@vulkanosaure]

If you like zachatronic, take a look at "turing complete" from another dev. It's about building a cpu from scratch

[@PainterVierax]

I think (most) Zachtronics games are good for education and discovery of engineering and programming logic (despite sometimes being about other subjects than computers) but in the end they don't replace the value of playing with real world stuffs with their infinity of challenges and potential creations.

[@killerbee.13]

@@PainterVierax I enjoy zachtronics games and actual programming in related but different ways. I don't think that their goal was to completely replace actual programming as a source of fun, so it seems odd to judge them by that.

[@PainterVierax]

@@killerbee.13 I didn't talk about fun at all, which is a subjective feeling. I replied about the inventiveness praised by OP. This is your comment that is oddly judgemental.

[@notnullnotvoid]

@@PainterVierax Who said they're trying to "replace" anything? Why is that what your brain jumped to?

[@1996Pinocchio]

There are two types of problems. The ones where all solutions are equal (as in they solve the problem), where are other problems are optimizing problems. Getting to the solution is the easy part here, but getting there as fast or cheap as possible is the tricky part, and you never know if you've arrived at the optimal solution.

[@Daemonworks]

Interestingly, at the high end, chess is considered "solved". Serious competition is more about memorizing exchanges, board states and the like than it is about actually applying the rules. As a result, there's a large array of variations created to bring back the problem solving by making rote memorization less relevant.

[@Cyfrik]

Wikipedia has a list of chess variants, and it's kind of fascinating to read.

[@musicexams5258]

One example is Fischer Random Chess, or Chess960, that just says "SCREW YOU OPENING THEORY" by well, randomizing the positions of the rooks, knights, bishops, queen, and king It is often said to not even be a variant, as the positions that arise in the middlegame and endgame are very much positions that come from regular chess

[@killerbee.13]

There's a mobile game called 'really bad chess' that I used to enjoy a lot that gave you and the AI random (and often very unfair) pieces, which completely changes the game

[@sudopod]

This is why citizen science games are viable as games in their own right. Citizen science games, like Foldit and Phylo, are games that harness the pattern recognition abilities of the human brain to solve complicated scientific problems. The developers need to translate these problems and the data into a form that the player can interact with and have fun with while generating useful solutions for scientists. It seems there is an additional layer of challenge in designing these sorts of games beyond the unsolvable problem-type games, but I'd be really interested to see someone tackle these games with real funding behind them.

[@sevehayden1463]

Anyone know any good ones? I've wanted to try one for a bit

[@AnotherDuck]

I find it interesting that I watched this video right before Design Doc's newest video about elements, and I think the topic is pretty much the same. It's all about creating variation and stop the player from always using the same, optimal strategy. Or at least add an incentive to be more creative. This video is more about the overall structure and goal of the game, while the other one is more about a specific mechanic, but they're both about the same idea. I recommend watching both videos in relation to each other.

[@AnotherDuck]

@@Madhattersinjeans How do you lose your weapons there?

[@TheREALBOJACK]

17:06-17:26 - Yeah, man. That sounds like a living nightmare. Who would want to live in that hellish scenario? Thank god that's not..........uhhh............hmm. 😕

[@Noperare]

"Who would want" Do you think this is a democracy? Keep talking like that and it is gulag time for you.

[@mapangel5284]

3:18 the attention to detail and easter eggs in your videos is amazing, had me laughing a good while :)

[@tungstentoaster]

I'm just amazed that the only reason I caught it is to check if I had actually just seen Ask Jeeves being used in the 21st century.

[@BlackReshiram]

im in the process of replaying divinity: original sin 2 for the fifth time right now, and its still as much fun as before, because the ways to beat its various challenges are insane and i love the creative ways to defeat - or even completely circumvent - battles because it stimulates my lizard brain that desires more and more stupid ways to beat the game. 10/10 can recommend for any fantasy rpg nerd

[@grodon909]

If you haven't already, try mods. Adding a bunch of options (especially if you also limit yourself to certain builds) lets you figure out new ways to tackle problems with different sets of resources.

[@tremox9786]

Yeah, there is something fascinating and cathartic about a game that lets you kill bosses by throwing a heavy barrel at them. All hail the Barrelmancer.

