The Power of Decision is easily one of the most scary and disturbing films I have ever watched.
I always used to think that Doctor Strangelove was a really funny movie, but after this, it was a lot less funny somehow (still a great movie, though).
I think WWIII sim is probably a better description. Or could go with the 1985 War Games "Global Thermonuclear War". Just nitpicking. The simulation is awesome.
Really cool - would be good to have a quick instructions drop down - I started with clicking things and hitting keys until I realised it was a simulation on initial conditions only.
The bombers seem too effective in anti-fighter measures, and has been said, the sats are very effective at anti-ICBM, but seem invincible themselves?
Interesting how quickly the tide turns from stalemate to dominance once a few factories or bases fall. And also how long it takes to really finish the opponent off (probably my launch_max is too low).
Also interesting the 'fronts' or lines of bombers that form between oppositions. This happens in naval and ground battle, but I'd think a major air war, with high speed relative to density of fighters would avoid this?
Would be cool to involve some sort of strategic element? I'd hoped the fighters would protect the bombers more, but it seems they are more defensive?
There are two views, top view and elevation view. All the actors have an x, y and z.
Each of the circle structures is a nation state.
It has a capital at the center (square, blinking). Defcon is the number in the capital.
Cities (circles) send people to work at factories.
Factories (triangles) make munitions and send them to bases
Bases (square) stockpile munitions (counts, clockwise from top right: icbms, abms (anti ballistic missiles), fighters and bombers.
Bombers are big and slow (triangles) that select a target (factory, base, city, capital in that order), fly to it and nuke it, reselecting a target if somebody else destroys it first.
As defence perimeters are penetrated, defcon gets more scary.
Fighters launch at Defcon 4 and attempt to destroy bombers.
At Defcon 3, Bases launch ICBMs a low probability amount of the time.
Satellites launch at Defcon 2, and can shoot ICBMs out of the sky, but have fire/recharge lasers.
When one of a nation's assets (factory, base, city) is nuked, they go to Defcon 1.
If your enemy goes to Defcon 1, so do you.
At Defcon 1, all ICBMs will fire.
When your capital is destroyed, it's Game Over.
The control panel lets you tweak the starting parameters. There are a lot more controls for all the actors (e.g, how close do bombers flock.) than are not exposed here.
Factories are triangles. Cities are circles. Bases are squares. In the center is a more different square with the defcon. Cities are required to supply factories. Factories are required to make new units. Bases are required to launch units.
Fighters target bombers and fighters. Satellites target ICBMs. Bombers and ICBMs target factories, cities, bases, and defcon. Bombers target in that order; ICBMs seem to target randomly.
Game over when defcon is destroyed.
Launching an ICBM requires defcon <= 3. The choice to launch is a bit random at defcon 3 and 2 but they all launch at defcon = 1.
Defcon changes to 4, 3, 2, and 1 if a bombers crosses the circular boundaries (radar?) around the center. You can see this happen when the boundary flashes.
- circle: city
- triangle: factory
- square: military base
- big plane: bomber
- little plane: fighter
- things with rocket trails: ICBMs
- floaty diamond things: satellites (which shoot down ICBMs)
The square in the middle of each team represents the current defcon. Assuming you start at defcon 5, when an enemy unit crosses the big blinking circle, drop to defcon 4. When a unit crosses the next blinking circle, drop to defcon 3. I haven't figured out yet how the escalation proceeds after that.
Yikes! Is this realistic? There seems to be a doctrine that ICBMs will only be launched upon receiving a complete nuclear strike, and once that happens it's pretty much game over.
This makes fighter jets a critical buffer because the only way a defense can prevent mutually assured destruction is to prevent non-ICBM first strikes.
It's fallen into abandonware hell, so you can't buy a copy at GOG or anything like that, but cough I'm sure you could find a copy if you looked on the right sites.
Try putting satalites up to '3', it's almost impossible for an ICBM to get through.
Eventually just one did, but then even the volleys get stomped by the satalites.
This game has been running for over 10 minutes at DEFCON 1 for me, the blueside managed to get the first city down but it's now a city each but yellow also lost 2 of their triangles (bases? factories?).
If my first game hasn't finished (It wasn't a complete stalemate yet but they have stocked up a lot of fighters and bombers) when I get home I'll try that! I find zero-player games fascinating, especially ones such as this.
Real Cold War is more of this:
Two side point lethal nukes at each other, but at a point one side falls on its face and proceeds selling factories for scraps, while other one forgets near-death experience in a whim deriving no lesson from it.
This was super fun to play with and the visuals are very cool! One minor thing though, the Star Wars program simulation seems too good: once you have around 5 sats going around you're safe for a long long time that it starts becoming boring (and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be the case IRL). Like, I watched a game for 30min and all sats were too effective and nobody could really hit each other no matter how many attacks they did. Maybe make sats attack each other while in orbit? Perhaps only in specific timed cases, sort of during an orbit apogee or perigee or whatever, just to make them a bit less effective or durable?
It seems with this scenario, whoever strikes first really does win, though the game takes a bit longer.
The game always nearly ends with a couple of bombers sneaking past the bases at the front and taking out the factories and cities until the player runs out of resources.
No frameworks or libs. Vanilla.js, raw Canvas and requestAnimationFrame. In this version, they are symmetric with slight random variations. No reason they have to be though.
Emacs, and Chrome dev tools. The build environment has jslint set up in it too. I can't recommend enough js{lint|hint}ing all your code. None of the stuff in the sim is super tricky.
Meh, the flashing-lights-in-games thing is waaaaaay overrated as a public health concern. Most photosensitive (=~'flashing light') epileptics require flashes in the range of ~8-18 Hz (mostly in 12-16 Hz), and even then it almost always takes some time to build up, and even then it's a fraction of epileptics that are susceptable. And flashing lights by themselves don't make non-photosensitive epileptics have seizures (or non-eplieptics). Only about 15% of people epilepsy with are photosensitive. A photosensitive epileptic will know to look away if they see their kind of triggering flash.
By the time you narrow it down to the mere handful of epileptics that will have a seizure from one or two flashes (ever hear anyone complain of a single camera flash and epileptics?), you're in a very rare group. At which point, nothing is safe - I heard of one epileptic who had seizures due to orange circles. Other colour circles were fine, other orange shapes were fine, it was just orange circles (which mean no driving...). Another patient had seizures when ice touched their lips. They do exist, of course, but at that point you're optimising for an incredibly rare user. If you're going to optimise for that, there's plenty of usability optimisations that hit way more people that you should be doing first :)
Source: spent four years doing several EEGs on neuro patients per day, each of which had a 5-minute session with a strobe light at various frequencies. Most of those patients were there for epilepsy or suspicion of epilepsy, but not all, of course. Seeing a photosensitive response at 8Hz was uncommon, but not rare. Some people had some response to single flashes (well, 1Hz) but it never built up to a dangerous level - I never saw someone in danger of having a seizure from 1Hz flashes.
/rant (sorry, nothing personal, I just keep seeing this (largely) urban myth)
A fair point - they're just doing CYA because of public hysteria on the issue. Game designers are rarely biologists, let alone neurologists, and it's a topic that the public knows little about :)
[1] (https://github.com/simonswain/deepspace) [2] (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8837204)