CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

Oh, and I also actually noticed another problem I wanted to point out. By allowing players to leave tables without any penalty, you make it so that it is to your advantage to leave the room if you build up a significant lead (say more than 10 chips). This will reset the stakes, and make it less likely the other player can gain back what they lost. I think if/when when more people start to play this game this tactic could start to become a real problem, as anyone not using it will be at risk of having their chips leeched away by players that are. The obvious solution would be to just reset the stakes at the beginning of each round, and I actually don't see any reason not to do this. The only problem would be the need to buy back in when you lose a round, but a simple dialog box should take care of that.

Because, if you are forced to make a decision that is the best out of a set of bad choices, there is a very high probability you opponent knows which column you picked for yourself. Not only does this tell them with certainty if their first number is higher than yours, and by how much, but it also tells them which column you eliminated so they will know more about your possible choices in future rounds than they would have otherwise.

I played several matches tonight, and I have gained some serious insight into what an optimal strategy for Cordial Minuet should look like. It seems like in the first round, strategy should be dictated by the rows/columns with the lowest high number. In a typical first round, you should always give your opponent the column with the lowest high number, because it ensures a level or predictability (you know they cannot have a number above that number). This will likely force your opponent to adapt the same strategy, because if they take a risk and go for a number higher number, they will often get a worse number than they would have if they had just stuck with taking the highest number in their column with the lowest high number. The only mind game that emerges from this situation, is the possibility of picking a row that will give your opponent a low number in their row with the lowest high number. But this is really a risk, because you have no way of knowing which row your opponent is picking.

This is actually disappointing to me, because it means that luck is a bigger factor in Cordial Minuet than I had hoped. Between the two players, the one with the highest number in their column with the lowest high number, has an inherent advantage. And because of the low stakes, even if you successfully counter-pick an column choice, their best option is just to fold. This mean that the only real strategy left is the betting strategy (whether to bluff), rendering the first round essentially pointless. Worse yet, the choices you make in the first round dictate the choices you will have left in the next two, meaning that the advantage due to luck will increase depending on the options that are left to you after the first round is complete.

In other words, this is bad. It makes luck a much bigger factor in Cordial Minuet than I had originally thought, and the game may in fact have an optimal strategy that leaves you with nothing but 50/50 guesses in situations where yomi is a factor. I tried to come up with a strategy to counter the strategy I outlined above when I was playing tonight, but failed miserably. At best I could achieve a tight back and forth game, and when I tried taking more risks it completely backfired. Does anyone else have any thoughts on this? I would love to be proven wrong, but I can't think of any real counter strategy that would open up additional possibilities before the second round.

I am actually very familiar with the concept of yomi. The Virtua Fighter community was largely responsible for bringing the term into use in the fighting game community.

Right, and this is mainly because you were actually raising very consistently. Because I could rely on you to raise for me, I didn't usually feel the need to raise before late in the game, because it would have just given you more information about the strength of my hand.

Well, it never really good practice to bluff with large amounts unless you have a strong reason to believe you have the more valuable position. And anyway, if you are going to bluff at all, it needs to be within the range of your typical raise, or it's a dead giveaway. Oh, and I actually did blatantly bluff a few times, but it was because I had reason to believe you probably had a weak position too, and you never really called me on it.

By the way, don't take it personally that I'm pointing out how I exploited some of your strategic choices. I enjoy analyzing this stuff more than actually playing the game.

Ah, yes, that would probably have been me. Although, I wouldn't call my strategy extremely conservative. What I figured out, is that with such a low ante, it really doesn't make sense to bet up in the first round unless you have a fairly strong first number. I basically wasn't playing anything below 20, and even then I had to weigh that against the possible numbers you might have. I did bluff some of the time, but I was trying to do it infrequently enough that you couldn't get a feel for whether I was bluffing or not. The idea was to tread water until I saw a clear advantage. If I hadn't been able to do that, I would have been forced to bet more aggressively.

Interesting, so that is a little bit like a certain situation in Virtua Fighter. In the latest version of Virtua Fighter, the throw system works so that each throw has an associated direction (forward, back, or neutral). Whenever you try to use a throw command, the other player can escape the throw by inputting a throw command in the same direction you are trying to throw them. So they basically have a 1/3 chance of escaping the throw. But not all throws are created equally, and some throw commands do significantly more damage than others. This means that most of the time, the person you are playing against has one throw they want to use more than any other. So this creates a mind game where you assume the other player wants to use their most powerful throw as much as possible, but if they were to actually do that you would escape it every time. So, they are forced to mix things up with their other throws to keep you guessing. Ideally you would like to be able to out-think the other player to the point where you would always know what direction they would try to escape. But in practice it actually doesn't work to your advantage to do this, because various aspect of the situation you are in while you are trying to throw will tend to create biases that the other player will pick up on. The only solution is to adapt a pseudo random throwing strategy, where the throw you decide to use is based on a random selection, weighted by the amount of damage the throw will do if successful. But in practice this is really difficult to do, and even really good players usually don't bother.

Yea, I mean, I am by no means 100% sure what I predicted will actually happen, but I think it is a real risk.

Trust me, it's never as simple as just using the right compiler. The interface would have to be redone, you would have to rewrite code to use different APIs, and all sorts of other issues.

Which would save a lot of work, but it's still not as easy as just designing a page layout for mobile browsers. And then what happens if Apple decides they don't want a game like Cordial Minuet on their App Store?

From what I've observed, a simple AJAX protocol would be sufficient.

It's not really any more difficult to implement something like that in JavaScript than it is in C++.

I would just do it all in CSS. You could also do it with HTML5's canvas element, but the current interface doesn't really have anything that would require it.

You could avoid that issue entirely by using the TLS support build into web servers.

Ah... okay, that would make sense. As I said, I only played a couple of games, and I didn't actually bother to do the math. And come to think of it, it would have to be that way, or certain board layouts would end up giving an advantage to one player or another. Still, as far as the actual game strategy is concerned, some rows have a fairly even distribution while others have outliers that make them a more risky choice (especially in the first round). Although to be honest, anyone intelligent enough to see the significance of this detail would probably also not need an indicator to know which rows are the most risky/safe.