[@BlackReshiram]

@@grodon909 i prefer to play as vanilla as possible, currently i dont use any mods at all in order to gain achievements :D

[@Pinstar]

You've put into words exactly why I play the games that I do. Iterating on a constantly shifting problem trying to keep up with the task at hand, while also being careful that your solution doesn't collapse under its own weight. Fantastic video!

[@GDGrimoire]

Since the moment you mentioned how important it is for problem solving games to know when to end, I was itching to write up a comment about Stacklands, as it nails exactly that aspect. What a fun surprise that it was Sokpop of all things you decided to give a shoutout to this time :D & great analysis, keep it up!

[@SilverStarStorm.]

The moment I saw the shout out I dove into the comments to see if anyone else also has experience and appreciation for them. I love them. Basically every game has that familiar fun Sokpop style but all are different. So much variety that asks so little of me :D

[@Dani751PL]

Human Resource Machine (HRM) is a quite interesting game. you would be surprised by it from time to time. For example, "I once managed to solve the problem my way" was not supposed to go this way, but by RNG, letters to deliver were set to let it pass. The game picked up on that and told me "You did it, but it is not the way you were supposed. You passed by pure luck, so we will reshuffle the letters again to prove it"

[@alwaysfallingshort]

This is such a good video for more reasons than you intended. I like the description of these games as "problem solving" games. You helped me refine some of my own ideas with this video, again in ways I don't think you intended.

[@Shaathurray]

Opus Magnum was duch a fun game to play. And once you got used to the controls it really had this feeling of "youre actually doing this" and every time i completed a formula i felt this sense of accomplishment but also this knowledge that i could do better. Really a great game to experience. The music also really helped get into that "creative engineering mindset"

[@AnotherDuck]

I like the use of the Sim City music at the ends. Worked well for bookending. Maybe because I remember if from back when I played it and that nostalgia triggers that back-to-basics idea you were going for when wrapping up. I very much prefer the games with less pressure, since it means more options are available. Some pressure is fine, of course, even if it's not necessary, and in some cases, like building modded Minecraft bases, the pressure comes only from trying to keep up with all the new stuff you build, even if you could just slow down the new stuff a little bit. But who has time for that? There are new problems to solve, and old solutions to optimise!

[@rashkavar]

Loving to see all the Surviving Mars footage in here. That game is my go to for city builder/management sims.

[@SammersM]

The first time (I think) that I was already aware of your shout out! The world definitely needs more Sokpop awareness 🤙🤙🤙

[@SilverStarStorm.]

Heck yeaaaahhhh more Sokpop awareness :D Not sure if I'd say they're my favorite indie studio, but when it comes to indie studio rating scaled by how many of their games I've actually played. Oh yeah. Orders of magnitude above everything else. Tbh the simplicity of their games is a + for me as I don't have all that much time for gaming and always feel guilty if I have to drop a game for a long time without getting far enough :') Sokpop is perfect solution. I love them. Variety and quantity, without really sacrificing quality.

[@geofff.3343]

19:24 "A card-based city-builder which is like Cultist Sim[ulator] but good." Thank you, it's so good I'm not alone in that opinion. I mean, I know you're never alone in your opinions, but you're the only one who's said it in a KZbin video.

[@CreeperSlayer365]

I've played cultist sim for 70 hours, it's not good. I think that game taught me almost everything on how not to make a roguelike

[@geofff.3343]

@@CreeperSlayer365 It preys on that need of human beings to know, which I guess could be on-brand for the game, but it's just so... bad... and the writer Alex Whatshisface is way, way overrated. Some mildly purple Lovecraftian prose does not a good game make.

[@r3dp9]

@@geofff.3343 It would be good if you could mod the game to have automation. Each of the puzzles is interesting the first time you learn it, but after that it's just tedium.

[@kevingriffith6011]

While the game isn't good, the core mechanic of "everything is cards" is very interesting to me. I think you could do a lot with the idea, and while I don't think Stacklands quite lives up to it either I think there is something great waiting to be made with the format. The biggest advantage of the system is that it gives nothing away and encourages the player to experiment, moreso than just "here is a list of options you can do."

[@CreeperSlayer365]

@@kevingriffith6011 A game with all cards seems super interesting. My problem with cultist simulator was that the entire game discourages exploration. If you fuck up once you have to restart up to 10 hours of work so the only strategy is to play insanely conservatively until you have all your stats maxed then do the cult stuff.

