Comments on: The Randomised Tactical Elegance Of Hoplite

By: Dan P

Dan P — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 20:48:09 +0000

After reading about this here and giving it a spin I still play it on my way to and from work everyday, many of my friends are doing the same too, it’s an absolutely brilliant game.

By: John K

John K — Tue, 06 May 2014 09:36:32 +0000

After depth 16 there are a few achievements which are actually interesting challenges – win taking no damage, win using no shrines, don’t kill bombers/wizards, get to depth 27, etc. – that have been keeping my attention.

By: Jason L

Jason L — Mon, 05 May 2014 05:13:18 +0000

Yeah, at that point you have to start caring about score which is rare for me. You could also intentionally turn it into a tragic tale of hubris, advancing ever on for the sheer glory of it – a thing I do sometimes to get around my indifference to any but a truly excellent points system.

By: Saul Alexander

Saul Alexander — Mon, 05 May 2014 02:04:24 +0000

I got into this on a long car trip at Easter, where I was sitting in the back seat next to my sleeping baby daughter. I love these kinds of simple-yet-complex tactical mechanics, and I got a good few hours fun out of it.

My problem with it is that there is no goal beyond Depth 16. I reached Depth 16 on my very first try, and then got the fleece on something like my fourth. I was hoping for another mission at that point, but when there was nothing, I just couldn’t bring myself to play it again. I rarely play phone games, and I rarely play endless games at all. This felt like it could have been an exception – if it had just given me another macguffin to pursue, I might have been hooked. But without a clear goal my motivation to continue just drained away, which was a shame.

By: Damon Smith

Damon Smith — Sun, 04 May 2014 21:05:02 +0000

This game was near perfect for me. I don’t understand why we don’t see more of these games on IOS/Android. Any similar recommendations?

By: CdrJameson

CdrJameson — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 12:33:12 +0000

This is great, but I’m suffering a lot of fat finger deaths.
Possibly better on a tablet.

By: Pentadact

Pentadact — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 10:50:38 +0000

May be cache my end rather than yours, I use a thing to reduce load on the database. Don’t quite understand the phenomena produced, but anyhow I didn’t see either comment on the live site, but found them in my moderation queue and approved them now.

By: Jason L

Jason L — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 03:10:54 +0000

Or not. The sequence of events when this occurs: Post comment. Posts appear. Check back – in this case on another machine that’s never visited this site outside a private window, so it’s not a cache issue – post both here and at BAFTA are gone. Post once more, both posts retroactively appear.

I thought it might be a matter of posts with links not closing, but when I posted here, both showed up immediately. I guess it’s showing, then binning, and then unbinning all posts for a given name either upon receipt of a definitively good comment or perhaps an overall quality rating rising above some threshold.

By: Jason L

Jason L — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 03:00:44 +0000

Sigh, tried to link to things again. Request spam review here and on the BAFTA post, sorry.

By: Jason L

Jason L — Wed, 02 Apr 2014 23:44:39 +0000

I put Hoplite on my mom's tablet because she loves 86856527 as well. A couple days ago I learned that she'd tried Hoplite but said it was too hard and didn't make any sense. This is an odd thing to hear from a person who broke through 86856527's barrier to entry! A bit of questioning established that she'd been bashing her head against the scripting and mechanical restrictions of the tutorial, and a moment's thought reveals that no, she's probably never played a tutorial before. Hmm!

By: Jason L

Jason L — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 23:50:01 +0000

Well, not historically! Most roguelikes and derivatives use squares. It gives freer movement and deadlier surrounding, not to mention that it’s possible to render in ASCII and easy with rectangular raster sprites.

If you’re trying things out (which you should, Hoplite’s as good as everyone says) and you’re on iOS, why not also give 868-HACK a spin? It’s essentially a photographic negative of this – managing hordes of melee enemies at range and collecting resources from the terrain. Its unpolished, free jam game predecessor 86856527 remains one of my favourite quick solitaire fixes.

By: Jussi Lepistö

Jussi Lepistö — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 21:55:30 +0000

I’ve been meaning to try Hoplite, and I might just have to download it after reading this post… Incidentally, this is really close to a game design / prototype I had about a year ago, except I had squares instead of hexes and couldn’t really make it fun. Hexes seem to be a much better fit for these mechanics.

By: Alex

Alex — Sat, 29 Mar 2014 23:13:31 +0000

This reminds me really strongly of Ending, another indie roguelike from a couple of years ago: http://robotacid.com/flash/ending/

By: Tyler Funk

Tyler Funk — Sat, 29 Mar 2014 20:49:51 +0000

When I saw the title for this post, my immediate thought was “That sounds like Hoplite!” which I had just downloaded the day before. I am glad to see that I was correct. It’s a beautifully simplistic and brutal game, and it’s my go to time waster.