M.U.L.E. Online - 4-player tournament

Tonight, we enjoyed another great tournament game with the soon-to-be-released new M.U.L.E. Online, with four players, on the European server. Dominik (Purple Bonzoid), Matze (Red Packer), Winnie (Blue Bonzoid) and me, Christian (Green Packer). From about round #8 it was clear that Matze was going to win - and alas he did become First Founder, congratulations! But the rest of us continued to give all for the colony, it was more a cooperative than cut-throat game, and were all rewarded by retiring in elegant estates with a colony score of more than $100k!
M.U.L.E. Online will be out in May, here is the website with all info:
puzzud.itch.io...
Trailer: • M.U.L.E. Online Trailer
More about M.U.L.E.'s legacy to be found on the "World of M.U.L.E." website, which will also have some very special content to celebrate the game's anniversary soon:
www.worldofmule.de
Join the Discord to meet up with M.U.L.E. fans around the world: / discord

[@DTM-Books]

Yay! Online MULE!

[@CandyHatsuneWolff]

Maybe 20 years ago, some people were playing the C=64 version (in-person real hardware IIRC?) and they supposedly managed to get a cooperative score of A MILLION. Now I'm not the greatest player, but I've loved this game for four decades. If M.U.L.E. Online continues to mature and standardized game tourneys with proper recordkeeping ever becomes a thing, I would love to be part of a co-op effort like that.

[@CarpeLudumGGS]

Never heard of "a million", especially not on C64. But there is a bug/feature in the original Atari version which allows pushing up the colony score significantly by performing a commodity transaction at the highest possible price in the last auction phase (turn 12 before final scoring)

[@mmille10]

I really wonder why this game needs OpenGL. Great reproduction of the Atari version (my guess).

[@Bonzi_Buddy]

The developer said they were going for the best parts of both the Atari and Commodore versions of the game. Atari has better colors, Commodore better audio…

[@stephwagner8377]

Poor red keeps losing mules 😭

[@stephwagner8377]

Oh, red won in the end anyway! A question, why does everyone sell at the end? Does this increase the colony score or something?

[@Bonzi_Buddy]

In the original game, selling at the end burned you… I think the value was calculated higher than the sell price. I learned quickly to never sell on the final round. I wonder if the game developer had access to the original source code which has the specific algorithms involved with those calculations as well as odds of spawning evens and the percentage of negative and positive events that help slightly handicap the game. M.U.L.E. Really nailed the handicapping feature unlike Mario party games. You could protect yourself from some of those negative events with a plot loss being the worst event but fairly rare. Early plot loss is a kick in the nads though!

[@stephwagner8377]

I've always been curious about this - obviously you wouldn't want to sell everything on the last turn, but wouldn't selling 1 of a good (well, specifically Crystite) on the last turn because the sale price is higher than the last time it was sold for, wouldn't that revalue all Crystite at a higher price? Or does the game do something like that automatically? @@Bonzi_Buddy

[@puzzud_games]

@Bonzi_Buddy is correct in that there is score loss when all goods are sold in the final auction. The store's buy price for every good except for smithore is either lower than the score value of the good or has the potential to be lower. The store will sell food & energy at $15 below its value. The store's buy price for crystite is rounded down to the next multiple of 4. To answer your question, it actually decreases the colony score.

[@puzzud_games]

@@Bonzi_Buddy Hi. MULE Online dev here. I do not have access to the original source code unfortunately. The only known copy of the original source code is seemingly kept private--either to honor the license for which it was acquired or to fetch a nice figure at auction one day. The one original developer I asked concerning still having the source code explained that Dani Bunten was essentially the build master--would take everyone's updated code and make test builds as her Apple II was souped up with 2 RAM drives and 2 floppy disk drives. However, I've spent a long time studying the C64 version's code. I've done a lot to ensure I understand the original game's logic and that MULE Online behaves as closely to the original as possible. Some people have noted they believe the RNG is different from the original. That would not surprise me because beyond the pseudo RNG algorithm it used (which I am also using), it is not doing much to emulate the RNG that would have been sourced from the Atari's OS, Atari hardware, or the Commodore 64 hardware.