[@keiyangoshin3650]

This video perfectly explains why I thought I outgrew these types of games. Solving problems is exhausting when that’s all you do all day and all week in a job. So I left these simulation games behind years ago. Lately however, I want to play Factorio. 🤷‍♀️ Probably because I have a lot more free time now.

[@r3dp9]

For similar reasons, Shipbreaker is a lot less cathartic when events similar to the game happen in my real job. Sometimes a game is TOO relateable. I'll probably go back to that game once I'm not working full time, such as the next time I go to school or swap careers.

[@glumbortango7182]

15:36 Yeah about that, there's actually a few provably unsolvable problems (AKA every method to "solve" it has an undecidable problem) in mathematics. A few include: - Halting Problem for Turing Computers - Infinite Plane Tilings for Wang Tiles - Spectral Gap Question for Complex Quantum Systems These problems exist in more simplistic games such as the Game of Life (with the undecidable problem being when/if a configuration decays into a stable loop), but my wouldn't it be interesting to see any of these other problems be translated to video games.

[@oliverb7897]

We gonna start dividing games into computable vs uncomputable games now?

[@glumbortango7182]

@@oliverb7897 It's perfectly possible to play, you just can't ask a computer how to play perfectly. Just saying, it could be done.

[@oliverb7897]

@@glumbortango7182 For sure, I was very deliberate when i chose the word "computable"

[@MagicGonads]

To be fair, games cannot be *truly* turing complete as the resources they take up has a finite physical limit, so the permutations of state encoded in those resources also has a finite limit. Even if the universe could be infinite in many aspects, it probably can't be infinitely dense, so the game has to be embedded in something that is isomorphic to a discrete system, and the only way that system can be unbounded is if it has infinite components, which would require infinite time to build as time is also not infinitely dense. So any game that we can build is decidable by a deterministic finite state machine (we don't even need more computationally enriched machines, however the more basic machines are likely larger than the game they solve, so a game existing might prevent the construction of a machine to solve it since they occupy parts of the same universe). Although if any components of the discrete system have unbounded parameters (by some kind of infinite energy hack), then we do need more than turing machines to be able to solve them in general.

[@notnullnotvoid]

@@MagicGonads I mean yeah, *nothing* is truly turing complete in a finite universe if you want to get ultra-pedantic, but that's not a very interesting observation and it has nothing in particular to do with games.

[@KermRiv]

you know, this channel and others like it have really taught me a lot about appreciating video games and other kind of art in general

[@vit78ify]

I feel it was a big miss not mentioning the joys of recreational mathematics, which is pretty much the definition of problem solving for fun and seems to be as old as mathematics itself.

[@Lorhelei]

I first realized how adictive this kind of games were for me while playing Factorio. And reafirm it in Oxygen not Included. The way you are never in a "good" posicion is amazing. There's always a new problem to solve, a new resource to master, a new waste to handle, all while moving facing your final goal, slowly, but constant. I noticed how, no matter how many 1h guides on Oxygen not included I watch, everyone had a different answer, a different method, a different take for every single micro problem.

[@jemal999]

That OG sim city music playing in the background hit me with too much nostalgia. I spent literal years playing that game as a kid, and somehow never got tired of the music.

[@icriinside9305]

Satisfactory is one of the greatest games I've ever played. It's the only game ever to not give me a straight clearly defined goal that i stuck with and got addicted to, usually games like that get boring for me 10 mins in but I've played this game for 10s of hours and only stopped cuz it was an important year for my education

[@fishyfish1917]

Thats awesome. I havent played Satisfactory yet but what you describe is whats happening to me with Dyson Sphere Program, which is also an Automation / Factory sim. Such a good game.

[@coyraig8332]

That last editing mistake joke was either really fun to make or really painful to make

[@minerman60101]

I can't wait for Dwarf Fortress to release on Steam with full graphics and casual playability, so it can make its way into all of these video essays

[@wombat4191]

Somehow this guy manages to constantly bring up games that I absolutely love but never expected anyone to talk about. This time it was World of Goo, what a gem!

