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Comment by mynegation | Hacker News Reader

What engine? Is not this game played in a spreadsheet?

https://prosperousuniverse.com is closer, but still not actually a spreadsheet.

"This is EVE Online for people who think the 3D spaceships part of EVE is time wasted away from their spreadsheets. "

I got way into Prosperous Universe for a few months, a few years back—it was fun for awhile but the pace at which new features were being added to the game was (and still seems to be) absolutely glacial, given what the game is. Really fun ideas in there, though.

There's been some new features in the past few years. But you're right that the general pace of new features is slow. There's only about 0.8 developers working on the game.

However, if you're the type of person that likes to work on spreadsheets to calculate profit margins and market trends, Prosperous Universe is worth checking out.

One thing I didn't like about it (and briefly experimented with, in a prototype for my own game in a similar vein), was, much like EVE, it's called a “spreadsheet game”, but there's no spreadsheets in the game, or any sort of API bridge that makes doing stuff with the game in an external spreadsheet environment easier. I understand that this may just be part of the appeal of these sorts of games for many people—reading through stat blocks and wiki pages to figure out what numbers and what formulas need to go where to build the Ultimate Spreadsheet for your purposes (though in the end doesn't everyone just use existing Ultimate Spreadsheets created by others, or at least use them as reference?). And trust me, I did have a lot of fun building my Google Sheets infrastructure to coordinate business and production between myself and the three friends I got to (briefly) play Prosperous Universe with me. Also, don't get me wrong, I also enjoyed the subsequent rabbit-hole of learning how spreadsheet implementations actually work, including historical alternative spreadsheet implementations that had a lot of cool ideas like Lotus Improv [0]. But, in the end, I just wasn't having enough fun with Prosperous Universe to keep playing after awhile.

[0] This video is worth watching the opening few minutes of just for the vibes alone (trust me) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgGmKD87U3M

There is a third-party API now: https://doc.fnar.net/ , which collects data through a browser extension that scraps the traffic. This kind of extension is blessed by the devs as long as it does not automate actions.

Is this just "Drug Wars" in space? Buy low, sell high, occasionally wonder what's gone wrong in your life that it all led to this?

I assume you’re not familiar with boosters, or you would know EvE is drug wars in space.

MMOSS (Massive Multiplayer Online Screen Saver) is what I've always seen it as. Beautiful game. Not for the faint of heart .

Right up there with The Endless Forest.

Jokes aside apparently they've hired economist to keep the game's market's stable.

This was at least a decade ago, but the game's economy seems to be managed well enough. Cost of having stuff transported is still 1M / jump.

PLEX keeps the markets stable now as they control the flow of PLEX like its Spice from Arrakis

depends on size, location, contents, risk, a million other factors. people are not paying 1m/jump to get stuffed freightered around by jita lol

Wasn't that Yanis Varoufakis?

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

Nope, Varoufakis consulted with Valve

that's very interesting, is there a place to read his achievements related to Steam? genuinely curious, because Steam is very popular now, and wondering what he did there, and whether his theories helped boost Steam economy/marketplace or not

He has however written about the game before, and been interviewed about it: https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2014/01/30/war-spikes-in-the-...

Ah, that's correct.

Got it wrong, because he did write some articles about the EVE economy, like this one: https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2014/01/30/war-spikes-in-the-...

I can never tell if these comments are jokes or not because I unironically thought this was a spreadsheet game my whole life.

For anyone as ignorant as I was, it’s actually a video game. You do fly around in open space, chase or run from ships, and top-level combat is surprisingly difficult to perform. Once you get the hang of flying itself, there’s a whole dance of turning systems on and off to be most efficient with fuel, overheating of ship modules to eke out a bit more performance, and more. Or you can chill out in a high security region, auto-orbit some random asteroid belt, mindlessly mining away with a group of friends while you chat or play magic on Tabletop Sim, or something else equally distracting.

I can’t gush enough about the game. The learning curve is huge, but if you’ve got a couple of buddies you like playing games with, this is basically perfect to explore together. They just released a new starter zone, too.

Yes, but you can turn a visual representation on by pressing ctrl+shift+f9.

I thought it was played on the forums? That’s where the nullsec alliance game was played in my day.

it used to be, but it's been less and less perverse over the past ten to fifteen years.

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