[@rootzparty3053]

Kinda surprised/unsurprised that Into the Breach didn't get used in the background footage here, as it is to me very nearly the ideal problem solving game. Every match, every round is an exercise in minimizing damage taken to self, civilians or important buildings by using a large number of interconnected systems to either kill your enemies, or to manipulate your enemies into impotence or infighting. And despite the randomly generated nature of each fight, I rarely ever find a situation that I cannot overcome perfectly, without having to make a hard choice of who to save. It almost feels like solving a sudoku or crossword puzzle.

[@finaldusk1821]

For a lot of these problem solving games that lack external conflict, the difficulty of reaching a point of equilibrium can be of utmost importance to keeping them fun. For an excellent example that wasn't mentioned in the video, take Oxygen Not Included. The base game may lack external conflict once you've contained any open vents, gysers, and volcanos near the base, (unless you count the meteors shelling the asteroid's surface if you're building up there) but acheiving a self-sustainable base that never runs out of resources or never overheats is a real challenge. You will likely need to rely on those aforementioned vents, gysers, and volcanos, as they are among the very few infinite resource spawners, building complex machines that are as self-automated as possible to tap them forever. Even then those spawners are sometimes dormant, so you'll have to be prepared for them to spend many cycles producing nothing. Additionally, in the late game, you often need to send rockets to space to bring resources back from elsewhere. Rockets not only require a ton of research, they need lots of of time, heat, and resources to build, not to mention that you need to train pilots, shield their launch platforms from meteors with automated bunker doors, refuel them before each launch, and manage the absurd heat from their exausts after each launch. And what few systems are renewable are typically very inneficient. Powering the base by having some duplicants run on giant hamster wheels for days on end is technically renewable and available from the start, but produces almost no power, and either wastes massive amounts of time from the colonists, or forces you to bring more in which will tax your food and oxygen sources. Mealwood is a nearly effortless crop to grow, requiring only dirt which is nearly impossible to run out of on many asteroid types, but the abysmal quality of the food will make it much harder to raise your duplicants' morale, which therefore makes it harder for them to learn new skills needed to complete new tasks and be more efficient at existing tasks. All of this means that you need to make use of most or all of the game's systems to keep your unsustainable base afloat, constantly delaying the inevitable death of all your duplicants, until you can finally achieve equilibrium in the late game. At which point, you can either start a new game, or keep building and expanding if you feel like it; either way, you can be proud of a job well done. And the highly adjustable difficulty and sandbox modes mean that even players who don't want a challenge can still enjoy building stuff freely.

[@fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I love your analysis on this one; really helped me understand why I just sort of bounced off They Are Billions. In thinking about it I think that there is one additional factor that made TAB relatively unsuccessful as a game about interesting adaptation and iteration: as you note it's just plain hard, which discourages some creative futzing around; but it's also hard in a way that leaves you feeling simultaneously constrained and unguided: The day-to-day zombies are just so much less threatening than the endgame swarm; and the scale-up of the economy so simple(compared to an Anno-style) that you basically spend the entire game desperately laboring under the knowledge that the endgame swarm will bury you in sheer HP if you haven't scaled up fast enough; but there really isn't anything within that hour or so of cookie-cuttering houses and production buildings that tells you whether or not you've scaled up fast enough: the little zombie raids help clue you in to likely attack routes; but you only really get one meaningful piece of feedback per game, and you need to wait an hour for it. That's a very strong incentive to be really skittish and spend your time metagaming based on what the wiki says you should be producing/how much land you should control at a given time, rather than organically responding to in-game events. Obviously there's a place for the sort of mastery that can require numerous playthroughs to attain; and not everything needs to be on a 30 second feedback loop; but there's nothing like having to do the boring parts of a city builder for an hour in order to receive the real feedback to make you really, really skittish about deviating from what the wiki advises you to do; especially when neither victory nor defeat are desperately interesting in themselves(unlike, say, an XCOM run where you probably won't survive falling too far behind Advent's power scale-up; but going down fighting isn't just watching impossible amounts of HP grind steadily through inadequate amounts of DPS)

[@TylerLarson]

Was putting off watching this cuz I had things to do.. I'm happy I gave in and decided to ignore my responsibilities for a bit. Nice work Adam, this video was really well done and gave me some things to think about.

[@Popjaksound]

glad you shouted sokpop. my fav lil indie collective., making such cute quirky games.

[@SilverStarStorm.]

:D They're amazing aren't they. edit: applies both to the games and game studio. I'm in their patreon discord and when I had problems the devs were so kind and super helpful

[@AniGaAG]

This is the kind of wonderfully educational video that I am subscribed to you for; even with so many years of doing my best to learn game design, this video really gave me some new insight, taught me something new and valuable. Thank you very much, that was _extremely_ engrossing to watch and listen to!

[@MoonSpiritChannel]

Glad you mentioned Hardspace: Shipbreaker. I never thought salvaging ships would be fun at all. Boy, I was wrong! It's gratifying! Wished it didn't have a folk music soundtrack (though that's personal tastes), but it makes the toil that much more relaxing.

[@noname117spore]

Honestly I think you absolutely nailed this video. I can definitely think of various strategy and economic games I like and don't like and find that how well they do in terms of this logic plays a big part into how much I enjoy them. I keep thinking back to Rule the Waves 2, one of my favorite games that goes unmentioned in these sorts of discussion since it's so unheard of, but I think it's a game that's done all of this pretty well. The randomized unlocking of technologies, constant march of technology rendering existing vessels more obsolete, the random events, semi-random AI ships, and differing wars with differing nations and potentially slightly differing colonies really makes the problems of the game "unsolvable," and you just have to optimize the best you can with each unique situation. Also think this is why FTL succeeds and Bomber Crew doesn't. FTL offers the more emergent gameplay while Bomber Crew only fakes it, and the curtain gets pulled back when you start having to repeat missions to get money to progress, especially if you died in a mission.

[@gabemerritt3139]

8:00 idk if I was in an early version or got lucky, but I had a stable amount of every resource after my first dome. Drones never died, cash income was slow, but adding more domes just felt like it would disturb equilibrium. Really killed all the motivation I had for the game.

[@LilayM]

This is my favourite of yours in a long time. Trully excellent

[@harperna3938]

Actually, the crux of lategame Two Point Hospital *is* an exercise in complex decision-making, it's just more discreet than it initially appears. Designing an efficient hospital is paramount for longterm financial stability, and the steps you take to do that (layout, staff specialization, upgrade/research priority, marketing, service costs, etc.) are intricate and interlocking. How do you balance your budget while expanding the hospital in a manner that is both efficient in the long-term and profitable in the short-term? Individual treatment rooms may serve a mechanically similar purpose, but the role they play in a given hospital can vary wildly. For instance, a DNA lab has a high cost, requires specialized doctors, and has a low success rate, but it doubles as an incredibly effective diagnostics room. It can either be a source of immense profit or a crippling bottleneck, all depending on the design of the surrounding rooms, the layout of the broader hospital, and the effectiveness of your staff. When and where you choose to build it matters massively, and choosing poorly can cause you to hemorrhage money. I do, however, agree that most of the illnesses added in the DLC are largely cosmetic, outside of some of them requiring unwieldy equipment that affects where you can put the room. I suppose they're mainly there to reintroduce research as a priority, since you need to research their upgrades before you can improve their equipment.

[@Jungus69]

Been waiting for a new video for a while, and this was worth the wait

[@NoNameAtAll2]

can you examine idle games at some point, please? there's just something about exponential progression and resets that fascinates me and it feels like "wait it out and math it out" mindset affected me in many other situations, for better or for worse

[@el2746]

Idle games are kind of shitty to me, i have played some, and i get why people play them, but there is some point were i start feeling BAD, so for my own sanity i stop playing them. There are other games where you have the same kind of progression but at least there's a game in it, like infinitode 2. It pretty much has a progression like any idle game, but at least the game is a tower defense, where your progression is "numbers" but also some new abilities, new mechanics, new towers, etc.

[@NoNameAtAll2]

@@el2746 there're multiple sub-genres of idle games, so not all affect brain bad in the same way I recommend searching "Perfect Tower", it's amazing

[@MoonGoblin]

Thats why Sim City had the UFO and Godzilla, as well as other disasters, because after a certain point without an end in sight, you kinda wanna just finish and have some fun closure and the best and funniest option is to have some monster or volcano absolutely wreck everything you built

[@CreativeExcusesGaming]

…. I have this review series concept for games called “An Excuse to Play” - based on my channel name - and I have found while thinking about the games I like that I usually gravitate toward the problem solving parts of games, especially when I can bash my head against a wall while doing it.

[@FelisImpurrator]

Dewit.

[@alecchristiaen4856]

I've actually come across an interesting version of problem-solving in an unexpected game: Payday 2. The problem being your build. A couple years back, I looked up some good builds and came upon one that I liked and implemented it. The jist of it is: -Take the Anarchist perk deck (-50% health, but +120% armour; armour recovers under fire, but in short bursts, dealing damage recovers a chunk of armour each 2 seconds). -Wear the two-piece suit (lightest armour, usually used for dodge or stealth builds) -Get a specific sniper rifle as main weapon (for instakilling everything short of dozers with headshots) -Get a specific full-auto shotgun as secondary (with dragon's breath shells, which lights people on fire for damage over time and stun) -Take stun knuckles as melee (to easily coerce police to take them hostage) The build also asks you to put perks into all deployables, making you very versatile, but I decided to make mutliple variants to fulfill various jobs (dedicated medic or breacher), putting the saved points mainly into reload speed and other utility. The issue is that....it's no fun to have this build, because while it IS absurdly powerful, I don't feel like I can improve upon it in a meaningful way. I've tried different sniper rifles, shotguns, or other weapon combos based on the same needs (any incendiary weapon and a precise, high dmg weapon), but nothing's as efficient as the pairing the build mentioned. The ONLY big flaws in the build is that it must use both weapons, so I can't carry a saw with me (which considerably speeds up some heists), and it has maximum detection rate, so it's useless for stealth. In games like this, build design is your unsolvable problem, helped by the developers semi-frequent patches (a friend of mine always used the Little Friend until it got nerfed), but some builds remain untouched (the anarchist perkdeck is notoriously powerful), and once you realize this...you may just deliberately experiment with weaker options just to keep it fun.

[@TheShelfman]

National Treasure definitely is a piece of art. Those two movies are fantastic and I wished they'd make a third

[@Soundole]

This is some of your best work, great discussion!

[@Spyke7]

Your video and the aspect of the unsolvable problem is really very very very great. When looking on construction/automation games, the unsolvable aspect lays in the amount of possibilities how to solve one small problem. While the perfect solution is already hard to find for humans in 2D games like Oxygen Not Included or Factorio, an AI can, one day, find out the perfect solution by trial and error and learning the concepts and relations of variables of the game. I had lots of times in those games willing to find the perfect solution by myself, but it is simply too complex or time consuming :P And I dont wanna know how many possibilities there are to solve the problems in 3D games XD

[@TazTheYellow]

"Now, I know what I just said didn't make any sense" On the contrary, it makes perfect sense. Any game that becomes "solved" becomes rote. Trivial. Disposible. Nobody seriously plays Tic-Tac-Toe at a double-digit age, after all. This is fundamentally why I am going to watch the rest of this video now.

[@Nichrysalis]

Mini Motorways is a great example of this design in use.

[@Shoxic666]

Problem solving is one of the reasons I like horde shooters so much, as well as demanding your traditional "aim good, move good" shooter skills, there are other factors like getting bang for your buck with ammo and not wasting it, killing as many things with as little cost and effort as you can, factoring it things like map design and so on. Look at Left 4 Dead's grenades; in any other game you throw a grenade in a specific scenario and that's about it, in Left 4 Dead, where your 'nade lands is a big factor, just as much as when you use it. In Alien Swarm and Deep Rock Galactic you have similar problems taken to greater extremes with the introduction of turrets or door welding/sealing holes or mines where every fight has some semi-automatic factors. Half Life 2's Nova Prospekt turret battle is the peak of this: there is a LOT of tower-defense like strategy to play with in addition to solid shooting mechanics, turning into a hybrid horde shooter and tower defense a la Orcs Must Die.

[@ProdigyDH]

I look forward to all your videos, keep it up Adam

[@Notllamalord]

People who say satisfactory is just crafting are playing it wrong. Mass crafting means you need to set up a factory to make that item. That is the gameplay loop, finding out you need an item and then realizing how complicated the new factory you need is.

[@pedluc2010]

And here I thought I just like city builders like anno because I liked seeing things grow...

[@Teiran42]

"I just wanted to make my drones happy!" is the sentiment that has cost me hundreds of hours in so many games...

[@dardet8523]

Love this video, DO miss "oxygen not included" tho. It's a problem solving game already by the title

[@seanbirtwistle649]

17:00 "dead or alive you're coming with me"

[@nevokrien95]

"Human right peeked at 2007 we r done" dam that hit hard

[@GenericInternetter]

The original quake didn't have jumping. This is why people discovered rocket jumping in the original quake. In the first quake map (after difficulty selection) there's a ledge just after the elevator you can only reach by sprinting very quickly from one ledge to another. Strafe jumping was discovered in quake 3 arena. Rocket jumping was also prevalent there too.

[@r3dp9]

I recently ran into a "perfect solution" in Rimworld. I encountered a guide for a ridiculously overpowered strategy, and gave it a try. It worked, but at a cost. The trick was to enslave new colonists instead of recruit them in order to keep their expectations down, then combine belief systems that lowered expectations further to keep the slaves permanently happy (or at least not unhappy) and the slave owners permanently happy (for owning lots of slaves). All of this had a cost: You can't get emotionally invested in slaves the way you can proper recruits, you ignore all the interesting and complicated ways to make colonists happy, and you have to routinely execute slaves to keep the rest in line. Even as a videogame, that made me feel bad. I have a much more fun experience when I play suboptimally, such as when I try to keep all of my colonists happy instead of just the good ones. I'll still joke about Pyromaniac colonists only being good for organ harvesting, but in reality I've actually gotten attached to a few Pyromaniac's that have been around since I started the colony.

[@sashabagdasarow497]

A great management game is Oxygen Not Included. I'm honestly not a fan of management or building games, but this one has a special place in my heart :)

[@ekimmak]

Nobody tell him about Oxygen Not Included, we'll never see another video again.

[@jasonreed7522]

He'll have to change his channel into a let's play channel and not a game theory one. (Something I'm sure would be interesting as a second channel from him if he ever had the time for it)

[@karlo.with.a.k281]

Frostpunk flashbacks: First playthrough is a pain. You have no idea about the negative impacts of the upcoming disaster and for how long it would stay like that.

[@remuluson2904]

Good video, Shame that to keep colonists happy you only ever need a grocer, diner and hospital. But hey, the rest of the game doesnt get put into a box so easily.

[@QuantumHistorian]

True, as good as Surviving Mars is at letting the player be expressive, it is a game with lots of problems. The optimality of some domes set up (eg, nursery and school domes) is a big one. The bigger one though is the vast of amount of micro and low-level detail the game keeps track of, only to add a whole layer of AI to automate it so the player doesn't have to deal with it, but that ultimately failing because the AI sucks at it. Things like citizens doing jobs related to their skills, or the drones moving resources about.

[@moldiworp9143]

I'd say a good parallel for this is enigmatic characters in fiction. Who maintains more thought after reading: Tom Bombadil or Frodo? I still have conversations about the nature of Tom. Each and everyone of us doesnt have a perfect answer for him.

[@grodon909]

Anyone try Oxygen Not Included? I really liked the ramping difficulty, which was usually caused by my own attempts at improving efficiency, or by the ramping presence of heat and bacteria, and power, food, and water needs as you continue.

[@Notllamalord]

Yeah and the stress of diminishing resources is unlike any other game

[@charliemilton9371]

Christ. Was that an actual, real Jeeves and Wooster pull? In 2022? I'm kind of stunned

[@benjaminstiles]

I’m glad somebody else appreciates the genius of national treasure two

[@arronalt]

This video finally explained something I knew but just couldn't put my finger on Cool video ty

[@Serilia]

So happy to see HSSB getting a mention ☺️

[@erinkarp]

My favorite unsolvable problem is worldbuilding

[@JonathanTash]

6:10 Yes! I love that game. It's so good for learning computer science.

[@Bounours42]

I'm surprised not to seen Oxygen not included in the list. It is one of the most interesting problem solving game I know...

[@raychang8606]

I mean i don't want to give a 2,000 word essay (like i wrote twice & deleted), but personally I find the idea of infinite gameplay very fun & often rarely play games that don't allow this. It allows me to control my own story & end it when I want & give myself my own challenges. Also I find the idea of the optimal sim city very interesting. I tried the logic in Kingdom & Castles, a small one, & the challenges that come with such a goal immediately change how you think into "what do I really need, how much do I need, & how much can I extract from external factors?" It's a fun (& occasionally monotonous) type of play style often with different perfect solutions based on the world itself. As you can guess, I love speedrunning

[@Antifinity]

Laughed out loud at the "cultist simulator but good." Dead on.

[@steamtasticvagabond474]

I think it’s interesting how the most efficient sim city is a cyberpunk police state devoid of human expression, almost as if it were designed by someone who no longer sees the humanity in their citizens but instead as numbers on a spreadsheet to be managed for optimal profit

[@GREATGAIWAIN]

There is something to be said about winning Sim City requires you to make late stage Capitalist America. Minus the homelessness.

[@Veylon]

I would've said it looked like the Soviet Union. Maybe they're not so different.

[@mbase6469]

Excellent breakdown of a complex but compelling design system! Rather than "problem solving," I might label this "efficiency maximization." Problem solving is vague since almost any action a player takes in a video game could fit that phrase from some angle. "Where should I go next?" is a problem, and exploring your environment by just moving around a level is "problem solving." However, finding a way to get where you're going in the shortest time possible is efficiency maximizing. Likewise, it's games that make it possible to improve, but never perfect efficiency that will eat at puzzle-oriented brains forever.

[@TulipsinAntartica]

Found it kinda of hilarious the uneven headphone sound on purpose, lol.

[@Endarire]

7:54 "If you give a mouse a cookie..."

[@BewbsOP]

"Like cultist sim but good" Savage! I don't disagree... but savage!

[@HatredSonneillon]

What's funny is if you listen to Will Wrights talks on design, you get a lot of talk about structures and some fancy UMGs but no definitive design take away. Which leaves me to believe that not even he knows what made his work so impactful. If there was something to take away from those talks, then videos like this wouldn't need to exist. I much prefer these videos over those hour long talks any way.

[@Lishtenbird]

17:04 Hm, I wonder if that "perfect city" solution of his was inspired by anything...

[@siukei]

"no one has an education, no one has healthcare, and no one lives over the age of sixty; with a massive police force to quell a never ending series of riots instantly" this literally sounds like a capitalist's wet-dream; if company towns were allowed to grow into massive cities

[@locobob]

Interesting how the end-game sim city example he showed sounds like what end game USA is trending to with late stage capitalism.

[@FelisImpurrator]

I haven't gotten that far yet, but bloated and inefficient, fucked in innumerable ways, and too big to stop failing? Edit; Yup, and it "works" if all you care about is making profit number go up. So basically just America, indeed.

[@janthran]

"nobody can make the perfect, bestest piece of media ever" - guy who hasn't played outer wilds

[@happyxerox]

If you're interested in design of SimCity and how its design kind of naturally leads towards that dystopian police state mentioned at 16:58 as the optimal stable endstate, then I highly recommend checking out the video (Polygon I think?) did on the topic.

[@rollingon5566]

how odd, i literally woke up and watched national treasure 2 this morning... odd

[@wyattr7982]

This video made me realize why i love (and sometimes hate) being an engineer

[@fridayafternoons1]

that editing joke was godlike lol

[@Flokirie]

I thoroughly enjoy your sense of humour.

[@pieterfaes6263]

On Simcity and Cities: Skylines though. There's a factor that strongly affects how possible 'ideal solutions' are, and that is the map itself. In gameplay this is rather noticable, as flat large plains are more boring to play, whilst rather hilly and complicated terrain create interesting problems with more varied solutions. ~No, this is not me promoting C:S' Prussian Peaks, why do you ask~

[@ExtraTurtle]

SImcity is like real life. You improve more and more without a goal, then you die.

[@fernandoi8958]

I remember making a simple city that was all about farming in all directions possible. I didnt give a F about their education, health and safety quality and yet I got tons of money from them - the perfect solution to prosper in sim city without cheats

[@Caterpie56]

Finally, someone else that appreciates the masterpiece of National Treasure 2

[@UNREAL30]

17:00 That guy made the world of Judge Dredd.